As more and more people understand the value of content for the growth of their online businesses, the web has seen an all-time high volume of content published daily.
Considering the massive pool of content being published daily on the internet, if you truly want to stand out among the sea of content marketers existing today – you need to consistently do these two things effectively:
- Published high-quality content regularly, and….
- Effective on-going content marketing campaign.
You’ll need to be consistently promoting your high-quality contents to get in front of audiences that are interested in reading what you have to say.
The wider your marketing reach, the more you increase your chances of driving targeted audience to your blog.
But here is the thing, promoting your content the right way to the right audience is not an easy task by any means.
You need to be on top of your game at many times of it in order to get the best out of your marketing efforts.
You need to be consistent, efficient, strategic, testing, executing, etc.
To get all these right means you’ll need the help of many sophisticated tools designed to boost your productivity levels, gathered useful data about your users behavior and gives better return on investment of your overall efforts.
Without needed tools to help break down complex task, automate repetitive tasks, get insight into data and help analyze each aspect of it in order to make the right marketing decisions – online marketing can be said to be nothing but a guess game.
Without wasting your precious time, let’s see how these 17 online marketing tools will help you drive more website traffic to your blog.
There is no better place to begin your quest to increase your blog traffic numbers other than – Google.
Google is not an advertising company that promise to deliver xxx traffic hits to your blog, nor is it an internet police department agency.
The business of Google is to collect users data, stored these data in its gigantic data centers across the internet, leverage on the information gathered from these users to make the operations of business activities better by providing entrepreneurs with lots of useful products and services design to make their lives better.
Here are such tools from Google design to make your marketing decision based on reliable data, information gathering and not your instinct.
#1. Google Analytics.
There is no catch about this, if you have a web base business, you need to install Google Analytics code on your website. Is as simple as that.
Google analytics will let you track almost everything you need to know about your site visitors that will help you in making the right business growth decisions.
How do you know which website traffic channels is bringing you significant traffic, and which traffic channel is not?
Google analytics help you discover lots of valuable data you can use on your website to make positive marketing decisions.
You can’t just be publishing contents without knowing how users are interacting with your existing content.
Google analytics will help you track how your blog readers are interacting with your content which is a valuable metrics to measure in knowing which content type is or URL generating quality targeted traffic.
#2. Google Search Console.
With Google search console you have a powerful tool in your hand that let you know how healthy your site is, and if there are issues affecting your site health that could be detrimental to its overall performance.
Plus you can track how your content keywords are performing in Google search engine which is a useful data to bank on for in-house content analysis.
Most times you really don’t need more contents to increase your blog traffic, a detail analysis of your content keywords will tell you what content already published you can tweak a bit to increase its search visibility.
There are lots of things to do in your Google search console that can drastically increase your web traffic.
#3. Google Keyword Planner.
You can’t be successful in driving targeted website traffic to your contents or offers without knowing what your ideal audience is searching for.
Keywords are what bring the right audience to the right content.
If you want more targeted website traffic, you’ll need to be spending more of your time on researching what questions your ideal potential audience is asking.
And one of the best tools to discover that from your audience is the keyword research tool.
Google provide one of the best tools for that purpose – Google Keyword Planner.
Besides, is free to use……your only requirement is to open an Adwords advertiser’s account which is also free.
#4. Google Trend.
If you’re going to be riding on the waves of trending topics to rake in the bulk of the opportunity available, you’ll need a tool like Google trends to discover what’s generating the buzz among your audience community at the moment.
Driving targeted website traffic means analyzing your users’ data, and knowing what’s important to them at the moment, and how over time, these things have continued to rise in demand or decline.
Google trend will help you discover just that, it shows you how a particular topic, industry or business has gain popularity over the years either is declining or gaining interest.
This information will help you make better marketing decision and come up with timely content topic that your audience is anxiously waiting to read.
#5. Google Alerts.
Google alerts is a powerful underrated, under-utilized online marketer’s tool.
And the funny thing is this, setting up alerts for anything you want to track using Google alert service is dead simple.
It only takes about 5 minutes or even less than to wrap everything up.
How does Google alert help marketers generate free targeted online web traffic?
There are many useful ways to do just that with Google alert.
Have you ever wanted to keep tab on blogs mentioning your name, brand or business name that didn’t link to you or you want to jump on the discussion real-time?
Spying on your competitors is a proven tactic to discover unknown traffic sources, link building opportunity or for making better marketing decision – Google alert will help you achieve these.
With Google alert set up, you can put your blog commenting task as timely as at when the post went live.
You already know how beneficiary it could be being the first to leave comment on a post.
#6. Google Adwords.
Google Adwords is design to help you drive paid targeted traffic to your offer.
It is a paid traffic service from Google to help advertisers reach potential customers directly through contextual advertising.
Adwords is regard as the best paid contextual advertising platform because of its wider reach through thousands of Adsense publishers and quality of the traffic, though is a bit expensive compare to other paid advertising agency.
If you have the budget, Adwords is a good option especially for new businesses looking to get traction before other traffic channels start generating referral traffic.
Advertisers ads are displayed above and beneath organic search result pages, and on thousands of Adsense publishers pages who rent out advertising space on their blogs.
The placement of Adwords ads are determined by a number of factors like maximum cost per click bid and your ads quality score.
Here is a detailed analysis infographics put together by word stream that shows how Google Adwords works.
#7. Canva.
With 94% more views on content with images than content with no relevant images, it becomes so obvious the importance on visual content in our today society.
And with researchers found that colored visual increase readers willingness to read a piece of content by 80%, you definitely want more inviting images for your next blog post.
A recent study also shows that Facebook posts with at least an image sees 2.3x more engagements than posts without image.
But there is this challenge of designing your own relevant images that go with your content message because finding the right images for your content can be sometimes a very difficult thing to achieve.
Canva is a powerful tool for designing your own images even if you have no graphics design skill, no coding and no experience at all in image manipulation.
Canva is a drag and drop visual design tool that lets you do almost anything possible with your images and make it 100% you own.
Plus Canva is free to use though you have some premium images which cost mostly at $1 or so to spice up your image design.
You can get your infographics done for you through Canva, and the better part of this is that is free also.
#8. Social Media Automation Tools.
Marketing on social media is not an easy task, there are lots more to do and complete in any given moments.
From engaging with your fans, customers, promoting your latest post, finding the right images, to building relationship etc.
Plus you can’t be there all the time doing all these things.
You need engagement automation tools to keep things tidy, stay up there at the right time, be relevant and speak to your audience when they’re available.
Optimizing your social media marketing efforts should be on your priority list because when you achieve that, you’ll save time and get better result from your marketing efforts.
While there are lots of social media sites available today, one common marketers activities found in all of them is sharing of contents both owned and discovery contents.
To get the best out of your time spending in sharing these content, you need to be consistent and strategic in doing it.
What this mean is that you need the services of marketing tools design to ease the task, and make sharing easy both for you and your blog readers.
Some of my favorites are:
- Hootsuite.
- Buffer.
- BuzzBundle.
- EveryPost.
- Bit.ly
- Agora.
- Social Oomph.
- Sprout Social.
#9. BuzzSumo.
“Content is king”……..obviously, you must have read this a million times in the past 24 hours alone.
And everybody seems to be getting it right with publishing high-quality contents these days.
But there is one major problem with this too.
Creating high-quality content is not enough, you need to be sure your content topic is going to attract significant amount of views, you need to be sure there is a proven audience waiting for your content to be published.
In other words, you need to be publishing content topics that already proven to have received massive social shares, comments, and generates viral buzz.
This is where BuzzSumo comes in as a tool to help you discover proven content topic in your industry you can bank on.
The only thing left for you to do is to make the content better by applying the skyscraper techniques develop by Brian Dean.
I have written a lot about using Buzzsumo to discover great content topic you can leverage on for your next blog post.
#10. Ninja OutReach.
NinjaOutReach is not a new tool anymore, and not one of the oldest anyway……but among the tools I have used to drive free super targeted traffic to my blog – Ninja outreach is one of the best.
Ninja OutReach, as the name reads is an email outreach tool for reaching out to relevant bloggers, influencer marketing, link building opportunities, guest post pitches, products review request etc.
Whatever your outreach needs, try Ninja OutReach out.
I wrote a post not too long ago you can find here where I reveal how to use Ninja outreach to drive traffic even to a day old blog.
#11. Email Marketing Softwares.
Is hard to get that reader/customer to visit your website, is even harder to keep them, and maintain the relationship seems to be the hardest part so they keep coming back for more information afterward.
The thing is, if you continue generating website traffic consistently without owning a part of it and keep them with you, you will continue laboring every time to drive traffic to your blog or offers.
This is where email marketing solutions services provider comes in to help you acquire, keep and maintain the traffic you sweat so hard to drive to your blog.
Plus they provide tools to build up the relationship design to make your subscribers trust you, believe you and consequently buys from you when it’s time to sell.
There are lots of reliable email marketing services solutions today that both small and mid-size business owners can get started with immediately.
Personally, I have tested a few on this list and can vouch for their quality services:
- MailChimp.
- Get Response.
- Aweber.
- iContact.
- MailerLite.
- Sending Blue.
#12. MyBlogU.
MyBlogU is a bloggers community of online marketers come together to share their experiences with others and get cited for it.
There are other activities going on MyBlogU but that’s the major one that get people together much over there.
How will MyBlogU help you increase your blog traffic growth?
You can benefits from MyBlogU in many ways but here I’ll talk about how to use it to drive traffic to your content and improve your search ranking.
Member request for idea or input from other members in the house on a project or content he is working/writing on, members share opinion/experiences and they get cited for their contributions within the content.
Simple.
First, you’re getting exposure for your knowledge, skills and expertise which could lead to additional referral traffic to your blog.
Second, you’re getting a link back to your blog which can in most cases is a do-follow link that may add to your SEO link profile.
Though, many blogs in the MyBlogU community don’t possess high authority SEO value to pass such a great deal of SEO link juice but over time, especially when these pages get better SEO value the link might increase your search visibility for good.
#13. Content Syndication Network.
Content syndication network had become very useful tools to drive laser targeted traffic to your contents with little investment of money.
There are lots of paid contents syndication network companies that in practice operate like the Google Adwords or Yahoo Bing.
You’ve probably seen this type of content promotion on many of the popular sites like Huffington Post, Forbes, Mashable etc.
These content syndication sites or network operates in so many different ways, but usually, the goal is to get your content seen by thousands of targeted potential audience.
Besides, their cost per click is always relatively low compared to an outlet like Google Adwords.
Below is a list of content syndication sites/network companies you can try out today to get the word out for your next blog post.
- Kingged – Offers both free and Paid Options.
- Simple Reach.
- Taboola.
- OutBrain.
- Zemanta.
#14. Bloggers Communities.
Bloggers communities is, if done right one of the best places on the internet to get connected with the right people in the industry that can supercharge your existing content and make it go more viral.
But where you can go completely wrong with bloggers communities is forgetting is primary function that brings everyone together – helping and sharing valuable knowledge with each other that could lead to meaningful business relationship.
Some bloggers communities allow you to share your latest post to the community either just the excerpt of it or in full like we’ve seen from Kingged.com which combines bloggers community with content syndication services.
Connecting with people like minded is essential to the growth of your business, and for getting targeted exposure for your content, business and brand name.
These are part of what you can achieve if you take full advantage of the benefits bloggers communities offers.
There are lots of them today in different niches and industries:
- GrowthHackers.
- Inbound.org.
- Kingged
- Klinnk.
- Do Splash
- BizSugar.
- BlogEngage.
- Blogkube.
- Aha-Now.
- Tibery
#15. More Keyword Research Tools.
Let face it!
Effective keyword research and analysis is the base of any successfully online businesses.
If you don’t get your keyword selection right from the go, your marketing plan is questionable.
The process of keyword research, analysis, and selections cannot in any ways or situations are a thing of guess work or making your judgment based on your instinct or guts.
No!
You need substantial amount of users’ data to wade through, analyze and make your final keywords selection base on what the data tells you and not what you think or wants.
To get these processes right, there are few quality keywords tools you can put your money on.
The list below is some of my favorite’s keyword tools.
They’re better than each other for some specific task but all works greatly for the sole purpose it was created.
- SEMRush.
- UberSuggest.
- LongTail Pro.
- Keyword.io.
- Search Latte.
- Keyword Suggestion tool.
- Answer The Public.
#16. Questions and Answers Sites.
One of the best ways to drive free targeted traffic to your blog is to share your expertise with others looking to get help in relevant online communities.
There are hundreds of people looking to get help on various issues related to your content topic you can help them with by providing necessary answers to their problems.
Plus questions and answers sites if done right can elevate you to an experts status in your field quickly.
The most popular ones are Quora, Stack Exchange, and Yahoo Answers.
However, don’t expect flood of traffic from question and answer sites to your blog, it takes concrete efforts, patient, and tactics done right to see some decent traffic from such community.
Most Q & A sites work the same if you’re looking to drive traffic from the site…….here are some of the things to watch out for.
- Always search for questions ask recently – not more than some hours hold.
- Look for questions with fewer answers.
- Look for questions with lots of views.
- The question must be relevant to your niche topic – no brainer.
If a question has been asked days ago, chances are there would be lots of answers already and the more answers a question received, the likely possibility your answer will get buried down the page.
The question needs to be relevant to your blog topic, should I remind you of this?
Absolutely Not.
But I just did……..in cases you forgot.
One other thing I’ll advice you take to practice is to always answer questions you’ve already written a post on your blog, so it comes natural to sipping your content link in your answer to drive traffic back to your blog.
But don’t make it a habit to always include links in your answer to questions, some communities have rules for ratio or percentage of what should an ideal link ratio vs answered questions.
If all your answers contain links, you many get bundle out without notice – especially if they contain affiliate links.
#17. Social Media Sites.
Social media marketing as come so big that many seasoned marketers says, “Social is the new SEO”.
To some extent and going by certain metrics, no one can argue with that.
With the top 8 social media sites combine driving 31.24% of all web traffic and Facebook alone accounting to 24.63% of all website traffic to publishers websites, there is no such thing as to whether my business can drive web traffic from social media or not.
With Facebook alone sees over a billion users every day, you can’t hide the fact that you must incorporate social media marketing into your content marketing strategies.
Facebook – Like I said earlier, with over a billion users, there is no debate or argument over it……..Facebook is a default social media platform for almost any business type.
And the beauty of it is that Facebook provides the platform for all business of any size to market their business using many of the tools provided on the platform.
You can promote your business for free on Facebook and still get your share of its massive opportunity, but spending a few $$$ marketing your content/business can easily make the difference.
Plus, it doesn’t cost a huge budget to promote your content using Facebook paid advertising option.
Depending on your type of business and audience demographic, interest, sex, age, etc…Other social media platforms to consider are:
- Twitter.
- Facebook.
- Google Plus.
- LinkedIn.
- StumbleUpon.
- Reddit.
- Pinterest.
- Youtube.
Conclusion…..
Internet marketing is not an easy thing; no matter how you look at it……you can’t run online marketing like the business of the brick and mortar world.
There is so much to do in a very limited time here, and with millions of distractions popping out every second to slow you down or completely diverts your attention.
Without great discipline, focus and many sophisticated tools design to ease the process and make online marketing more like scientific base decision-making process……..there is very little chances for marketers to survive here.
I know there are plenty left out from this list, will you help give us a mention of your favorite online marketing tools design to increase your blog traffic?
