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How To Increase Traffic To Your Artist Blog
You started an artist blog to increase your fine art sales.
But if no one visits your blog posts, how are you going to drive traffic to your artwork?
The tips outlined below will increase traffic to your artist blog and build brand awareness for your art business.
Simple Tips To Increase Traffic To Your Artist Blog
There are many different digital marketing strategies that businesses implement to get the upper hand on their competition.
According to HubSpot, the three most important basic marketing strategies are:
- Publish a blog
- Advertise on social media
- Offer free educational resources
On top of the list is publishing a blog.
Your art blog will be the foundation of your art business.
Every blog post that you publish will have an opportunity to drive traffic to your website for years to come.
How to Write Goals You Can Achieve Workbook
Neil Patel explains how his sites increased traffic by publishing more posts per week.
KISSmetrics only started to see big traffic increases when I started to publish 5 pieces of content a week.
We recently started testing posting 6 pieces of content a week instead of 5.
When we posted 5 a week, we had 422,885 visits a month.
When we tested posting 6 articles a week, our traffic went up to 501,573 visits.
You can read more by visiting How to Grow Your Blog to 100,000 Visits a Month Within 1.5 Years
The number of posts you publish will affect how much traffic your artist blog will receive.
But what else can you do besides writing blog posts to increase your traffic?
Below are five simple strategies that will help you boost traffic to your artist blog so you can start selling more artwork.
How To Get Traffic To Your Blog With Keyword Research
It is one thing to write an art journal on your art blog, but it is another thing to use your art blog as a marketing tool to drive traffic to your website.
I have always said that your art blog will be the foundation of your digital marketing strategies.
Keyword research will be the cement that forms your foundation.
A strong keyword research marketing strategy will build a thriving online art business.
Keywords define your art business and make it easier for your target audience to discover you in the search results.
Every art marketing decision you make will be derived from your keyword research.
Having a clear understanding of which relevant keywords drive traffic and sales will make it possible for you to grow your online business.
If you are new to keyword research visit, Keyword Research Basics For Creative People.
If you understand keywords, you will want to learn what keywords people are using to find your site.
An easy way to discover what keywords people are using to visit your online gallery, log into your Google Search Console, and click Search Results.
A list of all the queries people has used to discover your site will appear and show you how many appearances the keywords generated and how many times people clicked on the link.
Next, you will want to brainstorm some other long-tail keywords related to the queried people are using to discover your content.
A great place to start is by using free keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest.
To learn how to be more effective with your keyword research, check out this eBook Get Your Keywords Together: How To Do Keyword Research With Only Free Tools.
Create Long Form-Content
The next step is to write a detailed post related to the keywords you want to rank for.
Google wants to provide the best content to its visitors, so if you’re going to rank on page one in Google’s search, your blog post has to be better than the top ten positions.
The length of your content (how many words in a post) could affect your PageRank because the more details you can include about a topic, the more valuable your post will be.
PageRank (PR) is a calculation, famously invented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, which evaluates the quality and quantity of links to a webpage to determine a relative score of that page’s importance and authority on a 0 to 10 scale. (Source: Bruce Clay)
The higher your PageRank is for a post, the higher your article will be in Google’s search results.
The bottom line is that the higher you rank on the search results, the more organic traffic you will receive.
Organic reach is the number of people who have clicked on your posts through unpaid distribution.
How can you increase your PageRank?
Writing long detailed posts has shown to rank higher in the search results.
The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2,000 words. The higher up you go on the search listings page, the more content each web page has. (Source: Neil Patel)
Below are some examples of posts that I have written over two years ago that still receive thousands of views every month.
- Art That Sells – What Artists Need to Know
- 15 Places to Sell Art Online and Make Money
- How to Price Art – Ultimate Art Pricing Guide
- How to Write an Artist Statement That Sells Art
I have found that I get better results by writing a mixture of short form-content, medium form-content, and long-form content.
For example, a post highlighting a new painting will not have as many words as a post describing how to frame an original painting.
Even though statistics show that lengthier content ranks higher in the search results, adding a bunch of filler words for a topic that only needs 500 words to explain could produce adverse effects.
Your ultimate goal is to write for your readers, not a specific word count.
Publishing content that provides value to your readers and relates to your art business is how to keep your readers on your page longer and returning to your site.
You will want to check your Google Analytics after having your blog live for a few months to discover what type of content is performing the best for you.
The information you gather from Google Analytics will help you develop a more productive content marketing strategy.
Related Post:
Optimize Your Headlines
After you have written your blog post and optimized it for search, you will want to spend time on the headline.
What is a headline?
A headline is the title of the blog post.
Your headline will be the first thing a potential reader will see when searching on Google, Bing, or Pinterest.
If your headline does not catch a person’s attention, they will continue scrolling until they find something that does.
The headline also tells search engines what your post is about so they can refer it to people searching for the topics you are writing about.
Garrett Moon, Founder of CoSchedule wrote a detailed post about what makes a headline more shearable.
This is what Garrett discovered about the emotional value of a headline:
Posts with a high number of shares frequently reached an EMV Score of 30 or 40, several points higher than posts with fewer shares.
I found that as the number of shares also increased, so did the EMV score of the headline. This means that headlines with a higher EMV Score are more likely to be shared than posts with a lower EMV Score. Essentially, there is a direct link between the number of emotional words used in a headline and the likelihood it will be shared more than 1,000 times. This is a HUGE takeaway that we can all put to work on our posts right away.
You can read more by visiting What We Learned Analyzing 1 Million Blog Headlines
Creating a headline that will encourage people to stop what they are doing and read your post is just like creating art.
It is essential to take some time to craft the perfect headline for your blog posts.
The good news is that you can revise the headline after being published.
For example, if your post has many page impressions but a low CTR, you might want to experiment with a different heading.
To learn how to discover your art blog impressions and CTR visit Search Counsel Reports. (Source: Google)
Below are some of the best free headline analyzer tools I use to craft clickable headlines.
- CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer
- Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer
- ShareThrough Headline Analyzer
Promote Your Content
It takes a lot of work and time to build a following for your artist blog, but once you start to see your art sales increase, you will sit back saying it was all worth the effort you put into your art blog.
The last tip I would like to talk about is promoting your blog posts.
It takes time for blog posts to rank on Google and other search engines, so it is good to give your new posts a push by promoting them on all of your social media accounts.
One common mistake I see many artists do is to write a great blog post and only share it once on their social media accounts.
This mistake slows down the amount of traffic the post could be receiving.
Create a simple schedule for your social media accounts and stick to it.
This will allow more of your followers to discover your new posts, and if they like it, they will share it with their friends.
Here is an example of my social media schedule:
When Post is Published – Once your post is published, you should share it on all of your social media accounts.
Next-Day – Not all of your followers will see your first post, so it is good to share it again the next day. I share my post at a different time the following day to try to reach a diverse group of people.
One Week – Share the post again one week after it has been published to ignite the fire again.
One Month – You will be building your following on social media so it is a good idea to share your post one month after it was published to reach your newest members.
You can use this schedule for your social media calendar to start. Still, I recommend that you review your analytics to see what is working best and adjust your schedule according to your unique audience.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
So far, we talked about the importance of keyword research, writing high-quality content for your readers, crafting titles, and promoting your blog posts while waiting for them to rank in the search results.
The last thing I would like to talk about is what not to do.
One of the worst things you can do is stuff your blog posts with keywords.
Keyword stuffing is when an author mentions an exact keyword repeatedly throughout the post.
When I first started selling art online, including many keywords in a blog post or art description, was common practice.
Google soon realized that spammers were keyword stuffing low-quality content to rank higher in search. In 2012 Google made an algorithm change that penalizes spammers who practice keyword stuffing.
If you want to increase traffic to your art blog, the best advice I can give you is to write content that is valuable to a reader.
Final Thoughts On How To Increase Traffic To Your Artist Blog
Your online art gallery is where people can view and purchase your artwork.
Your artist blog is going to be the fuel that drives traffic to your artwork which will increase your sales.
If you want to sell original art online you will want to focus on different ways to drive more traffic to your website and blog traffic will be the number one source of traffic your site will receive.
If you are are interested in learning how to get traffic to a new blog you might want to consider guest posting.
It could take up to six months for your blog to start seeing traffic because it takes time for the search engines to rank new content.
You can reach a broader audience by writing a guest post for an established blog.
At the end of a guest post, you will be able to write a short bio of you including a link to your website.
If the readers enjoy your content they will visit your site for more articles.
The last tip is to stay patient and always remember you are working for the long-term.
Would you like to learn how to build a blog that generated over $15,000 a month?
Debbie Gartner explains exactly how she created a blog that makes her six figures a year.
- Easy On-Page SEO (For Beginners)
- Easy Backlinks For SEO
- Google Analytics Easy As 1,2,3
- Blog Income Recovery
Check out this eBook to learn how to be more effective with your keyword research, Get Your Keywords Together: How To Do Keyword Research With Only Free Tools.
You Might Also Be Interested In:
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- 5 Simple Tips To Increase Traffic To Your Artist Blog
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