10 Ways to Kill Your Blog Traffic

A decade back, getting right information was a difficult task. This has been changed with technology and nowadays you can get any information you want. With social and smartphones, getting traffic to a blog is no more a difficult task. However, with gazillion blogs available on internet, getting sustainable traffic to your blog is not that easy. If you are planning to launch a new blog or running a smaller blog, here are the things you should consider to get consistent traffic from search engines like Google. Without proper maintenance, your blog will disappear sooner or later.

1. Not Monitoring Blog’s Traffic

Whether you have a small or big blog, it is important to monitor the traffic status. This is required for the following reasons:

• Measure the blog is growing as per your strategy
• Understand what type of content readers view more on your site
• Any impact to traffic due to algorithm updates

If your aim is to get one million page views per month, break down that into smaller objectives and track each objective separately. Google Analytics and many other tools are available to track the traffic of your blog based on different metrics. This analysis is required to find what content gets more traffic so that you can focus on improving your skill and marketing in that area. In addition, Google releases many algorithm and search updates. You have no other option to keep an eye on your traffic to understand whether you get impacted.

Remember, even an established blog can disappear in few years if the traffic data is not monitored and no corrective actions are taken to retain the traffic.

2. No New Content

Blogging is nothing but learning and sharing. Your blog will be dead when you stop publishing new content. Though you have hundreds of valuable old articles, Google and other search engines love fresh and updated content. Hence, you have to publish new content regularly in order to be on the blogging game. It is not necessary to release an article on daily basis. However, make sure to keep the blog in running condition at any point of time.

3. Not Recycling Old Content

More than 90% of the articles on the internet are time bound. They will become useless after few years of time. Let us say you run a technology blog and how-to tutorials about using iPhone. You have to update the old content to make sure they are valid for the current model and operating system. Otherwise, users landing on your blog will quit in few seconds when they found the articles are years old.

4. No Editorial Schedule

You may be excited when starting a blog and spend lots of time in publishing articles. This is not possible when you are moving ahead. For example, you may have to spend time with your kids or friends. You should keep a blogging schedule based on your situation and follow it meticulously. Many bloggers fail with their website with a simple reason of not having an editorial schedule.

5. Inappropriate Use of Social Media

We use the word “inappropriate” as some bloggers overuse social media while some may underuse.

• Overuse – sharing each article in Facebook, Twitter and many other platforms. Over the period, you will end up in using only social platforms and close your blog.
• Underuse – not responding to requests and not sharing important content. Ultimately, you will not tap the potential traffic from social platforms.

Both cases will hurt your traffic and hence you should measure how to appropriately share and respond in social platforms.

6. Following Black Hat SEO

Nowadays, new bloggers do not have patience to wait for years to get traffic. Social media is their first option which will also hurt as explained above. The next choice is to follow the below black hat search engine optimization techniques.

• Hiding text with white color font
• Sharing sites in auto surfing and link exchange programs
• Paying money to get traffic

All these things are ultimate ways to kill your blog’s traffic.

7. Not Updating Backend

Running a blog, especially on platforms like WordPress, needs you to spend lots of time on maintenance work. The problem is that hackers will target your site if you are not updating the backend like PHP in WordPress. Not updating theme, plugins and content management system will lead to security threats. It may also lead to a disastrous end to your blogging journey.

8. Doing Everything Yourself

Sooner after launching a blog, you will understand blogging is not about individually managing everything yourself. You can’t be an expert in everything starting from writing articles, marketing and generating revenue. You need people to manage other stuffs so that you can focus on your core work. Trying to manage everything will ultimately affect your blog traffic and lead to failure over the period.  

9. Not Building Community

You will get bored in few years if you are focusing on building a simple content website. The success is to build a community around your blog. It is not necessary to build a forum or address thousands of users. You can simply sell some eBooks or online services to offer your skill and build a client base based on your blog. Not doing so will make yourself bored and force you to quit blogging even you get decent traffic from content.

10. Not Marketing Through Blog

At the end, it is all about how you market your blog to reach proper audience. The success lies in converting the user landing on your blog to do the next action. For example, encourage users to purchase products through your affiliate links to get commission. This will happen only when you market the content to persuade the users to purchase the product. Many blogs fail to generate revenue without any content marketing strategy. When there is no revenue for long time, that will the end of your blog.