So we started thinking of creative ways we could reach out to more specific pockets of people that we knew would benefit from our content. After implementing many new twists to our content and marketing, all the while simultaneously keeping our blog active, we were so excited (and admittedly a bit shocked) to see that our blog traffic had tripled in just one quarter! With these considerations in mind, we’re now seeing increased engagement, many more inquiries about our services and products, and even more people reaching out to contribute to our blog and participate in our interviews.

Because you, our readers, are the ones who have given us this result and we’re big believers in the motto “sharing is caring”, we’d like to offer some of the tactics we used to increase the scope of our blog. Here we go!

Just how did we triple our blog traffic in one quarter? Here’s a quick list…

1. Target an audience that shares.

There’s a mutual benefit in promoting your customers. Many of our users have enterprises and social network accounts of their own! The beauty of our work is that many of our clients have used our services and products to grow their own businesses and they’re very active on social networks. We reached out to more of our users following us on social media to hear and share their story on our feeds, participate in an interview with us and share their experience using our themes. You can bet they were eager to share our links on their social media accounts and share with their followers and friends.

2. Mingle with your audience in the places where they like to hang out.

Google can help you figure out where most of your audience is browsing and visiting frequently to learn, engage and post content. Identify those platforms and post your blog in relevant context. As an example, Quora and Reddit are great platforms for this.

3. Keep your blog content SEO-geared.

I know, I know—a no brainer right? Though you’d be surprised how many writers, even when aware of this, stray off course. We’ve had to remind ourselves that great SEO content will follow when you keep what’s relevant and useful to your users at the forefront of your mind while brainstorming and writing. There are also great tools and resources we can all use to point us in the right direction such as Yoast SEO.

4. Don’t be shy on social media!

You can write all the great posts you want but unless you advertise it you can’t expect higher traffic! We weren’t so great about this before, mostly because we didn’t have the human resources and organization to make sure we’d have weekly, consistent social media posts and emails being sent sharing our content and engaging current and prospective readers.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, Instagram–you know all of these. Fill these out to the fullest with as much information as possible about your company and services/products. Share your content and those of peers and like-minded companies on those sites to gain sharing from others and prompt questions that spark conversation. Make sure to Interact with the community using hashtags and engaging in interesting conversations around your blog topics. Also keep a mental checklist of things you see on social media; this can be useful to find new content ideas for your next blog post!

5. Install Analytics and Pay Attention.

Look at how each of your blog posts are performing to see which one drives the highest traffic to your website. See how much time users spend time on each article and which content is more engaging. This will help you when you are trying to create new ideas for future posts.

6. Make the visual graphics, photos and videos fun, authentic and real.

We started posting more graphics thanks to our new designers, we added videos, pictures of our users, simply people to connect with our people! Rather than using stock photos, take the time to capture authentic interactions, creative brainstorming and playtime. Use different kinds of medium to deliver your message and you can reach to different kinds of audience.

7. Do your research before and while writing your content—keywords are KEY!

By knowing what your audience is looking for, you can shift and customize your content to be the most relevant and useful to your audience. All it takes is typing in your topic into Google and seeing what keywords are suggested. There’s also AdWords Keyword Planner which shows your phrases that align with the topic you were thinking of writing about.

8. Everything connects, including your previous content.

Now this is not to say go crazy throwing around links in every sentence. Choose your links wisely and make sure they’re reputable, useful and play by the SEO Link Rules. You’ll find that sometimes your content is built upon discussions or knowledge you had offered in previous posts—feel free to refer back to that post with a link. Then, of course, are the other blogs, websites you may follow and who serve as a muse to your writing. If you refer to something they’re discussing as well, offer a link to your users for further research and reading. Give and you shall receive!

9. We looked outside of our walls for inspiration.

There are so many social community sites and online forums (Reddit, Buzzsumo, etc) and see what all the buzz is about certain topics—this can trigger a lot of great ideas for you to write about or for you to apply to your sector and share with your customers. Share those links and sources of inspiration with your users! If your customers begin to turn to you for their own inspiration, well then I guess we’ve just accomplished “trickle-down inspiring”!

10. Welcome guest bloggers and volunteer to post in other blogs.

Guest blogging provides our users with a great opportunity to demonstrate their command and expertise in a given topic while also providing a different point of view. Reach out to customers whose work and approach inspires you  and who you think can offer their own perspective and expertise to advise your other customers.

11. Post consistently.

We share a blog post every week at the moment, and we plan on increasing them. It’s good to have a deadline to keep everything in track. We found out that with good planning, a blog post a week, with good quality is easily manageable. Consistency is the key. Don’t give up easily, if you feel like your blog is not getting the attention you feel it deserves.

12. Attractive layout.

Typography matters! Think about the many times you didn’t bother reading a blog post because the text was too small! Also break down the paragraphs and make it easy for people to read the content. There are many things to be said about typography so here is an amazing guide which you might find beneficial. Don’t make your layout complicated. Sidebars are usually a bad idea. Make the eyes focus on the content without any distractions. Also make your sure your blog is responsive. We realized a lot of our traffic comes from mobile, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise to us.

13. Variety.

We try to have different kinds of content, video interviews, tips and tricks, and articles about how we work as a team and so on, to ensure that our content is always fresh and helpful to read. We are always open to new suggestions too so let us know in the comment section below if you want us to write about a specific topic!

14. Let everyone contribute!

We are a big, talented team of developers, designers and marketers and we all want to share our knowledge. Each of us has things to say so we try to all contribute to the blog as often as we can. It’s also great because we see that we still have so much to learn from each other!

15. Give genuine advice.

There are many reasons why you might have a blog, however remember that the most important reason should always be this: try to share your knowledge and help people. Teach them things that you have learned, and they will keep coming for more. Think of the questions, or the problems that your target audience experiences and try to address them directly.

Pause. Reset. Blog.

You may have already implemented a few of these points into your blog content production strategy but we found that by using balanced doses of all 15 of these considerations, we were able to triple our readership and blog traffic in just 3 months! Now we challenge you to give it a try and let us know how it goes!