How To Increase Blog Traffic Using Social Media

Use Social Media To Increase Blog Traffic

Blog traffic is important if you want to earn money online. Therefore, before you start monetizing your blog, you must increase your blog traffic.

There are three main ways to drive traffic to a blog:

Social media marketing
Search Engine Optimization (Google, Bing, Yahoo)
Paid Traffic

You don’t have to choose only one way, you can use all three to drive traffic to your blog. Over the years I tried so many techniques to increase my blog traffic and get to new audiences, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, SEO, working with influencers, whatever you name it! And today I know exactly what works and what is a total waste of time.

My Strategy to Drive Traffic For New Bloggers

First, I recommend starting with Pinterest, especially if you are a new blogger. Pinterest is perfect for bloggers who want to drive free traffic fast. By using Pinterest, I managed to increase my blog traffic from 0 to almost 200,000 page views per month in less than a year. Only five months after I started this blog, I accepted to Mediavine and started earning big money. Once your blog gets steady monthly traffic, you can monetize your blog and start making money.

If you are interested to learn how to drive free traffic fast using Pinterest, here is my Pinterest guide for driving more than 100K visitors each month.

After you get at least 50K monthly sessions per month, you can apply to Mediavine and start earning money. Mediavine is one of the leading ad management platforms that work with many bloggers and content creators around the world. Once you get accepted to their program, you can earn $7 to $30 on average per every thousand sessions (RPM rate). For example, if you get 100K sessions per month, and your RPM is $20, you’ll earn $2000 just for displaying ads on your website. I talk about this in detail on the How to Make Money Blogging page.

Here is a screenshot of my first 3 month earnings from Mediavine:

Mediavine earnings first 3 month blogging — Mediavine Earnings First 3 Months Blogging

The next step I would recommend is to optimize your site for Google and other search engines. In fact, SEO is another great way to get free blog traffic.

Why not start with SEO for Google first?

From my experience, driving traffic with Pinterest is much faster than driving traffic with Google. That being said, SEO for Google is more important for long-term strategy.

Why?

Because Google’s traffic is more trusted than Pinterest traffic or other social media traffic sources.

I want to share with you something very difficult that I had to deal with last year.

My Pinterest Traffic Drop In 2021

In 2020 Pinterest started changing its algorithm by adding new features and prioritizing different types of pins.

When I had this sudden traffic drop from Pinterest I thought I’m gonna die!!!!!!!!!!

One day, instead of getting 3000 visitors per day from Pinterest, my traffic dropped to almost ZERO!!!

Here is a screenshot:

Pinterest-Traffic-Drop — My Pinterest Traffic Drop – Google Analytics

This was insanely shocking for me because 90% of my traffic was coming from Pinterest.

My monthly income completely vanished ! ! !

No ad earnings and also no affiliate earnings (zero traffic!).

I tried to contact Pinterest a few times but I was getting the same message that didn’t include the exact reason behind the sudden traffic drop, instead, they continued to send me marketing tips that I was already following for years.

I read every article I could find online and I saw more and more bloggers who complained about sudden traffic drops from Pinterest.

A month after, when I was really frustrated and even thought about leaving blogging, my Pinterest traffic suddenly went up as nothing happened. I trust me, I didn’t even do anything, stopped publishing new pins or repping old ones.

The ad revenue was back, affiliate revenue was back, and I was back in business.

This day I knew that something must be changed.

I canceled my Tailwind subscription and focused on Google SEO.

Before this traffic drop, all my eggs were in one basket – Pinterest.

This was the moment I stopped being lazy and started Google SEO. Pinterest traffic was too good to be true but it was so comfortable and easy to drive traffic using Pinterest that I postponed SEO. I did this because I knew that it takes more time and effort to get organic traffic from Google.

But I had no choice. I knew that I can’t trust Pinterest anymore.

And you shouldn’t trust it too as the only free traffic source.

Pinterest is perfect for driving tons of traffic in a short time, but as a long-term strategy, you should focus on Google SEO. Anyway, you must promote your blog in a few channels, you never know who will change its algorithm.

Make sure not to miss the SEO best practices page that I share later in this guide.

When Should You Pay to Get Traffic?

Buying traffic for your website can be an awesome way to increase income. It’s also known as traffic arbitrage when you earn your money mainly through ads.

If you pay $30 for every 1000 sessions and your RMP is higher than $30, you earn money.

But this technique is not easy. You need to find the most profitable articles on your website and be able to run low CPC campaigns.

Another option is to promote affiliated articles, your services, or products you sell on your website.

You can advertise your blog/products on social media, Google ads, or other programmatic platforms like Taboola or Outbrain. But this is for another article.

Now let’s go quickly through all the best social media platforms that you can use to drive traffic to your blog!

Best Social Media to Drive Traffic Fast

If this is your first time using Pinterest to drive traffic, here are a few interesting facts about Pinterest. Pinterest is a giant visual search engine that has more than 100 million active users around the world.

The biggest benefit of using Pinterest to promote your blog is the massive free traffic that you can generate from it in a short time by using a wise Pinterest pinning strategy.
You should know that there are many experienced bloggers that successfully manage to drive more than 70% of their blog traffic from Pinterest every month – which is amazing!

Before I have found out about Pinterest’s great ability to drive traffic, I promoted an older website that I had on Google and Facebook. But it was nothing like Pinterest’s ability to drive tons of free traffic fast. Starting this blog and promoting it on Pinterest, increased my monthly income significantly!

In less than 5 months I managed to reach more than 64k monthly page views with my new blog!

By the end of the year, I reached almost 200,000 page views! I-n-s-a-n-e!

After two months of exploring Pinterest, I built a Pinning strategy that works. Check out my “Pinterest Guide to learn how to increase blog traffic with Pinterest.

As I mentioned earlier, driving traffic through Pinterest is much easier and faster.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the most popular social platforms in the world, where you can start a free business page. It offers paid promotion options through which you can reach new relevant audiences.

Besides paid promotions, sharing your blog posts in relevant Facebook groups is very common, useful, and a free way to promote your blog online. Look for Facebook tutorials on Youtube to help you learn more about Facebook marketing.

You should know that there are bloggers who use Facebook to drive a lot of traffic every month. Blogs that do well on Facebook post about food and recipes, travel, fashion, home decor, gardening, online shopping, and parenting.

Tip – You can use Facebook Pixel in your blog to allow Facebook to track your readers. This way you will have the option to create remarketing campaigns in the future, which means promoting ads to people that visit your website.

Instagram

Instagram is a social network based on sharing photos and short videos. Instagram is not considered a good platform to drive free traffic to your blog (although they added an option to add clickable links to stories lately), but you definitely can use Instagram for branding and keeping in touch with your followers.

Generally, the target audience you can reach on Instagram is much younger than the Facebook audience, and you will find many celebrities running an Instagram feed with millions of followers.

If your blog niche is related to fashion, design, beauty or you have a lot of great visual content to share, you should create an Instagram profile. It will help you stay in touch with your followers and share your content in a visual way.

Make sure to check my stickers collection for Instagram stories available for download from my shop.

YouTube

YouTube is awesome! It’s is an American video-sharing website. And many of the greatest bloggers, celebrities, and singers have become famous thanks to YouTube. If you want to share your knowledge through videos, YouTube is a powerful tool that can help you reach new audiences.

Before starting a Youtube channel, it is very important to learn about the best YouTube marketing strategies and ways to create and edit videos. There are many ways to shoot and edit videos. You can even use your iPhone to take your first video fast and easily. I learn from YouTube tutorials how to use Adobe Premiere Pro video editor software to edit my videos. But you can also find many other apps to do it. You can find the best tips on how to start a YouTube channel on YouTube.

Bottom Line,

There are more social media platforms I haven’t mentioned here such as Twitter, Snappchat, Tiktok, and more. Some of them may work for you and some not. To keep it simple, start with Pinterest, Google SEO, and Facebook, and then add more platforms if you want. This way it will be easier for you to keep them active. I truly recommend starting with Pinterest since it can drive tons of free traffic to your site in a short time and Google for long-term strategy.

Now let’s move to the most interesting part of this guide on how to make money blogging.