Welcome to episode 38 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! In this episode, Bjork talks about 7 strategies to build traffic for your for blog.

Last week, Bjork spoke with Delores Custer, a world-renowned food stylist. Delores has been in the food styling game for a long time (she worked with Julia Child!) and had a lot to say about the way things have changed over time. To go back and listen to that episode (and get a chance to win a copy of her book), click here!

7 Strategies to Build Traffic

When it comes to making a business out of your blog, there is one thing that can have a really big impact: traffic.

We get asked all the time about things that you can do to help grow your traffic. There are the easy, well-known tips, like putting each post on social media and submitting your recipes to FoodGawker. But there are also some things you can do that aren’t as simple or intuitive that can make a really big difference, and that’s what Bjork is talking about today.

In this episode, Bjork talks about:

• How offering your content to influencers can increase sharing
• Why you should become an influencer yourself
• How to use Google Analytics to guide your content
• How linkable content can build your internet clout
• How to create content for specific platforms
• How to learn more about different platforms without becoming an expert on them
• Why you need to create a lot of content to find success

Listen to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast below or check it out on iTunes:

Resources:

• 025: How to Connect with Influencers with John Corcoran from Smart Business Revolution
• 033: Notes on the Pinch of Yum Redesign
• How to Create a Long Image for Pinterest
• 035: How to 10x Your Facebook Following in One Year with Stephanie from Spaceships & Laser Beams
• Process.st

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to [email protected].

Be sure to review us on iTunes!

If you’d like to jump to the comments section, click here.

Transcript:

Bjork Ostrom: Welcome to episode number 38 of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Hey there, everybody, this is Bjork Ostrom and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This is episode number 38, lucky number 38. Is it lucky? No, I don’t think it is. Maybe it is for you. I hope that it is. It is today, because we’re going t be talking about a question that we get a lot, and that is the question of traffic. We hear from people all the time that one of the things they want to do is really build traffic to their site, which makes sense. The more traffic you have, the more ability you have to interact with people, to test things out, to see what’s working, to see what’s not working.

As is the case for many people that listen to this podcast, it makes it a lot easier to start that transition into building your blog or your website into more of a business, into something that you can have as a job, because with traffic, oftentimes you’re able to create an income. The bottom line with traffic is that it’s not something that comes easy, but there are some things that you can do to help you start to be creative with how you build your traffic, and I want to talk about 7 of those today. Today, we’re going to be talking about 7 different strategies that we’ve used with Pinch of Yum and that you can use with your blog to help build traffic.

Now what I tried to do with these is use some ways that maybe you don’t think of normally. Maybe you’ve thought of some of these but you haven’t applied them. Basic idea with building traffic is that you have to have really awesome content. If you have a blog or a website that doesn’t really offer anything valuable, then it’s going to be really hard to encourage people to come to that site or to link to that site and to build a business around it. I just want to say that before we jump into this.

The bottom line is that you really have to have awesome content, and with that in mind, as you kind of perfect your content, what are the other things that you can be doing to help increase your traffic? That’s what we’re going to be focusing on today. We’re going to talk about 7 specific areas. I talked with Lindsay before recording this podcast and she shared some input as well, so we’re going to dive in and talk about that. There’s no interview today. It might be a little bit shorter because I’m not going to try and fill it out to that normal time of 40-50 minutes, maybe an hour, because I don’t think we’ll need that long. It’s maybe going to be a little bit shorter, a little bit sweeter, and, hopefully, extremely valuable.

Let’s go ahead and jump in and talk about these 7 strategies to increase traffic to your food blog. Number 1, this is one that I love because it’s something about the way the Internet works that when applied to your blog really helps to build traffic, and the Internet is all about sharing. I think sometimes we can get really stuck with this idea of protecting our content so nobody can access it, nobody can use it. The reality is bloggers and website owners that are smart about sharing their content really do themselves a service by allowing other people to access their content and share it on their websites and their blogs.

Now it’s not just being open about sharing your content and to allow people to do it, but one of the things that you should do, and this is tip number 1, is to connect with influencers and outright offer your content to them. What I mean by influencers is you can go to popular sites like, let’s say, BuzzFeed or Huffington Post or Yahoo or MSN. You could even go into different social media areas like Instagram or Facebook and you can connect with people that are either editors or content creators on those sites like BuzzFeed or Huffington Post or Yahoo or have popular accounts like Instagram or Facebook.

You can connect with them and say, “Hey, I notice you have a popular account. I really like what you’re doing, and I want to reach out and say that if you ever need a recipe or a photo, then you can use those from my blog.” You can kind of give them a blanket statement that says, “If you’re interested in using anything from my blog, you can go ahead and do that.” We’ve done that in the past with certain editors that we’ve connected with on sites like BuzzFeed, and we’ve openly said, “If at any point, you ever need to use content from our site, you can go ahead and do that.”

Now there’s a little bit of a clause that we include in that, which is, “We ask for 2 links back to our website, one to the home page and one to the recipe itself, and we ask that you don’t use the entire recipe.” The reason that we don’t want people to use the entire recipe is because there’s the potential for those big sites to outrank Pinch of Yum. A site like BuzzFeed or Huffington Post, if they were to post an entire recipe including the ingredients and instructions and a photo, chances are that on search engines, because they have so much SEO juice, they might outrank Pinch of Yum.

An example would be, let’s say we posted a full recipe to allrecipes.com. Allrecipes is really, really optimized to show recipes high in search results. What might happen is if we have that exact same recipe on those 2 sites, it might show up higher. We have this little clause. We say, “You can’t use a full recipe, but you can use any image you want and then also we ask that you include links back to the website.”

The key here with this tip of connecting with influencers and offering your content, the key here is that you want to be sure to be proactive about that, that you’re not just putting something on your FAQ page that says, “Hey, you can use a photo from our blog as long as you link back to it,” but you’re reaching out to them and saying, “If at any point you want to use something from my blog, I want to let you know that you can.” That’s tip number 1, connecting with influencers and offering your content.

If you haven’t yet listened to the podcast interview with John Corcoran, I would encourage you to do that. He talks all about this strategy of connecting with influencers, not directly related to food blogs necessarily, but he talks about the best way to do that. If you want to check out that episode, that is episode number 25 of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, and you can find that by going to foodbloggerpro.com/25, or if you use iTunes or any other podcast aggregator, you can go ahead and search for John Corcoran and find episode number 25.

Tip number 2, this is kind of related, but it is more about becoming the influencer yourself. I’m going to talk specifically about BuzzFeed. We’ve noticed this on the Food Blogger Pro forums a lot, we’ve had a lot of people start to put together these different, these roundups essentially, and they’re posting those as a content creator to BuzzFeed. If you didn’t know, BuzzFeed has paid contributors or paid authors, but they also have this kind of community area where you can sign up and you can be a contributor or a community editor. I don’t know the technical term that they use. You can create content and submit that to BuzzFeed.

What we’ve seen a lot of people do is we’ve seen them create these, you know, BuzzFeedy type articles like 21 Salad Recipes that Taste Like Hamburgers. I haven’t actually seen that, but that would be great if you created it, or 17 Desserts That You Want to Eat for the Rest of Your Life, or This Taco Recipe Seemed Normal at First, but Wait Until You See What Happens When You Add Beef. That wasn’t one either, but I would love to see that if you create it.

The basic idea here is these roundups, 21 of this, 17 of this, 15 recipes that you’ll love, and they have a photo and then they have a link to the recipe, they have a very specific theme. It’s either summer salad recipes or healthy desserts or things like that, something kind of niche and kind of that BuzzFeedy title. Then what people do is they submit these as a community editor or as a contributor, and they include their own recipes in this roundup. The idea is that you can connect with other people and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about putting this together,” and this is what people have been doing on the Food Blogger Pro forums. They’ll gather up different contributions from other bloggers and they’ll create this list that they then submit to BuzzFeed.

They author that and submit it to BuzzFeed, kind of the community area, but within that, they include their own recipes and a photo of their own recipe as well. Usually what you’ll see is they’ll include their recipe at the top so it will be number 1. It will be the one that will be most prominent and seen most often. Then maybe they’ll intersperse 2 or 3 other ones. If there’s 17 total recipes, they’ll intersperse those throughout the feed or the roundup, and then they’ll also include the other ones that they’ve collected from other bloggers.

It’s a great way to connect with bloggers because you’re using their content and helping drive traffic to their site. It’s also a great way, if you haven’t yet connected with people on those big sites like we talked about in tip number 1, BuzzFeed or Huffington Post or Yahoo or anything like that, to move forward with it on your own. If you’re just getting started out, you’ll really see a difference with this because the potential to drive traffic is a decision that you make. You’re saying, “I’m going to put this together. I’m going to submit this. Even if somebody’s not responding to me or I’m not able to connect with people like I want to that are putting these together on their own, you can go in and create your own.”

Sometimes these will go on to be featured prominently on BuzzFeed, and it can be a great way to initially build up traffic to your site if you have that extra time to build these roundups. I’ll say this, let’s say you’re a little bit down the line, you’re kind of at that mid-level where you’re starting to create an income from your blog and maybe you don’t have time for it, this would be a great thing for somebody on your team to pick up. You could have them maybe once a week or twice a week go through the process of creating these really specific roundups and potentially even creating something similar on your blog.

Maybe you want to create some type of recipe roundup and you submit that to BuzzFeed and then you augment it a little bit, create something that’s not exactly the same, and then submit it to both places, so something to think about. We’re going to actually talk about that in a little bit in tip number 5. Number 2, submitting your own content to BuzzFeed instead of connecting with somebody that’s already a contributor or an editor there.

Number 3 tip for increasing traffic to your blog, I love this one. I’ve talked about it before, but it’s a really important concept that I want to revisit because I think that it will help you no matter where you’re at, if you’re just getting started out, if you’ve been doing this for a long time. The idea with tip number 3 is to research and recreate. Oftentimes, we use Google Analytics as a very generic information tool. The only way that we use it is we go in, we look, and we say, “What is our traffic like? How many people visited our blog today? What was our traffic like last month? Are we improving? Are we not improving?”

Google Analytics, when used correctly and when used at its best, is really an incredible research tool. It should be used to not only give you information that tells you how your blog is doing in terms of traffic but also gives you information that you can use to help increase that traffic. One of the easiest ways to do that is to research and recreate. Here’s what I mean by that. When you go into Google Analytics, there’s an area where you can see the top pages, and the top pages essentially means that these are the highest traffic pages on your blog.

What you can do is you can go in and you can see the, let’s say, top 10 or top 20. You can pick how many you see. You can see the top pages on your blog, and you can start to do a little bit of research around those pages. You can see not only what the recipe was, but you can also start to look at where’s that traffic coming from. Then you can dig in a little bit deeper and you can see that, well, there’s actually 25% of the traffic coming from this one specific Pinterest account. I’ll actually talk you through an example here to make this a little bit more concrete. It’s going to be a little bit hard because I’m talking about Google Analytics, but I think it would be helpful.

I’m in Google Analytics. I’m clicking on the Acquisition tab. Again, this stuff changes relatively quickly, so it might be in a different place, but the general idea will be the same with Google Analytics. Acquisition, and then I’m going to click on All Traffic and then Referrals. Then this brings me to a page where it shows me the top referrals for the given time period that I’m looking at. What you can do is you can look at this area in Google Analytics that it’ll say Primary Dimension, and it’s kind of in the middle of the page. Then it will say Source, Landing Page, and Other.

What you can do is you can click Secondary Dimension and then click Behavior and then scroll down and then Find Page. When you do that, what will happen is it will show you the top source and then the top page that’s connected to that. In this case, I’m looking and I see that number 1 it’s Pinterest and it’s showing me on Pinch of Yum it’s 12 Easy Recipes You Can Make in a Slow Cooker. Then another Pinterest one, and then there’s one from BuzzFeed. The page is a recipe for Garlic Basil Chicken with Tomato Butter Sauce.

I’m going to click on that, and when I get into this, it’s showing me the very specific URLs that are directing traffic to this page. The top one is by a contributor to BuzzFeed that says Delicious Dinners for You. I can actually click on that and visit that page. I can see exactly who that author is, and in this case, it’s an author on the BuzzFeed staff and it’s 7 Delicious Dinner Recipes, exactly like it’s described.

What I can do is I could go in and do a similar recipe to this one, or maybe if this is a couple of years later, I could do a recipe that’s a little bit more improved than this one or maybe has a different ingredient that’s a little bit different. Then I could follow up with this author or this contributor or editor or staff member and say, “Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I just recently submitted this or published this new post and I saw that you’ve done similar roundups before and I thought this one would be something that would be helpful for you to include in your next roundup.”

That’s a way that you can use this tip, this idea of researching and recreating to help drive traffic to your blog. I hope that that makes sense as I talk through it. If you want to find that in Google Analytics, you can go back and you can walk through that process. Then what I’ll do is I’ll actually include a screenshot of what that looks like in the notes for this exact podcast episode. If you go to foodbloggerpro.com/38, that’ll bring you to the show notes and then we’ll include that screenshot so you can see exactly what that looks like. That’s tip number 3, research and recreate.

Tip number 4, create linkable pages. If you listen to episode number 33, I talked a little bit about the Pinch of Yum redesign and actually used an analogy about the matrix, talking about why links are so important and how links work on the Internet. This kind of ties into that a little bit. It’s this idea of creating linkable pages and why links are so important for building your blog. Really, that’s what the Internet is. It’s a bunch of links pointing to different areas, and we talk about that in episode number 33.

The idea with creating linkable pages is that you’re thinking about content that you could create that other bloggers or other website owners would link to, and this might not be recipes. The most obvious example for us, for Pinch of Yum, is the monthly reports that we do. If you’re not familiar on Pinch of Yum, the blog that is 98% Lindsay and then 2% me coming on each month and doing these reports, the idea with the income reports is that they’re linkable pages. They’re very shareable in that maybe there’s an idea that we share or just it’s kind of interesting to see the behind-the-scenes for a blog. We get a lot of people that link to those, but we don’t get a lot of traffic to those.

As a matter of fact, I looked up total traffic for 2015, and total traffic to those income reports, all of the income reports that we have available on Pinch of Yum, total was … drum roll, please … .71%, so .71% of all of the traffic that we received in 2015 was to these income reports. What we did get that was a little bit more than that in terms of the comparison was links. I didn’t crunch the numbers on it, but my guess would be that if we get 1% to those income reports, maybe we would get 10% of the links back to those income reports. What that does is it helps build credibility for the blog because Google sees a bunch of links pointing into the blog, and the more links that you have to your blog from credible sources, the more valuable it is in the eyes of Google and the more trustworthy it is, so it’ll show that a little bit higher.

What does that look like for you if you’re not going to do income reports or blogger tips or anything like that? Another example of a linkable page is the post that Lindsay occasionally does about blogging. She recently did a post where she talked about this idea of feeling jealous on the Internet and this idea of we all have ways that we feel jealous about other people’s success. Maybe you look on Facebook and you see a friend who’s done something really cool and has taken a really cool trip and then you feel jealous about it or maybe you see somebody being really successful and they started later than you did and they’re advancing further on. There’s all these different ways that we can feel jealous on the Internet, and it’s a very real thing. We deal with it. I’m guessing that in some ways, you might deal with it. It’s a universal struggle.

How do you overcome online jealousy? Lindsay wrote a post about this and zero intent to do it as a linkable post. What happens is this is a post that’s different than a recipe in that it’s a little bit more shareable. It’s kind of hard to describe the difference between it, but you can understand how it’s different than the post below, which is a spicy shrimp with cauliflower mash and garlic kale recipe. It’s a different type of link. People might share it in a recommended reading list or they might share it in an e-mail newsletter that they have that helps spread that a little bit. Maybe it’s a resources page on their blog where they just permanently have that there as a link for tips for overcoming jealousy or tips for blogging or something like that.

These types of posts are really valuable because of the links that they create. The tip is for you to think about different types of posts that you can do that aren’t just recipe posts. Let’s say if you’re a fashion blogger and for some reason you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, posts that you could do that aren’t just different fashions that you have this week or different clothes that you wore. I don’t know how to speak about fashion because I’m not a fashionable guy. The idea is that you’re creating content that is linkable in a different way than the normal content that you have.

What that will do is that will help you build up what they call a link profile. The more links that you have pointing to your blog from valuable sources and from incredible blogs and websites, the higher trust value that Google will give your site, which means that overall, Google is going to be more willing to show your content higher in search results. Even though the income reports for Pinch of Yum get a tiny amount of traffic, .71%, they don’t get a lot of traffic, even though they get a tiny amount of traffic, they help to build the link profile, as do some of those other posts that Lindsay writes about blogging in general, like Tips for Blogging When You’re Traveling or Overcoming Online Jealousy. Our intent with those isn’t purely just to build up a link profile, but that’s something that’s helped build links to Pinch of Yum.

What can you do on your blog that’s maybe a little bit different than the normal content that you create that would be something that people would really be willing to link to in a way that they don’t with the normal content that you have? That will help build your traffic, your search engine traffic, in a way that the normal content wouldn’t. That’s tip number 4, creating linkable pages or posts on your blog.

Number 5, build a content multiplier strategy. Ooh, that sounds pretty fancy, huh? The idea with this, and this is something that Lindsay is really intentional about doing, is working once to get multiple pieces of traffic-driving content. An example would be, let’s say you’re doing a post and the content that you’re creating is around a recipe and it’s for creamy cauliflower sauce. Usually what would happen is you’d go in and you’d go and you’d create that content, you’d post to your blog, and then you maybe share that link on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest, all the different social media sites.

What you’re doing with this strategy, the content multiplier strategy, is you’re not looking at the post just as a singular post on its own that you then share out. You look at it as a base for the content that you can then change and implement in different ways on different social media accounts. It’s more than just sharing the link. It’s using the content and re-crafting it in a way that fits the different social media areas. An example would be for that creamy cauliflower sauce post, let’s say you took all of these different photos that you then have on your blog and you post those throughout, maybe different shots, in process shots and things like that.

With this strategy what you’re doing is you also take those photos and you create, let’s say, a really long Pin that then you post to Pinterest. Those have been some of the most successful Pins that we’ve had, this idea of long Pins. You have text over them and you have the different images. Maybe you also then create 2 or 3 other different images. Some of those have text over them. Maybe others are just the photos themselves. Then you can create maybe kind of a little collage. Stephanie talked about this in the podcast on growing your Facebook following, episode 35. That was Stephanie from Spaceships and Laser Beams. She talks about these Facebook collages that they create and how those are successful on Facebook.

What you’re doing is you’re taking that base content and you’re multiplying it in different ways that apply best to the social media accounts that you use. Gary Vanicek talks about this as speaking the native language for the social media account that you’re using. Pinterest, the native language on Pinterest is very different than the native language on Facebook. The basic idea, the high-level idea, is that you’re multiplying your content by using the base content for the blog post and then creating it in native content form for the different social media profiles that you use.

With both Food Blogger Pro and Pinch of Yum, we’re starting to get better about doing this, but we’re starting to create these as processes. This really helps to alleviate some of the stress that comes along with content creation by just following a certain process for every blog post that you do or for every time that you share to social media. We’re using software called Process Street, and it’s actually process.st. That will redirect you to a software tool that we use called Process Street, and it’s a great way to document the steps that you take after publishing a post and how you then go out and share that to social media.

If you’re just getting started, it’s helpful to do that even if you don’t technically need it, because at some point you might bring on somebody that would help with that, and if you have that well-documented, they can pick that up and they can run with it right away. That’s called Process Street. It’s something that we’re starting to use a little bit more with Food Blogger Pro and Pinch of Yum. It’s a great way to help you build out your content multiplier strategy so you’re not just using content for your blog but also for the different social media profiles and using it in a way where you’re speaking the native language of the social media account that you’re using. That’s tip number 5, building a content multiplier strategy.

Number 6, become an expert and then connect with experts. One of the things that you probably quickly found out is that you can’t be an expert at everything, right? There’s 30,000 different things that you have to know and you have to do when you’re building a blog, and there’s 30 different social media profiles or social media accounts that you could start and really start to understand, but you can’t become an expert at them all.

What we’ve noticed is that people that are successful with building a blog or a website, they usually latch onto one type of social media and they become an expert at that. They really start to understand that and they really become an authority on using that type of social media, but they don’t stop there. They know that you have to have a complete understanding of the different social media accounts, but they don’t necessarily try to become an expert on them. They connect with other experts that help to teach them.

An example would be for Pinch of Yum, we’re starting to understand Pinterest a little bit more in terms of creating content that does really well on Pinterest, but we’re not experts on Facebook, so Lindsay’s connected with some people that really understand Facebook and get that. What they do is they cross-pollinate their information and they share what they know with each other because some people want to know about Pinterest and they don’t necessarily want to become an expert on it. For us, it’s like we don’t necessarily know Facebook really well and we’re not an expert on that. We become an expert on a certain area and then we share that content and expertise with other people in exchange for their content and expertise.

What does that look like in terms of making that happen? I think it usually happens pretty organically. You can connect with somebody that you notice doing really good work, and you can say, “Hey, I feel like I understand Pinterest pretty well and I would love to start to understand Facebook a little bit more but don’t necessarily have the time to figure out what works on my own. Would you be up for doing a 30-minute Skype call where we can kind of share some ideas and share what’s working well for us?”

That’s been an effective strategy for us as we grow Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro, and it’s my belief that, again, you can’t be an expert on everything, so you have to pick one thing that you can be an expert at, get really good at that, but bring other people that have that expertise into your circle so they can teach you their expertise and knowledge as well. That’s tip number 6, become an expert and then connect with other experts as well.

Number 7, this is actually more of a concept than a strategy that you can apply, but I think it’s really, really important, which is why I saved it for number 7 and want to spend some time talking about it. Tip number 7 is to be a songwriter. I don’t mean this literally, unless you enjoy songwriting, then go for it. The idea with this is as a content creator, as a content producer, the reality is that you need to be like a songwriter and you need to write songs all the time. Now the comparable for somebody that has a blog is that you’re writing blog posts all the time, and not in a way that you’re just pushing out content as much as possible just to get it out the door.

You want to be intentional about your craft. Like we said at the beginning of this podcast, you need to really focus on high-quality content in order for it to be successful, but you also need to do a lot of that high-quality content until you get to the point where you have your first one-hit wonder. I think that one thing that many people forget about is for most artists or for most songwriters, they’ve probably written hundreds of songs before they get to the point where they have that one-hit wonder.

The same is true for people that create a blog or for people that start a website. Chances are that you’ve written hundreds of posts before you have that first post that does really well. I haven’t crunched the numbers on this, but I like to think of it as the 80/20 rule. When it comes down to it, probably 20% or 30% of the posts that we write result in 70% to 80% of the traffic that we get. The same is true with songwriters, so 20% to 30% of the songs that they write result in 70% to 80% of their success.

Oftentimes, people forget about this when they’re first starting the blog and they want their first 10 posts to have a ton of interaction or they want their first 100 blog posts to result in them being able to transition into having their blog be a full-time job. Just like songwriting, it takes a lot of blog posts, it takes a lot of content before you’ll get that first one-hit wonder, that first blog post that starts to get a lot of traction, that gets a lot of interaction.

Then the thing is you got to keep doing it. A band or a songwriter that stops after their first hit, they’re going to go on and they’re forever going to be known as a one-hit wonder. Then there are these artists that have a hit and then they keep writing songs each and every day and then they have another hit. Then they start to build their career as a songwriter or as a band and they move past that one-hit wonder stage.

The reason that I share this is because I think it’s such an important concept for people to understand, especially people that are just getting started out because oftentimes we want success before we’ve paid our dues, before we really put in the hard work to build up that catalog of songs, or in our industry, it’s that catalog of posts or content that enable us to start to have those hits. After you’ve done that for a long period of time, you’ll really build up the catalog of hits.

It’s kind of like going to a U2 concert where at this point, after 20-30 years of writing and recording and putting in the hard work, they’re able to play an entire show and all of the things that they play are hits. It seems like, “Oh, these guys are the best. All they do is write hits.” In actuality, they’ve written hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of songs and only a select number of those are the hits. It’s very similar in this industry with content, with blog posts, with a website that you built based around content.

You have to put in the hard work and you have to produce all of that content over a long period of time and eventually you’ll start to have those hits and you’ll start to build up your career as a songwriter or in our industry as a content producer. That’s tip number 7 for increasing traffic. It’s really to put in the hard work and the time to be a songwriter, to do your craft each and every day, to build up that catalog. As you do that, you’ll start to create those hits.

Let’s go ahead and do a quick review, high-level review of what each of these tips is and then we’ll wrap up this podcast episode. Number 1, connect with influencers and offer your content, this idea of seeking out editors or staff members from different sites like BuzzFeed or Huffington Post, Yahoo, MSN, or content creators on social media sites like Instagram and Facebook and just giving them an open invite to find content on your site that might be a good fit and share that with their followers.

Number 2, kind of similar but a little bit different. Submit your content to BuzzFeed, creating these roundup posts as a community member of BuzzFeed and including your own recipes or your own content within those roundups. Number 3, research and recreate. The idea with this is you’re finding past popular content using Google Analytics and then you spin-off or recreate that content or give it a little upgrade by changing it a little bit and then trying to recreate the reason for the success for that post. Maybe it’s reaching out to people that shared it or maybe it’s creating a similar structure for an image that you shared on Pinterest that did really well. You’re not doing the exact same post, but you’re researching what worked well and then recreating it and maybe giving it a little bit of upgrade or spin-off of the original.

Number 4, create linkable pages. This is the idea that it’s maybe not something that’s exactly in your niche, but it’s something that’s very shareable. It’s something that bloggers or other website owners might post to their blog or website and share it in a way that people wouldn’t normally share the type of content that you do, and for us that would be recipes or food-related content. It’s creating these linkable pages that are maybe a little bit different than the norm of content that you create.

Number 5, build a content multiplier strategy. This is the idea that a blog post isn’t just a blog post. It’s content that can be reproduced in different ways. You’re just using the content that you have, adjusting it a little bit, and then sharing it to those different social media accounts. Number 6, become an expert and then connect with experts. Really dive into one certain social media area that you really like, but don’t stop there. Find other people that are experts and connect with them and share your insights and knowledge.

Last, number 7, be a songwriter or at least have the concept or have the mindset of a songwriter. Know that it takes a lot of songs before you have that hit and know that it takes a lot of posts before you have that one-hit wonder. What this does is this enables you to not feel the burden of having everything be super successful. You know that some songs that you write are going to be hits and other songs that you’re going to write are going to be paying your dues in order to get to that point where you do have that one-hit wonder.

Hope those tips were helpful. We hear that all the time in terms of questions that we get from other people that are just starting out or that have been doing this for a while, “How do I increase traffic?” Some of those are very actionable items that you can move on today. Others are concepts or mindsets that you can take on and think about as you continue on in this journey.

That’s a wrap for episode number 38. I hope that you guys found some helpful information from this. I know that I really appreciate everybody that tunes in to this. It’s so fun to hear from people whether email or on the Food Blogger Pro forums or in a Tweet, those people respond to this and interact with this. Can’t wait until next week. Appreciate you guys, and we will talk again soon.