As a blogger, you quickly become very proficient and slightly obsessed with numbers. The higher the numbers for you, the better. Everyone wants eyeballs on their blog and on their social media outlets – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, etc. It’s the nature of the beast in the blogging world, the more traffic you have… the chance that more opps might come your way (*Not all opportunities with brands/companies are based on traffic, but it does help).

Here’s my daily number breakdown when I get up every morning:
– How much traffic was on my blog yesterday?
– How many new Twitter followers?
– How many new Pinterest followers?
– How many uniques on my blog this month?
– How many people viewed my videos from the day before?
– How many new Instagram followers?

I literally do a quick number inventory and see where I’m at and what I need to do to improve the numbers.

Increasing my blog traffic is something that’s been my goal since Day 1 of blogging. I’ll never forget sitting in my kitchen and refreshing my analytics page over and over and over again to see if it increased. I remember seeing the number hit “50” pageviews and feeling overjoyed that 50 people had read my blog that day (knowing that maybe only 10 of those clicks were from me). It became the foundation to what I was doing, seeing if people were reading and responding. I have always been appreciative of every single click.

After you start seeing and analyzing your numbers, you begin (quickly) to see what does well and what doesn’t. You start to see the trends and see what works. You start to see what really excites your readers and what doesn’t. It’s helpful because you really can gauge how to proceed with content on your blog and on your social media channels.

We’re all looking for ways to increase blog traffic. I wanted to share with you 8 ways to increase your blog traffic that I use and feel that if you implement some or all of these, you will see a jump and a boost in your traffic.

1. Make sure you’re sharing your content on all the social media channels that you can. Once you’re done with a post – make sure you link it out everywhere – Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram (you could do an image and embed the link in the comments) and Google+. It’s important to get it out everywhere.

2. See what is trending online. It’s no secret that trending stories can get lots of traffic, so if you’re looking for content during the week, you can easily see what is trending and try crafting a post around that topic.

3. Giveaways. If you don’t do giveaways, you should. They are great traffic generators. Even if you do one once a month, it’s still a great way to get eyeballs on your site.

4. Link up with other bloggers for a weekly special. I do “Fashion Friday” every Friday with 4 other bloggers. It’s a great way to link to other people’s sites because they link back to yours, too.

5. Contribute to links (like) Wordless Wednesday and Throwback Thursday are ones that come to mind. I would absolutely make sure you contribute to these links. Not only will your post be out there on the list, it’s also a great way to meet other bloggers who have content like yours.

6. SEO. This is something that I’m just getting better at, but it took me time to really understand, research and get it down. Make sure you are properly doing SEO on your site. I recommend picking up a book on SEO. I literally just picked up the book SEO for Dummies at Barnes and Noble. It was an easy read and it was great to understand.

7. Create posts that teach/tell your reader something. Some of my best posts are the ones that are like – 101 Ways to Spend a Saturday Afternoon or 50 Things to Do in the Spring. Lay it out easily for your reader. That kind of content does well online and on the different social media channels.

8. This is only if you feel like you can handle another writing gig, but you can also see about being a contributor on other sites (paid or non-paid). If these sites have lots of traffic, and they link back to your site… that’s another way to gain access to more traffic. I used to write for SheKnows.com and the traffic link backs to my site were really good. It was a nice and easy way to get new readers.