This St. Patrick’s Day, we here at Proven Systems hope the luck of the Irish is with you and your content marketing. But even without it, you should still be getting blog traffic. A blog can be a powerful tool if used correctly, but don’t rely on luck to get your blogs in front of readers! There’s a better way.

Your time is too valuable to waste writing and producing content that no one is reading. The number of people who click and read and share your content might seem random, but blog traffic is controllable — with a little work!

Make it easy
You don’t want it to be hard for readers to find your blogs, so start by eliminating obstacles! Ensure that your website navigation is clean and easy to follow, share links to your new posts consistently on social media, and make sure interested readers can subscribe to get email notices about blog updates.

It can also help to place links to your blogs within your other content marketing, to make it easy to get more information. Try these tactics:

• If two blogs have related topics, link to the other for further reading.
• At the end of every blog post, link to more blogs so readers can keep reading if they are still interested.
• Link to popular or relevant blog posts in other content marketing, such as eNewsletters and eFliers.

If you have earned dedicated repeat readers, don’t shut them out. Ensure that someone who wants to read your blogs has a simple, intuitive way to do so.

Optimize for search engines
To bring in new viewers, don’t ignore search engine optimization (SEO). This is the best way to match valuable content with those who are looking for it. Include the phrases and keywords someone might use if they were looking for your content.

Don’t just put keywords in the body of your blog, though! Try these other locations:

• Image captions, names, and alt tags
• Title
• URL
• Meta tags
• Category

You can also make keywords stand out to search engine crawlers by placing them in the first paragraph, the last paragraph, and emphasized formatting such as header tags, bold, and italics

But remember — you don’t want to write for robots. The whole point of SEO is to get actual, human readers to your blog. So don’t forget to also …

Optimize for readers
If you want to capture and retain the interest of your readers, you have to provide value. Stay away from sales-y copy and instead answer questions and solve problems that your target audience is experiencing.

Also, make content easily shareable so that readers who enjoy your blog can pass on their interest. You can do this with social media buttons that appear on every blog post, so each reader is just one click away from tweeting your blog out to their friends and followers.

It could be that leprechauns will put miraculous blogging success at the end of the rainbow for you this St. Patrick’s Day. But just in case they don’t, you can take matters into your own hands and ensure that your blog traffic is steady and relevant — no matter your luck!

Need help boosting your blog traffic? We can help. Contact the experts at Proven Systems by email or at (970) 223-6565 to learn about our blog marketing programs.