As a blogger, you’ll encounter hundreds of tactics and over-riding strategies to get traffic to your website.
One sure-fire method for getting traffic to your blog is to simply create content. And not just any old content neither. The content needs to be compelling content that solves a real high demand problem that people within your market are actively searching for.
Every time you publish a new post on your blog, you’re creating another indexed page in the search engines. Of course, I’m assuming you set your post to “index” in your SEO settings.
Essentially, when you create new indexable posts and pages, you’re creating more web real estate that can be found by search engines and blog directories. Increasing your web real estate means that there are more entry points (front doors) to your blog which of course means there are more visitors with a different set of problems entering your blog.
Furthermore, you’re alerting directories with fresh content and letting Google know that your domain is publishing fresh content regularly which in turn, will prompt Google to crawl your site more frequently.
Staying Ahead of Your Competition
To increase your visitors and decrease your Alexa rank, your objective to release fresh content faster than your competitors with a similar Alexa rank. Of course, the quality and demand of the content is more important than the quantity of posts that you create.
Tactic #1: Digging for Traffic Pulling Headlines
This method involves doing some quickfire research using Digg.com
- Head on over to Digg.com
- Enter some broad search terms into the search bar
- Filter the results by ‘Most Dugg’
- Identify a possible adaptation you can make to a headline in the list.
- You may even wish to browse the article to give you an insight into why the article was dugg so many times.
This type of article is likely to be shared amongst readers’ social networks if it is already receiving lots of Digg action.
Tactic #2: Searching Top Magazine Publications for Attention Grabbers
Consult magazines that are world renowned for grabbing the attention of their readers. Ask any top copywriter if they read and take swipes from magazines such as Cosmopolitan.
The article illustrated below is a perfect example of an attention grabbing headline that fills the reader with curiosity, and potentially fear if the headline strikes a chord with the reader’s personal experience.
The reader immediately wants to know what the problem might be, what the tell-tale signs are, and possibly even how to remedy the situation.
Tactic #3: Split Testing Possible Headlines using Twitter
Once you have published a post, you may wish to test variations of the post titles to increase your clickthrough rate on your blog. Remember that your post titles show up on excerpts, sidebars, RSS feeds and related posts links. You can increase the number of pageviews per visit by implementing this type of strategy.
This is one of those tasks that I really know I should do more of myself because I know I can get more results from my existing content by doing so.
- Simply create two versions of a headline that you want to test.
- Ensure that you create unique tracking links for each of the headlines using a URL shortener such as bit.ly.
- Send out two tweets at approximately the same time and see which one gets the highest clickthrough rate.
- Change your article heading when you have a clear winner.
So… there you have it! A few simple ways to write traffic pulling headlines which will leave you enjoying increased levels of traffic and blog stickiness.
To Your Online Success,
The Profit Share
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Fantastic post Wayne! I was just in the process of writing up some Tweets when I came across this post. God works in mysterious ways.
Make it a great day!
What other tactics do you use to write headlines?
Hi Dhane,
Thanks for your comments.
You can sometimes get an idea by which articles have received a lot of tweets or likes from popular blogs.
Another way is to check the most popular section in an article directory such as Ezine Articles.
Hope that gives you another couple of ideas to find inspiring headlines. :)
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Hey dude :) your shared article provide a perfect example of an concentration grab heading that fills the bookworm with interest, and potentially fear if the heading hit a harmony with the reader’s personal experience.
Thanks William. I haven’t seen you around here before so welcome to my blog.
I went for functional with the headline choice. When blogging, choosing a catchy headline is an important and frequently overlooked traffic generation strategy.
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Wow that was cool. Since twitter and digg are 2 of the most famous social media it would be a great resources.
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Writing headlines that pull traffic is important as you’ll increase clickthroughs and your readership over time by using them.
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I believe split testing is the most effective Wayne. That’s my opinion. Haven’t thought about it really but I’ll try your last tip to see which headline can drive more traffic to my website. Thanks Wayne for another brilliant post!
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Great stuff Andrew. Finding good headlines that pull traffic is a great traffic strategy in itself.
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Having Traffic Pulling Headlines is very Important as it leads to the increase in the business and helps our business to grow.
I would agree with you most especially when done through a thorough research for attention grabber from renown periodicals
This post really gives me a lot of bright, not only focusing on its title but also to various approach on how to come up with it. But what i like most is how to generate traffic through attention-grabber through good headlines. i would love to try tactic #1.
Great tips and tools to use for generating headlines. Before I finished reading I went over to Digg to test it out and came up with some interesting results. I will put my assistant on that to ‘digg’ further.
And thank you for breaking down the Split Testing in Tactic #3. I have heard this referenced and just hadn’t put the attention to figuring out the easiest way to try it.
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thank you once again for the information.
I do have a question. What in the world and how does one “INDEX” on a serch enginge? I tag on blog. Is that the same or something ai haven’t picked up yet? Malika
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Hi Malika,
Indexing on a search engine is where the search engine lists your content in a database after it has crawled your site.
Blogs notify search engines of new content through a process called ‘pinging’. When you ‘publish’ or ‘update’ from WordPress, you ping (notify) the search engines that fresh or revised content is available on your site which causes their bot to crawl your site and record it in their database tables. Recording the content in their database is the process called indexing.
All you need to focus on search engine optimisation fundamentals. I recommend you ‘Join as a member’ by clicking the link at the top right of this page, then following all the instructions carefully. This will guide you into the traffic membership area.
There is a book in the ‘Bonuses’ section which is called ‘Google Traffic is as Easy as ABC’. I recommend you download and read that book. It will tell you all about search engine fundamentals.
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