How to Increase Educational Blog Traffic

To be able to increase your educational blog traffic demands that you offer valuable educational content, publish blog articles consistently, optimize your educational website for Search Engines, build internal links, aggressively promote your blog both online and offline and provide hands-on solutions to your visitors’ problems.

Generally speaking, all these boil down to two key things. Yes, do the technical stuff that will increase the number of visitors to your educational blog. But, more importantly, make sure you are doing the things that will keep your audience perpetually satisfied. That is basically how you keep a sizeable proportion of them coming back.

But the above are just a handful of ways to increase educational blog traffic. In fact, the most effective ways to attract more visitors to your school website are varied but very simple.

Are you looking for cost-effective ways to increase your educational blog traffic? Maybe you have a teacher blog whose traffic volume you want to increase without having to pay for expensive ads. There is a good number of students and professionals with one awesome learnable skill or another who would love to start their own educational blog to share their knowledge with the rest of the world. Then the fear of not getting enough visitors keeps them undecided.

That is to be understood because the competition in the blogosphere is getting stiffer and stiffer by the day. Indeed, most popular keywords have already been written about. And the much older educational blogs out there appear to leave no room for newbie bloggers like us to rise to the first pages of search engines like Google.

There is still hope

Well, I’ve got good news for you. Despite the stiff competition, it is still possible to break through the crowd and rise to even as high as the number one position on Google.

In this post, I’m going to share with you my experience regarding how one can increase educational blog traffic. Personally, I own an educational blog that attracts a minimum of 250k monthly pageviews according to Google Analytics.

Much as this traffic volume is modest going by industry standards, I know that there is a large number of teacher bloggers who are struggling to get just 10k pageviews per month.

Bear in mind that getting 10k monthly pageviews today is not an easy task. And when you are there, it is possible to monetize this traffic and make an amazing income out of your blog.

So let’s find out the simplest ways to increase educational blog traffic.

1. Publish Valuable Content

The best way to attract more visitors to an educational blog and also get repeat visitors is to give them what they want. Forget about what you think they need.

This is simply because every serious blogger is aware that they are in the business of satisfying their potential customers’ demands. Here are a few tips to make your blog articles give value to your fans.

Do simple keyword research via Google Suggest. Typing in the search bar a topic will quickly reveal to you the most frequent questions people are asking.

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Write mostly long-form in-depth articles.

Make your tutorials highly informative. This calls for some serious research on your part so that you will sound authoritative enough.

Write in simple language that is easy to understand. And mind your expression and grammar.

Do not be afraid to show your readers the way to other websites for further reading. And where possible, cite your sources.

2. Blog Often

It is good to have a content publishing calendar if you cannot discipline yourself enough to keep writing and publishing content regularly. Consistent publishing has at least two benefits that will, in turn, have a positive impact on your educational blog traffic.

First, the more frequently you publish content, the easier it gets to win the trust and loyalty of your website visitors.

The second advantage of consistent blogging is that it helps those search engine bots to remain active on your site, so to speak. And that is how they will reward you with greater search visibility.

3. Diversify Your Blog Content

I will not deceive you. It is not easy creating blog posts. So adding other content formats like audio and video is one hell of a work. But you and I consciously chose to do this, right?

Thankfully, it is a passion that keeps every successful blogger in the game. So you just need to find a way to eventually diversify your content format. Besides writing blog articles in text, try adding some YouTube videos or audio lessons and podcasts.

You need not do this on the very day you start your blogging venture. It can always come later. Feel free to leave this for the time when you’ve gathered enough experience and are comfortable doing additional work.

When you are able to add other content types, those who prefer to consume content with their eyes or ears will come running to your site. This will certainly help you to increase your educational blog traffic.

4. Sound Like a Real Teacher

Because that is what you have decided to be. Always bear in mind that most of your readers are students. There are also curious adult learners who would wish to learn more about a topic you teach on your blog. Again, be sure to have teachers coming to your educational blog in search of additional teaching resources.

You need to find the right voice to help all learners get the points you put across in each tutorial. A few tips will do here.

• Sound interactive. Use expressions like, ‘Let’s’, ‘You and I/me’, ‘we’ etc.
• Illustrate the concepts you teach with helpful examples and details.
• Carry a friendly tone and remain humble. For all you care to know, some of your visitors may have more knowledge about the topic than you will ever imagine. So help them to understand that you are only guiding them to their respective destinations.

5. Add Fun Content to Your Website

Most students come online looking for information they might have already been given by their teachers. So the question is why? Well, there are many possible factors responsible for this. But there is one that stands out. That brick-and-mortar classroom lesson was boring and the presentation difficult to follow.

You are the next tutor students look up to for a solution to their study difficulties. To put it in a different way, most students come online in search of a second opinion.

You, the online tutor, can only help them achieve this goal by making sure that your online classroom (I mean your educational blog) does not become another boring and confusing place. If not you will begin to lose them.

So how do you add fun content to your teacher website in order to increase educational blog traffic? It’s quite simple. Consider these ideas.

• Add short fun quizzes. With the right plugin, you can add quizzes and tests to your blog.
• Organize fun contests
• Create giveaways. I’m yet to use the RafflePress plugin but I’ve been doing some serious research on it. I gather RafflePress is one of the best giveaway WordPress plugins out there.
• Use simple but stunning graphics and images that are fun to see. Use them to portray some aspect of the concept you are teaching. Do not forget infographics. They help students to digest complex facts faster.

6. Engage With Your Existing Audience

The truth is everybody loves to feel important. And when you make your existing fans feel that they too have something to offer, they will recommend your blog to others. This is what referrals are all about. And they are a powerful means to increase educational blog traffic.

Here are some practical steps to take to engage with educational website visitors.

• Reply to their comments.
• Ask them personal questions.
• Send special emails to your most valued customers.
• Respond to their queries and feedback.
• Show all visitors how easily they can contact you. This is why you need a contact form on your school blog.

7. Offer the Majority of Your Study Guides for Free

There is no denying the fact that every serious blogger needs to pay the bills. So you can’t go on and on giving all your labour for absolutely nothing. No one does a serious business like that, do they? So yes, even educational bloggers need to monetize for some revenue.

However, to increase educational blog traffic and maintain a loyal fan base, it is necessary to offer many of your learning resources for free. We all do love freebies. So give them out generously. Offer free downloadable files like PDFs and audio lessons.

Your readers will love you for it. I know an ultra-successful blogger from Singapore who gives 60 per cent of her content for free. The remaining 40 per cent is what brings her the money. You can emulate that.

8. Adequately Serve the Major Segments of Your Traffic

Increase educational blog traffic by simply identifying new audiences inside your niche. Students may constitute your main audience but they are definitely not the only source of educational blog traffic.

Here is a simple truth. The more interested people you satisfy, the higher your educational blog traffic.

Quite often, it is tempting to listen too attentively to ‘blogging experts’ who tell you to niche down and then further down. Multiple times. Well, while niching down is great, you don’t want to carry this advice too far.

I urge you to identify as many segments of your potential audience as possible. Then get down to work on serving each one of them sufficiently with awesome targeted content.

Do not forget other stakeholders in the educational sector like online learners, teachers, parents, educational authorities, booksellers and educational software developers.

Depending on your overarching blog topic, you may be able to create categories based on the above audience segments. The next thing is to create valuable content that addresses the needs of each of these.

Now let’s look at the technical stuff. When you combine the above tips with what I’m going to show you next, you are more likely to see better results with your efforts to increase educational blog traffic.

9. Build Internal Links

Link building is a well-known SEO strategy in the blogging industry. Internal link building has proven to be one of the most effective ways to increase blog traffic.

The simple reason is this. Search engine bots love internal links. It gets easier to appear on top of search engine result pages (SERPs) when these bots are happily racing through these links on your site.

That one is my layman’s way of saying it.

You can either manually build internal links on your WordPress website or use a dedicated plugin.

Recently, I came across a WordPress plugin called Internal Link Juicer. This internal link-building plugin automatically creates internal links inside any blog content. All you need to do is feed it with the keywords you wish to use as anchor text on your site.

10. Optimise More for SEO

Search engine optimization is an indispensable way to increase educational blog traffic. In fact, organic traffic is arguably the most sustainable traffic for any website. And it is relatively cheap to get.

You don’t need to pay a dime for the additional traffic you attract to your teacher blog with the following smart SEO strategies.

• Do simple keyword research with Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends
• Use long-tail keywords
• Optimize your meta tags (blog post titles etc) for the search engines. You can find out how to write the best blog titles in another post on this site.
• Don’t just write. Keep your writing focused on the main problem for which you are giving a solution to your readers.
• Use appropriate graphics and images in blog posts.
• Build external links by joining your content to other authoritative websites with relevant content.
• Never forget that building internal links is also an SEO strategy.

11. Build that Email List

Here is the secret. When you manage to capture your visitors’ email addresses, it becomes possible to keep in constant contact with them.

This way, you will likely get repeat visits from some first-time visitors who would otherwise have been lost for good.

The free email marketing tools that other teacher bloggers have employed to capture leads include Mailchimp, Mailmunch and Active Campaign.

12. Use the Right Plugins and Browser Extensions

Check out these FREE plugins. They have specific functionalities that aid your effort to increase traffic on your educational blog.

• Yoast SEO – Free popular Search Engine Optimization WordPress Plugin loved by millions of website owners.
• Quiz Maker – Create fun quizzes and get your students to interact with your content. Time spent on the page increases and your bounce rate gets better.
• Popup Maker – Build beautiful high-conversion call-to-action forms.
• Mailmunch – Effective email list builder
• WP Table of Contents – SEO-optimized
• Keyword Surfer – A much-loved Google Chrome Extension for carrying out simple but effective keyword research.

13. Choose an SEO-Optimized WordPress Theme

Personally, I use AstraPro on my educational website. The Astra theme is one of the fastest WordPress themes on the market. You can start using Astra for free even today.

Other equally reliable themes in the WordPress repository that you can install and activate on your teaching blog are OceanWP, Zakra, GeneratePress and Neve. Just remember that you need to be careful when choosing a theme for your site. Because all themes are not created equal.

14. Get Active on Social Media

Facebook Groups provide one great opportunity to discover potential visitors to your educational blog. Actively search for Facebook Groups that focus on people in education and learning.

Groups for teachers, students, textbook writers and sellers are a goldmine for attracting more traffic to an educational blog.

Beyond Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit and Quora have given many educational blogs fantastic traffic volumes.

You can leverage Quora, for example, to give exposure to your website by providing brief answers to the thousands of questions people are asking on that platform.

15. Promote Your Educational Blog Offline

Trust me, it is possible to increase educational blog traffic by publicizing your online activities offline. Try the following and when you start seeing the amazing results let me know.

• Create and distribute posters and leaflets. Schools are best for this promotional method. You may as well visit markets, bus stops and other places where people regularly gather.
• Use business cards. Give them to friends, customers and business associates.
• If possible, a couple of large signboards positioned strategically in your community will catch the attention of a sizeable number of people who might want to visit your website out of curiosity. And that could be the beginning of greater things to come.
• Visit other social gatherings like churches, mosques, festivals, and sporting events. Spread the information about your teacher’s blog as cleverly as possible. Do not be too pushy or overly promotional about it. The few leads you can get are enough. They will do the word of mouth for you days or even months after.

16. Avoid Wasting Time on Design

Finally, spend your precious time wisely. Focus on the tasks that truly bring more traffic to your educational blog. These are the most productive tasks. Please do not waste too much of your time on the design of your website’s appearance. You can afford to let that wait.

No doubt, it is a great feeling to look at your education blog and behold it in its beauty and splendour. That being said, a beautiful design, though it may appeal to some visitors, contributes very little to sustainable blog traffic. And it becomes a liability if all you do is sweat over how beautiful you want your site to look.

From my personal experience, I can tell you that there is more to gain from producing content consistently than making the aesthetics of your website a top priority.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking you to be happy with an ugly-looking educational website. Even your students will not like its look. The watchword is to know where to focus the more significant part of your time and attention.

Because remember, at the end of the day, the desired income and success will only come when there is a consistent increase in your educational blog’s traffic.

Conclusion

Now we both have a fair idea about how to increase educational blog traffic. Make sure to practice these education website traffic strategies on your blog. And do not hesitate to ask for assistance at any time.

I am a full-time educational blogger and it will be my pleasure to help in any way I can.

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