This post highlights the most vital ingredient for blogging success:
Promoting your new blog.
If you are one of those marketers who is just beginning online, or you’ve been at it for a while but are still struggling to get decent amounts of traffic consistently, then read on to find out how to promote your blog and get inspired ideas for building up your traffic as quickly as possible.
A lot of people overthink things when it comes to getting blog traffic, and they make it more complicated than it needs to be.
They read too much into all the different techniques and spend way too much of their time tweaking this and that trying to ensure that every aspect of their blog looks great.
While there’s nothing wrong with a great-looking blog design, or taking the time to do your SEO the right way, if you’re spending too much time on technical stuff and not enough on providing actual value for your visitors, then you’re wasting your time and you won’t see much in the way of traffic results from all that effort.
The key to getting extraordinary amounts of traffic is creating extraordinary content.
Assuming that you’re starting from scratch and that you have limited funds, let’s explore a kick-start strategy that all bloggers can use to get their blogs to 1,000 daily visitors quickly.
How To Get 1,000 Daily Visitors To Your Blog
There are 3 steps to this strategy:
1. Create Amazing Content For Your Blog
2. Optimize Your Blog for the Search Engines
3. Optimize Your Blog Marketing
1. Create Amazing Content For Your Blog
As a beginner, the main thing you should focus on when it comes to getting traffic is producing great content.
This is what attracts people to your website. With each piece of content that you create, you should have a couple of things in mind.
First, you should make it simple for the person viewing your content to understand it.
Second, make sure that the reader finds immense benefit in it.
With that in mind, how much content do you actually need to get your blog to 1,000 visitors every day?
Take a look at these figures:
- 100 articles each getting 10 visitors per day
- 20 articles each getting 50 visitors per day
- 10 articles each getting 100 visitors per day
Any of these could work, but if you’re like every other marketer out there, you obviously want to get the most number of visitors from the least number of articles.
But what makes the difference between a post that will bring in 10 visitors a day and one that will bring in 100, and more importantly, how do you go about crafting content that’s good?
Below is a simple step-by-step method to help you do just that.
Brainstorm and research relevant high traffic keywords
It doesn’t matter how great your content is if none of your ideal audience finds it.
And if they can’t find it, they can’t link to it on social media and other blogs, which helps you get higher rankings in Google and is a great way of boosting your traffic flow.
You need to target your content for what people are actually searching for on Google, and that’s where keyword research is needed.
Don’t let keyword research intimidate you. It’s just about finding the keywords that get the most searches on Google. There are countless user-friendly tools to do this, some of which are free and some of which are paid.
Luckily, most of the paid keyword research tools let you check out the features before you commit.
For example, when you sign up for an account with Ahrefs, you get a free trial. After you create your new account with them, just go to the Keywords Explorer tool and type the topic you intend to write about in the search box.
The key here is to find keywords that have lots of searches but aren’t so competitive that you won’t be able to rank for them.
There is a wealth of information that you will get from the keyword research tool such as:
- How much traffic the search term is getting
- How many back-links you’re probably going to need to rank for it
- Who is already ranking for it
- How much traffic they are getting
- What other keywords they rank for on that page
Write Magnetic Headlines that Sell People on Your Articles
Your article’s headline is what attracts readers to your blog post. When you craft your headlines, try to include what they will learn from your post, the benefit of learning it, why they should learn it from you, and so on.
For example, on this blog, we could use a headline such as:
“21 Headlines That Got Us A Million Readers”
What will the reader learn from this post?
The best headlines to get tons of traffic, why should they listen to us?
Because we’re successful at getting traffic.
Create a great list article around keywords
Research shows that most readers prefer reading list articles over any other type of post. This is probably because with a list article you know exactly what you’re going to get. Plus, the content is laid out in a way that is are easy to scan.
People like to be able to skim the content. After all, no one wants to invest their time into reading a long blog post if they’re not sure it’s going to be worth their while.
It’s also a great idea to link out to other websites in your blog posts.
For example, you could write an article on ‘The 25 Most Influential Internet Marketing Bloggers’, and link to each blogger. When they see your post, each of them will probably want to share it and link to it somewhere on their blog.
Make your blog posts look great
Proofread your posts and ensure that there are no grammatical mistakes.
Optimize readability.
Make sure that the formatting allows the reader to be able to scan the post quickly to get the main points. Use numbered lists and bullet points wherever possible.
Use images not only to promote your posts but to split up the content as well. Make it easy for someone who comes to your site to skim the article quickly so they can figure out if it’s one that they want to read.
Take our blog, for example. If you went to one of our posts that is around 2,000 words long but it had huge paragraphs, no headlines, no images, and poor formatting, would you want to invest your time into reading it?
Of course not.
Here is an example of how you could display your blog posts:
- Main Headline
- Introduction
- Headline 2 (h2 tag)
- Headline 3 (h3 tag)
- Text
- Image
- Headline 4 (h3 tag)
- Text
- Image
- And so on…
You can even include sub-headlines for sub-headlines if it helps to break up the content and make it easier to read.
2. Search Engine Optimization
You’ve found a great keyword, and you’ve written your blog post, now all you need to do is to optimize your post for that particular keyword.
How to Optimize Your Blog Post For a Targeted Keyword
Use Yoast SEO, a free WordPress plugin that tells you everything you need to do to rank for a particular keyword.
It will tell you what things to do to boost your SEO such as:
- Include the keyword in the headline
- Include the keyword in the meta description
- Include the keyword in the first paragraph of your post
- Include internal and external links
- Include an image with the name of your keyword
- Add alt attributes with the focus keyword to your images
- Mention the keyword enough times (relative to the length of your post)
Once the Yoast SEO plugin gives you the green light, you can proceed to publish your post.
Blog Post SEO: How to Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
Exactly how Google decides on where to rank your blog post is a huge mystery, but we do know that a big part of that decision depends on how much the search engine likes your website.
Google likes to link to websites that are user-friendly, up to date, popular, and trustworthy.
There are a lot of different ways in which you can achieve this including:
- Having a contact page with an address and a phone number
- Getting HTTPS in the URL of your website
- Adding a sitemap to your website
- Always fixing any broken links
- Improving your page speed
- Making sure there’s no duplicate content on your site
- Mobile friendly
Just remember that your content has to be great, to begin with.
You can optimize mediocre content all you want, but if it isn’t amazing, it just won’t get linked to, which means that it won’t rank very well in Google.
3. Optimize Your Blog Marketing
You’ve published your blog post and made it easy for the search engines to find it, now let’s ensure that it’s easy for people to find it, as well. You obviously want as many people as possible seeing your content in this battle for eyeballs.
In addition to that initial traffic, the more people like and share your content, the more traffic you will get in the future.
Think of it this way, if you saw an article that was shared only once you probably wouldn’t think much of it, but if you saw one that was shared thirty times you’ll probably be thinking that it’s a great post if so many people are sharing it and you’ll probably read and share it too.
If you continue to create traffic you will eventually get huge spikes in traffic. Mention the keyword enough times (relative to the length of your post)
Unfortunately, often times these huge spikes in traffic are gone as quickly as they come.
For example, if your blog receives 100 visitors each day, and one day you post an article that does very well on social media and gets about 1,000 visitors that day, it’s ten times the amount of traffic you usually get, but that spike will most likely be gone after a day or two.
So what’s the solution?
Design your website so that it can turn traffic spikes into recurring traffic. After jumping from 100 visitors to 1,000, it goes back down to 150 or 200. That is a relatively big increase from where it was before.
But how do you turn one-time traffic into long-term traffic?
By asking people to subscribe to your email list. You can add a popup and an opt-in box in the footer of your web pages offering exclusive content for readers who subscribe to your email list.
Another great way to get first-time visitors to your site to come back is through social media. Use these communities to consistently bring social buzz to each of your new posts.
With each amazing post you publish, you will gain new fans which means that every time you do something it’s just going to grow bigger and bigger, creating some real momentum for growing your blog.
Tips for Getting Loads of Traffic to New Blog Posts:
Email Your Subscribers
If you already have a list of subscribers, make sure that you email them each time you publish a post, tell them what it’s about and what they will benefit from reading it. This is one of the best ways to instantly get a lot of people to visit your site.
Some of those subscribers who visit your site will share the post on social media and others may link to it on their blogs getting you back-links and giving your SEO a huge boost.
Mention Your Post On Social Media
Tweet or Facebook your article to get a lot of visits to the page.
If the content is awesome, people definitely will share it. If you continue to produce outstanding content you won’t even have to put a lot of work into building your social media accounts, your readers will do it for you.
When leveraged the right way, social media can be a great source of traffic for a new blog.
Getting People Already On Your Blog To Read New Posts
This is one of the easiest ways to keep your blog traffic high.
If someone is already on your blog it means that they are interested in what you offer, so offer them more. Keep readers visiting page after page on your site.
There are a few effective ways of doing this:
- By adding a link to your site’s top navigation bar (If they’ve enjoyed your content, they’ll be looking for more).
- By adding a link at the top of the sidebar.
- By making sure the new post is featured on both the home page and category pages.
- By making sure that the post is featured in popular/related posts.
- By asking Friends to share and comment on your post (if you’re getting a lot of shares and comments, other people coming to your site are more likely to comment and share as well).
The Last Word
While these things may not seem like much on their own, remember, it’s about momentum, so consistency is of value here.
If you keep at it, before long these small trickling streams will add up to a raging river of traffic that just keeps flowing and growing.
Feel free to post your comment below. An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!
PlanetBizOp.com
->Steven
Updated: Originally published May 23rd 2018
Hey there! Great advice on getting traffic to your site!
You’ve hammered home a lot of things I have been reading online and watching on YouTube.
One thing I don’t see a lot of people talking about is the time it takes to get these results. I’ve only started with my blog about 4 month ago…and just now am starting to get some organic traffic. It’s very small, but growing.
Anyway, I know it depends on your niche. But in general, how many months would you expect it to take before you start seeing 1000 visitors a day?
Thanks!
If you put a lot of effort into social media you could see big results in a month or so. The down side is you would have to spend the bulk of your time and energy on that effort. This kind of traffic is rarely self sustaining so you have to continue the effort indefinitely to keep it going.
To see 1000 visits a day via organic search engine traffic will depend on how often you publish and the quality of those publications. So, that is a difficult question to answer outright. If you publish stuff people want to read and share, it could easily happen in 6 months though.
Be patient, keep building, it sounds like you are in the home stretch.
Thanks for the comment kmv!
Hi Steven,
What a great article and how to get people to your site! You definitely do what you say as in having catchy headlines and a great blog post set out. Do you believe though, it does come down to the more posts you write will indeed increase your traffic? As I have always thought Google loves consistent blogging hence getting your posts to rank on pages 1/2, hence lots of traffic. Do you blog regularly and how much would you recommend?
I post 3-4 times a week. The more pages of quality information you have out there, the more traffic you’ll get over time. Once you choose a frequency for posting, stick with it, a lag in posts will hurt your rankings. Also, you can update old posts, this works just as well as new posts, so you don’t have to come up with new articles each week.
I would try to post at least two times a week if possible as a minimum to build traffic and keep Google pleased.
Thanks for the comment Sharon!
Very informative post as usual, thanks so much there is a lot here that I am going to put into practice to help boost my traffic. 1000 visitors per day seems like a pipe dream compared to what I am getting now so I am glad I found this.
You mentioned emailing your subscribers every day- are their any tools you would recommend for doing this?
There are plenty of email list services out there, aweber, MailChimp, etc. Most offer free trials, but, keep in mind moving an established list from one to another is likely going to be difficult. Most won’t allow you to import a list easily due to their spam policies. Pick one you like before acquiring a big list of subscribers. Most are pretty similar anyhow…
Thanks for the comment yomikebarton!
I really need to increase visitor numbers but I am stuck lately so I was looking for new ways to increase it. Actually the h2 and h3 headlines are quite interesting.
I remember that I heard I need to use 4 h2 tags before. Do you think that I should do this for every page? What are your experiences with this?
I prefer h3 tags for headlines within my content because they look better than h2 tags in my opinion. I put what looks good and maximizes readability. I don’t believe these tags have a huge influence on rankings anyhow. Go with what looks good for your article formatting.
As far as numbers, my articles have anywhere from just two h3 tags to as many as 15 h3 tags. Just depends on the article’s size and structure. I recommend going with readability, make the article pretty for the reader, that’s what counts.
Thanks for the comment Furkan!
Hi Steven! I like your blog and enjoyed reading it. It has a lot of helpful information especially to newbies like me.
The steps seems easy when you just read them, but it gets complicated once you start implementing them. I do some of the steps you mentioned, content. social media, keyword research, some I have no idea where to start. I do get traffic but not as much as I want it to be. Driving traffic is a struggle for me. Traffic was really slow during the first 6 months, but after that it started picking up. But I wish I could do more. I still have a lot to learn in this business. I will only be 1 yr. in July. I hope that someday, I can finally be where I want myself to be in this business. Thanks for the tips.
I understand. This business can be very frustrating and requires tremendous patience. It sounds like you have passed the first milestone, getting any search engine traffic, consistently, is a big achievement.
I know it probably doesn’t feel like it, but, you have achieved more than most ever will. You have persisted for a year and acquired traffic. Keep going! You are doing better than you think.
Don’t let that nagging urge to ‘do more’ get to you. Just keep publishing quality material and growth will happen, even if it feels painfully slow. You should feel good about what you have achieved so far!
Thanks for the comment Rebecca!