Getting traffic to a new blog is one of the biggest challenges for newbie bloggers. On my blog and also in my previous post, I talked about how I used a header image to significantly increase social sharing on a blog post. In this post, I talk about the technique that I used to triple the traffic and increase social shares to that post, even though it was a new blog.

This technique takes me at least a few hours to execute, so you will want to make sure your posts contain top quality content for maximum effectiveness. This method includes two main parts – writing top quality content and then promoting it by email.

Write Top Quality Content

A lot of bloggers write about whatever they feel like on their blogs. When I start a new blog, however, I like to make sure that I am providing top quality content.

Top quality content should do some or all of the following:

1. Inspire or arouse emotions

2. Solve a common problem

3. Showcase a significant result and explain how it was achieved

4. Provide a useful resource

There are many other topics that qualify as top quality, but these are some of the ones I like to focus on. Essentially, you want content that people will be willing to share with their followers and friends.

Analyzing the Popularity of a Topic

One important step is to analyze the popularity of a topic and also create a list of people that you can reach out to. The quickest way to do this is to think of a common problem that people have, then search on Google and see what comes up. Using a keyword tool like Google Keyword Planner is another option.

Search for your topic and then start looking at the blog posts and articles that are currently ranking in the search engines. Popular topics will have at least 5 posts or articles (usually more) that have a large amount of social shares and comments.

Once you find a good topic, use a backlink checker to see what types of sites are linking to these posts. Add these backlinks to a spreadsheet and find and save the email address of the author. Some popular backlink checkers are ahrefs.com and Open Site Explorer.

The Blog Post

The blog post that I wrote was entitled 101+ Sources of Blog Content Ideas. It ended up taking about 8 hours total to finish the post, but the goal was to provide one of the largest and most useful resources for coming up with ideas for blogging, which is a common problem for many bloggers.

To make this a resources that other people wanted to share, I tried to make it the largest list of content ideas out there. A quick Google search revealed a lot of other shorter lists. There were also a few lists that were about the same length, but they were poorly organized and the quality was not as good.

Promoting the Post

Once the post is written, it is time to promote it. Email your prospect and let them know about it. Keep your email short and ask for a link or tweet. Here is an example email:

Dear Mike,

I noticed that you linked to (resource) on your post here – (link to their post). I am writing to let you know that I have created a related resource and wanted to share it with you:

(link to your post here)

If you like the post, would you mind linking to it or tweeting it out to your followers?

Thanks,

Brian

The Results

I emailed a little over 100 people and got around a dozen responses, which is the typical response rate for email outreach. Although this may not seem like much, some of the responders had large followings and their tweets were retweeted and shared further.

In fact, whenever I do an email outreach, I usually find that I get at least a few influencers that will tweet or link to the content. To date, 101+ Sources of Blog Content Ideas has received over 100 social shares and traffic to the site increased by over 300%.

Influencers will share content for a variety of reasons. Successful people often enjoy helping other people succeed, but most importantly, for someone to tweet or link to a resource, it needs to be useful to their followers.

Other Benefits or Email Outreach

Asides from promoting your content, email outreach has several other benefits. In fact, the long term benefits outweigh the short term benefits of promoting the one post.

1. I got to connect with other successful bloggers and even got some help from them.

Building relationships with your peers and influencers is one of the best parts of email outreach. Some of the tips and comments I received from other people helped me increase the effectiveness of my blog posts.

2. I found a bunch of other blogs to possibly guest post on when doing backlink research.

Backlink analysis reveals other blogs and sites that you can target for exposure for your own site. Although it takes time to do, backlink analysis is something you should do anyways to get a better understanding of how people are successfully promoting their websites.

3. Social proof increased email opt-ins

I noticed an increase in email opt-ins, even months after I completed my email outreach campaigns. Having posts that have a lot of tweets and shares makes you look a lot more credible.

The keys to success with this technique is to make sure your content is top quality, being concise and clear with your emails, and providing value to the people you are reaching out to.