How I Doubled My Blog Traffic Virtually Overnight

How I doubled my blog traffic

When I first began blogging, it was with the aim of becoming a better writer (hopefully I’ve succeeded at least to some degree). I had no knowledge of traffic building, or why one would really even want an audience until about two years ago.

When I began The Frugal Farm Wife, I promised myself that I would post nothing but high quality content, and try my hand at developing an audience.

Well unfortunately, I fell off the high quality wagon pretty quickly. Largely, I’m afraid, because photography is not my forte. I understood the rule of thirds, but had a difficult time implementing it. And of course, I knew that distracting backgrounds were a no-no. But that was about it.

Why am I telling you this? Because it had a huge impact in my blogging. I’m still not a good photographer, but I’ve at least gotten a little better, and numbers don’t lie; readers want better pictures.

So here are two things that, together, have doubled the Frugal Farm Wife’s traffic almost overnight:

How I Doubled My Blog Traffic

• Quality pictures. Like I said, I have a very meager understanding of photography. The ebook How To Take Better Photos – Your Guide To Taking Better Pictures From Any Camera was kind of my turn around point. For some reason, that little ebook made more sense to me than any other article I’d ever read. It explains work arounds for point and shoot cameras like mine, which, until then, I had stored away because I could get better pictures with my iPod. (Pretty sad, huh)There are also a number of websites where you can get images for you posts. Some of them are free, others you’ll need to pay for. I often use these for my non-food posts. See that image up above? That one came from morguefile.com, and I added the title in picmonkey. Which leads me to…
• Pinability. When I started making my articles easily pinable, more people started pinning, and my traffic from Pinterest skyrocketed. All it took was putting a little “pin it” button somewhere in my posts – usually right under a picture. When I started going through the archives, making posts pinnable, starting with my most popular posts, traffic soared.These two things really go hand in hand of course, because nobody wants to pin ugly images.

I’ve also really enjoyed using pic monkey to title and edit my photographs, which I think also encourages people to pin. And certainly, it ensures that no matter how many times the description gets changed by pinners, people know what kind of article the pin links to.

There you have it! An amatuer bloggers two major blogging tips.

I’d read many times of course, that these – photo quality, and pin-ability – were the  most important ways to increase traffic – second only to quality writing. And, I believed it. But now, after implementing these simple principals, I know it.

Now it’s your turn! If you’re a blogger, what are ways you use to increase your traffic?

P.S. What some more blogging tips? One of my favorite places to read about blogging is blogelina.com. She’s a mom blogger (like me!) so I find her stuff to be really helpful and relevent to my situation. My other most recommended resource is How to Blog for Profit (Without Selling Your Soul) written by Ruth Soukup, a very successful mom blogger. This is by far, the best blogging book I’ve ever read.

---

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. Don’t worry, it doens’t change anything for you, it simply means that if you happen to click through and purchase something, I get a small advertising fee.