If you have a blog that’s not yet popular enough to attract visitors as soon as you post a new article, then we’ll need to do some work to get the traffic you want.

Over the next few steps, I want you to start thinking about your blog as an SEO content machine.

Why? Because this perspective will help you get steady visitors from Search Engines, as well as Social Media networks.

If you think of your blog as a machine designed to draw visitors in, you’ll have a better chance of coming up with creative, compelling ideas.

That being said, here are 10 essential to-dos to put on your list if you’re serious about stepping up your content marketing game.

1. Ping Your Articles (whatever that means) to Search Engines

Simply put, this is a way of letting different search engines know that your blog has been updated.

A tool that has proven to be very useful is googleping.com, which sends (“pings”) your article to search engines for indexing and forces the search engine bots to check out the article.

Other such tools are:

• pingoat.net
• pingomatic.com

2. Submit Social Bookmarking and Social Media to Feed Your SEO Content Machine

Social bookmarking is a way to tag a web page with a web-based tool so you can easily access it later. Platforms like: Pocket, Delicious, Bitly and even Pinterest can be used for this.

Make sure to social bookmark your articles and also make sure you Share, Tweet, Pin all your content.

If you don’t have social media accounts yet, start building them and connect to people from your niche or people who you think would like to read your articles, because it makes sense for them to read your articles.

This will get your SEO content machine fired up!

3. Submit Your Feeds (RSS) to Relevant Sites

If you want to increase the chances of your articles spreading like wildfire, you need to submit your WordPress site’s feed to as many sites that collect information from feeds as possible. 

You can find your feed (for your WordPress site) at the following location: http://domainname.com/feed/.

So if your site’s name is coolcakes.com, your feed can be found at www.coolcakes.com/feed/.Try visiting your site and adding “/feed/” to the end of the URL to get started.

4. Share Your Opinions (and links) in the Comments Section of other Blogs

A longer-term solution could be to look for articles from other blogs written about the same topics. Make sure they have a comments section.Make some remarks regarding the content, state your opinion and insert a link to the article where readers can find your detailed opinion or more information they will find useful.

5. Start Conversations around Your Article to Generate Traffic

Start conversations about your article on question-and-answer sites where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by their community of users.

Here are some examples:

• quora.com
• inbound.org
• Stack Exchange

6. Cater to People Who Use Their Mobile Devices to Read Articles

Try to find apps that distribute information on mobile devices (think iOS, Android) because there you will find a lot more readers.

We, for example, use Flipboard to read other blogs from mobile devices, and we’ve also made a version of the Squirrly Blog available on Newsstand.google.com.

If you access this link from a mobile device, you can see it in action.

7. Ads, anyone?

If you can swing it, you can try promoting some of your articles or pages through AdWords from Google or social media ads.

At Squirrly, we use Boosted Posts on our Facebook page and it works really well. It’s something that we recommend if you already have a targeted following on Facebook.

8. Post as Often as You Can without Compromising Quality

If you manage to publish valuable articles often, you’ll build a loyal audience around your blog. In turn, the number of returning visitors will increase over time.

It’s not easy to put together an efficient content creation method that allows you to post fresh content constantly. But once you establish a clear editorial process, it won’t seem like such a hassle anymore.Plus, it’s an essential step that will get your SEO content machine running at full speed.

9. Monitor and Measure the Impact of Your Actions

Squirrly’s Performance Analytics feature is an important tool for monitoring your article’s ranking in Google.

What’s more, it gives you relevant information so that you can understand why your article ranked the way it did.

For instance, if you get more visits than unique visitors, it means your visitors read more pages, or they returned to the site, both being good things for your blog and the way search engines see your site.

It basically means visitors think your content is relevant. This will place you higher in search rankings.

Besides traffic, Squirrly also monitors the impact of your articles on social media, which shows if your readers have shared your articles. The more shares your articles get, the better your search engine ranking will be.

Another thing that you should consider monitoring is the number of Inbound Links, which shows how many other websites have linked to your article.

The number of links is not the only thing that is important. The authority of the sites that linked back to you is also relevant.

Squirrly monitors the authority of your site, and you’ll be able to see if the sites that linked to your article have authority in their industries or not. The Authority should at least be over 30.Note: Squirrly Article Rank offers the info about links and authority through MOZ.com. The updates for this section are not made in real time, but on a weekly basis, thus giving you time to build more links to your blog.

10. Check Out Fiverr if You Need Help

If you need a little help in some areas (be it for content creation, link building, design, and so on) you can try using fiverr.com.

You’ll find freelancers eager to help you for as little as $5.

Key Takeaways:

• After you publish each article, it’s important you make sure that it reaches your readers and even new readers. No matter how good a piece of content is, if nobody gets to see it, it’s useless.
• Distributing articles via social media is an excellent way of getting your article to more readers, faster. Make a consistent effort to leverage it as much as possible.
• Use Squirrly Performance Analytics to discover what are the weak points of your strategy and make informed decisions about further actions you can take to improve results.

 We hope you found some useful information in this article and that you’ll start applying these tips right away!