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WHSR Twitter Chat Recap: Blog Smarter and Stay Productive to Grow Blog Traffic

Twitter chat is a conversation between a group of people on Twitter. People tweet and answer using a specific hashtag. This helps to keep the conversation organized and easy to follow.

WHSR has started our own hashtag #WHSRnetChat. We reach out to influencers, friends, and brands to gather feedback on our questions. Although we are not hosting it live, feedback from Twitter communities is really helpful!

There are lots of things you need to do to build a successful blog. On our previous Twitter chat, we discussed tips to growth hack and how to make money from blogging.

In this recap, we are going to share with you:

  • Tips you need to promote and drive traffic to your blog.
  • Tools to save you time and keep you productive.
  • Blogging mistakes from experts and how to avoid.

Let's begin.

blog smarter

#WHSRnetChat Q1. What's your tip(s) in promoting and driving traffic to your blog?

Traffic is the lifeblood of a blog.

However, driving traffic to a blog is a challenge most site owners face. “Build and they will come” is not going to work these days. You need to find ways to get your blog in front of your audience.

Daniel Lyons, a talented blogger, was generating half a million visitors daily to his blog. However, he was only making about $1000 in AdSense earnings with his traffic.

Not quite what he was hoping for. The reason is simple. He was not getting the right audience.

I posed this question to the Twitter community and here is the feedback we received:

  • “To promote my blog: Lots of social media & mention blog in author/presenter bios.” @amandavogel
  • “be good at social networks!” @B_Grimaldi
  • “network with other bloggers.” @Lisapatb
  • “grovel to my peeps for social love ? and consistently share it myself on my social platforms.” @DreBeltrami
  • “My first answer would be to build an audience. A community of raving fans. An email list is critical to blog promotion success.”  @vanmarciano
  • “stay authentic.” @EmilysFrugalTps
  • “Use JustRetweet. Join communities/groups. Engage with others.” @lorrainereguly

I changed my question a little by asking about the most effective ways to drive traffic to a blog. The feedback was awesome. These are great strategies to hack traffic.

  • “Create value, connect with human beings. Create, connect, traffic follows.” @RyanBiddulph
  • “Participating actively in chats like this helps because people will usually check out your profile.” @SHurleyHall
  • “Write amazing content that is head and shoulders above the rest.” @cre8d
  • “Proper #SEO is the #Best way to drive #traffic to #blog.” @BloggerSharad
  • “Being active on Social Media, interacting with other bloggers and followers, easy links to your blog and photos!” @makeupandbeauti
  • “active social media. Seo on point, Pinterest, twitter, Instagram, Facebook (groups) and email newsletters.” @ivorymix
  • “Sure! It depends on the site, but PPC is great for driving engaged users looking for the info you're providing.” @revaminkoff
  • “I love using @Outbrain & @taboola to drive traffic to blogs – you get new engaged users interested in your content.” @revaminkoff
  • “Being active on the right social channels, ensuring that your blog/site are properly set up, posting original content!” @ZenContent

@Mike _Hosting given us his feedback in long format. Here's the reply:

  • “I primarily use social channels to advertise when I'm publishing new content. The most effective from all the reading and experimenting I've done is building an email subscriber list.”

Here are some key takeaways from the question:

  • Social media is the popular choice to promote and drive traffic to a blog.
  • Connecting with the human behind the screen is important.
  • Using correct tools will give you a helping hand.
  • Having quality content remains the key to a successful blog.

Related article: 5 effective ways to grow your blog traffic.

Moving on to our next question…

#WHSRnetChat Q2. What's the blogging tool(s) to increase productivity?

Nearly every blogger lacks enough time to complete all the tasks on his or her list. You have to read, write articles, promote them to social media, engage with others, and a million more things.

There is just not enough time. As such, tools remain the necessity to help us better manage our time and be more productive.

I have reached out with this question to pro-bloggers and writers to discover the tools they are using. You have most likely heard about tools like Hootsuite, Buzzsumo, and Buffer. But, there are lots of good tools you might not have heard of just yet.

Take a look at the feedback from the Twitter community:

  • “1) @hootsuite 2) @studiopress 3) @Grammarly 4) @longtailpro 5) @googleanalytics” @ErikEmanuelli
  • chrome extensions and other time-saving tools would be @buffer @tweet_jukebox @missinglettr.” @davidhartshorne
  • “I'm trying out this new tool called Habitbull. My all time fav tools are Evernote, Todoist and Google apps. ?” @ValerieDeveza
  • “Jimdo, more a platform, Hootsuite and Massplanner.” @DanteHarker
  • “My list is pretty short: mostly it's @MyBlogU @VCBuzz @trello @Buzzsumo @TweetDeck and good old spreadsheets ?” @SanaKnightly

@Mike _Hosting gave us his reply in an email.

  • “For me it's not necessarily about the tools (there are so many to choose from and different ones work for different folks), but about developing a process for writing and publishing that makes it quick and easy to get your content onto your site. I use WordPress on my site and there are plenty of great plugins, but [by] far the most useful is Yoast SEO. It is very useful when ensuring you are trying to get your blog noticed and saves a lot of time on customizing meta tags.”

I did some research on a few tools which I thought you might be interested in. Some of them are new to me. Others are useful and I'm using as well.

1. Habitbull

Habitbull is a habit tracker tool. The app organizes your daily life and keeps track of all your habits. It will put all your data in beautiful graphs. The cool part is, it includes motivational images to keep you motivated.

2. Trello

If you are looking for an online collaboration tool, Trello is a great platform to start with. It is easy to use. You can create a task and move around quickly with the use of boxes. You can add a comment to every task and track all the activities.

3. Missinglettr

Missinglettr replied to our Twitter chat with a brief introduction. Here's what they said: “With @missinglettr you literally just connect your blog and that's it. We then send you pre-rolled campaigns. Campaigns are created based on your own blog. Each campaign is unique and will run for 12 months. In short, we save you the time and pain involved in having to create a social campaign for each article you write :)”

4. VCBuzz

Viral Content Buzz is a great place to boost your tweet and gain social appearance. It works by earning credits when you share other users' content. You will have to use the credit when you promote your content through the tool. It works across other platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, and StumbleUpon.

Here are some key points covering our question:

  • Don't be a slave to tools, but understand that they can help you in your work.
  • Use tools that are comfortable to you. These will probably be those with less of a learning curve.
  • Measure your effort.

Related article: 21 productivity tips to do more while you travel the world.

Let’s move on to our last question.

#WHSRnetChat Q3. What's your biggest blogging mistake? And, how to avoid?

Mistakes are great as long as we learn from them.

Even better, Rather than make the mistakes ourselves, we can learn the mistakes of others. Mistakes help us understand what and how things work.

I believe this question is helpful to a newbie blogger or even a pro-blogger. By studying the mistakes of others, we keep reminding ourselves not to repeat the same.

Here are the blogging mistakes you can learn from the experts:

  • “Biggest #blogging mistake? Not starting with niche soon enough!” @patweber
  • “Not writing for your audience. Know who they are & what they want.” @sherisaid
  • “Lack of planning! Keeping an editorial calendar is the best way to stay on top of things! Thanks for asking, Jason ?”  @joyceatjoysong
  • “My biggest blogging mistake is NOT optimizing for lead capturing from day 1… so many years of lost traffic!” @seosmarty

@Mike _Hosting shared his own experience:

  • “For someone who is starting out, don't get hung up on visitor numbers. Generating regular traffic to your site won't happen overnight and only getting a handful of daily visitors can be a little demoralizing. Don't give up! Developing a loyal following takes time and effort, it's a big market and you are competing with millions of other experts. When I started out, I was amazed how long it took to gain readers.”

I'm sure there are lots of mistakes you can learn from. I wanted to know what are the things pro bloggers would do if they could turn back time. I searched around the Internet and hand picked a few answers:

  • “I would spend more time networking and building a community of like-minded bloggers and small business owners. This is the key to growing, learning, helping, profiting and much more!” @madlemmingz
  • “I would give more attention to my followers on social media and communicate more with them rather than just promoting my blog.” @DovileMal
  • “The #1 mistake in my blogging career: Not collecting emails – right from day one.” @WebHostingJerry
  • “My biggest blogging mistake was thinking I was a failure if I didn’t publish a blog post every week.” @alancassinelli
  • “Be consistent, don’t do it all by yourself, and help others.” @devesh
  • “I didn’t write.Or, I didn’t practice writing 1,000 words or more daily. Write, write and write some more to find your voice and to stand out.” @RyanBiddulph
  • “My biggest mistake was buying backlinks for bloggingcage.” @kulwantnagi

If you would like to learn more blogging mistakes from the experts, herehere and here are some good roundup posts to follow.

The key takeaways to conclude from our last question:

  • Bookmark it. Make sure you do not repeat their mistakes.
  • Always remind yourself what you need to do, although it is not your first day of blogging.
  • Reach out to them and learn from them personally.

Related article: Things we wish we knew before starting a blog.

I hope you enjoyed this post as much as I did. I faced a lot of challenges when doing this outreach campaign. Setting the right questions, reaching out to people, gathering feedback and compiling it.

Many thanks to everyone who participated in this Twitter chat. Thanks for your time and effort in giving your feedback. Let’s connect @WHSRnet.

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Article by Jason Chow

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