Nonprofit Blogs: How to Increase Your Traffic

In the busy and often resource-constrained world of nonprofits, keeping your blog content fresh may seem like the last thing that needs to be on your list. But the fact is, blogging is a great way to engage your audience, allowing you to showcase your organization’s accomplishments while building a trusting relationship with your community, gaining free publicity, and driving traffic to your website.

That last point — more traffic to your website — is key for an organization’s growth. Traffic means more exposure, which can lead to interest and engagement and help you increase support for your organization. Here, we’ll share a few tried and true ways to increase traffic to nonprofit blogs:

Increase your content output. Search engines tend to prioritize websites with fresh content, so keeping your blog updated is a great way to rank higher in searches, which translates to more traffic. Keep your content relevant, interesting, and useful. And remember, more words means more opportunities for SEO, so don’t worry about keeping your blog posts short and sweet!

Leverage keywords. While more content is great for SEO, more content that incorporates target keywords is even better. Think about what keywords your audience is likely to search for, and do a bit of research into how difficult it is to rank for those keywords. Tools like Spyfu are helpful for this type of research. Select keywords you think you could potentially rank for, and start incorporating them in your blog posts by making sure they appear in the title, URL, meta description, and body of the blog post.

Share, share, share. Develop a top-line blog distribution strategy for each blog post that you write. This can be as simple as deciding what social media platforms you’ll share each post on, or who you’ll tag to encourage social sharing. And don’t just share once! We recommend sharing each blog post 5 times or more to ensure maximum exposure. And don’t be afraid to re-share evergreen content, either.

Encourage others to share as well. Speaking of social sharing, adding social share buttons to your blog is a great way to encourage readers who are enjoying your content to share the link to their followers. This can be a great way to get new eyes viewing your content.

Add photos or video. Adding photos or video is a great way to make your interesting, relevant, and useful content even more compelling. People tend to prefer visual content; in fact, a study from the University of Minnesota School of Management and the 3M Corporation found that presentations that contain visual elements were 43% more persuasive than those that did not — the same holds true for blog posts. Make sure you optimize your images and videos so that they don’t load too slowly and leverage those assets for social media sharing as well.

Promote to your mailing list. Do you have a distribution list of those who have opted into your email marketing? Use this list to share your newest blog posts as well. This could be as simple as including your blog posts in your latest e-newsletters. It’s an easy way to keep interested community members engaged, and continue to have them visiting your site.

Consider paid promotion. Yes, paid ads on social media can be expensive — but they don’t have to be. Boosting a Facebook post, for example, is a relatively inexpensive way to get more eyes on your posts, and drive traffic to your blog.

Make sure visitors can subscribe to your blog. It’s easy to click a link once, read a blog, and never visit again. Stop this cycle by offering subscribe functionality, which allows visitors to sign up to receive an email every time you publish a new blog post.

Click here for more from advice on writing and promoting nonprofit blogs, as well as an interview with Vanessa Chase Lockshin, President of The Storytelling Nonprofit.

And, once you are successfully driving traffic to your blog, consider adding additional features to your website. Our Connect Network of more than 250 nonprofit and patient advocacy partners share dynamic content with their communities every day through Match, our clinical trial search tool. We also help our partners with clinical trial educational materials for their communities. Contact us to learn more.