How to grow a blog to 100 thousand visitors per month in less than a year
I run a blog on ConversionXL . The blog is dedicated to optimizing conversion, and it is one of the largest blogs on the market.
I started to lead it a little over 2 years ago, in October 2011. In the first month I received 50,000 visits thanks to some viral posts, the rest of the growth was linear, slow and constant.
15,000 visits in the third month
22,000 on the 6th month
90,000 on the 10th month
')
After a few months, I had 100,000 regular visits per month. And these are not simple visits - my blog generates profitable clients for my company of 10 people.
At first, I did not know which strategy to choose - after all, there are already a million marketing blogs. What is the meaning of another? I started collecting data.
First of all, I went through all sorts of lists of the “Top 100 Marketing Blogs” to analyze their content. I asked the following questions:
- how many words in the post?
- Is the text well structured?
- How much data, examples and research is used in the post (and not just personal opinions)?
- how many pictures are there in it? Are they good or is it just a clipart?
- how much external resources and links are used?
- is it useful?
- is it well written, and is it interesting to read it?
- font size, color, ease of reading, typography?
Answering these questions, I thought, can I do something better? How can my content stand out from this noise - both in meaning and in design?
I believed that today people do not like to read, so I wanted to make short posts that write about some results or conclusions and draw interesting conclusions. Something like what Seth Godin does:
okdork.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Seth-Godin-Blog-Style-e1391907820436.png
But almost everyone did such posts. Mostly because of its laziness. It is very easy to write a 200-word post in an attempt to appear smart, giving out some personal opinions there.
The secret of success is to do what others do not want. And I understood what it is. Advice based on solid evidence and research data. I decided that this would be my niche.
I decided to concentrate on optimizing the conversion, since there were few such blogs. Choosing a niche is very important - do not be afraid of this, you can always expand later.
Like Tim Ferris, who started with the “Four-Hour Work Week,” then expanded his presence — and so you can do it with your blog.
If you are starting a general-purpose marketing blog or a fitness blog, it will be difficult for you to stand out. Have you heard of the Nerd Fitness blog? A great example of how to occupy a niche and stand out well with this.
I was helped by the use of content based on data.
There are no posts in my blog outlining only one opinion. Or statements like "people usually prefer ABC." Instead of stating that people prefer simple websites, I give evidence:
See how that adds credibility? This is not just someone's statement “simple design is better.”
According to the rules of my blog, each statement must be supported by a study or example. Now I am pissed off with articles where they write “according to the study of such and such” and do not provide links to it. This is very common and it is very beneficial for a writer - not to look for reliable sources for his statements.
People like that in my posts there are always links. Very few people do this, and most of them are successful.
I found studies that have studied which posts are gaining the most links . Most Popular Posts:
long - from 1850 to 3035 words (ideally 2700-3000)
Visual - posts containing videos, pictures, and lists attract 6 times more links than just text.
Therefore, I write articles where each statement is supported by data, I make them at least 1,850 words in length, and I insert there pictures, titles and lists.
And it works. In the post length of more than 2000 words, you can fit a lot of useful things (more than 200 words).
Will it work for everyone? Probably not. First, you need to be able to write. If you hardly connect a couple of paragraphs, then an article in 2000+ words is not for you. Maybe you better make videos or podcasts.
If you want to start a blog, I would advise you to do the following study:
- what are the more successful blogs in your market, in the industry, in a niche?
- what others do not do?
- how can your content be noticeably better or different from others?
If you start a blog without the support of your existing audience, do not wait until "people find it" or "SEO will work." This is not how it works.
Obviously, you need to add widgets to distribute links in social networks. You need to collect email readers to deliver content directly to them. I spread my posts as I could.
- contacted the people and companies that I mentioned in the post, and many of them then distributed these posts
- but did not solicit retweets (do not do this)
- sent short emails: “Hello, ABC, I just mentioned you on my blog post at www.xyz.com . Kisses, Vasya. "
- shared posts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. In LinkedIn you can do mass posts in the groups of which you are a member.
okdork.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/LinkedIn-ConversionXL-How-to-Mass-Post-2-e1391909108691.png
- posted posts on Reddit, StumbleUpon and Hacker News (there was not Inbound.org and GrowthHackers.com yet). Some posts were spread by the viral method.
You can advertise a post only if its content is interesting enough. People will distribute it if they like it. Your creation should be perfect. And then you need to figure out how to bring it to influential people.
A lot of these people found my posts at HackerNews. And then Tim Ferris dropped my blog by sending too much traffic there.
By the way, about it. My post about the experiment with prices reached the first place on HN in the first month of blogging. Because of this, my server fell (better to use CDN, Content Delivery Network (and distribution)). After 7 months, someone found this post again, and again posted it on HackerNews. I was in the top ten for two days in a row - this is a very serious traffic. And then, immediately after the end of the traffic from HN, Tim Ferris shared it on his Facebook and Twitter.
Although visitors with StumbleUpon, Reddit and HN give a very poor conversion of “visits to emails,” they help in a different way. What is becoming popular there, then retweet, so I earned a bunch of followers on Twitter and a bunch of links to my blog from others. And these links raised a blog on Google.
Guest posts in other blogs also attract traffic and audience well. But your guest posts should be more awesome than the posts on your blog. These posts, in fact, are high-quality advertising. If you want users to go to your blog, you need to write an epic guest post. It is hard - so do not write such posts for small blogs.
Do not be afraid of big blogs. Good content is needed by everyone, and they will even pay for it. All top blogs pay guest posters ( want to write for me ?) With SmashingMagazine, hundreds of visitors come to me every month, although I last wrote there a year and a half ago. Here is an analysis of traffic for the last month:
- content syndication. Business2Community and BusinessInsider are engaged in syndication
- settle for all the podcasts and webinars. Every mention increases your traffic. And offer yours
You probably know other strong players in the market. Do not know - find out. How to find out who invites guests to webinars and podcasts - suggest your own topics. If you are good, then everything will work out. Make sure your blog has enough content and you have specific ideas to discuss.
I have my personal record for webinar attendance when I was invited to Unbounce webinar (Unwebinar). There were more than 3,000 visitors. I still get subscribers from there, and I meet people who first heard about me there. Use other people's audiences to increase their own - only for this you need to provide high-quality content.
SEO helps, of course. But I did not cooperate with SEO companies and did not generate a heap of left links to myself. All links are real, deserved good content.
In addition to using the SEO plugin on my WP, the only thing I do in this regard is to write key phrases in the post headers. And then I insert the same phrase a couple of times into the text. I come up with a 2-3-word phrase that people will most likely look for when they need what I describe in the article, and use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to estimate search volume. If the volume is greater than 0, I use this phrase. Previously, I did not compete with highly competitive phrases, because I had few backlinks to my blog. Now I can afford it.
Today, my main traffic provider is Organic search:
For money, I did not advertise.
For the first year I wrote 76 posts. One post in 4.8 days. It is available to everyone. Then I slowed down to 2 posts per month - the work was distracting. But I saw that the frequency of posts affects the traffic and the number of subscribers. Every time I clicked “publish” and sent it by email, I received a bunch of visitors. I am sure that as the amount of content increases, my traffic will increase. I'm working on it.
It is critical to have patience at the very beginning. Everyone wants to wake up successful, but this does not happen. Perseverance and constancy. I helped many blogs increase their conversion, and had access to their statistics. And I met such a thing on the traffic graph every time: slowly, slowly, slowly, BABAH!
Here is my traffic from organic search, from the very beginning to the present day:
Plateau, growth, plateau, growth. Low points are weekends. Great failures - the Christmas holidays.
You need to constantly work on a blog. If you determine for yourself that in the first year you will not achieve anything special, you will not be very worried about the results and will be able to continue working.
Here's the same situation with Derek Halpern's blog :
Every next year is better than the previous one. And it happens to everyone who regularly produces good content. Do what others cannot do for a long time.
If you want to make quick money, then blogging is not for you. The main goal of the blog is building an audience. The audience that trusts you, loves you and wants to buy from you - what you sell now, or what you will sell in four years. And you don’t even need to know that it’s your audience that will tell you that.
I started to lead it a little over 2 years ago, in October 2011. In the first month I received 50,000 visits thanks to some viral posts, the rest of the growth was linear, slow and constant.
15,000 visits in the third month
22,000 on the 6th month
90,000 on the 10th month
')
After a few months, I had 100,000 regular visits per month. And these are not simple visits - my blog generates profitable clients for my company of 10 people.
Content strategy
At first, I did not know which strategy to choose - after all, there are already a million marketing blogs. What is the meaning of another? I started collecting data.
Find a niche market
First of all, I went through all sorts of lists of the “Top 100 Marketing Blogs” to analyze their content. I asked the following questions:
- how many words in the post?
- Is the text well structured?
- How much data, examples and research is used in the post (and not just personal opinions)?
- how many pictures are there in it? Are they good or is it just a clipart?
- how much external resources and links are used?
- is it useful?
- is it well written, and is it interesting to read it?
- font size, color, ease of reading, typography?
Answering these questions, I thought, can I do something better? How can my content stand out from this noise - both in meaning and in design?
I believed that today people do not like to read, so I wanted to make short posts that write about some results or conclusions and draw interesting conclusions. Something like what Seth Godin does:
okdork.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Seth-Godin-Blog-Style-e1391907820436.png
But almost everyone did such posts. Mostly because of its laziness. It is very easy to write a 200-word post in an attempt to appear smart, giving out some personal opinions there.
The secret of success is to do what others do not want. And I understood what it is. Advice based on solid evidence and research data. I decided that this would be my niche.
I decided to concentrate on optimizing the conversion, since there were few such blogs. Choosing a niche is very important - do not be afraid of this, you can always expand later.
Like Tim Ferris, who started with the “Four-Hour Work Week,” then expanded his presence — and so you can do it with your blog.
If you are starting a general-purpose marketing blog or a fitness blog, it will be difficult for you to stand out. Have you heard of the Nerd Fitness blog? A great example of how to occupy a niche and stand out well with this.
I was helped by the use of content based on data.
There are no posts in my blog outlining only one opinion. Or statements like "people usually prefer ABC." Instead of stating that people prefer simple websites, I give evidence:
In a Google study from August 2012, it was found that users not only appreciate the appearance of the site in approximately 1/20 of a second, but also that the sites defined as “visually complex” were rated by them as less beautiful.
See how that adds credibility? This is not just someone's statement “simple design is better.”
According to the rules of my blog, each statement must be supported by a study or example. Now I am pissed off with articles where they write “according to the study of such and such” and do not provide links to it. This is very common and it is very beneficial for a writer - not to look for reliable sources for his statements.
People like that in my posts there are always links. Very few people do this, and most of them are successful.
Optimization of posts for traffic
I found studies that have studied which posts are gaining the most links . Most Popular Posts:
long - from 1850 to 3035 words (ideally 2700-3000)
Visual - posts containing videos, pictures, and lists attract 6 times more links than just text.
Therefore, I write articles where each statement is supported by data, I make them at least 1,850 words in length, and I insert there pictures, titles and lists.
And it works. In the post length of more than 2000 words, you can fit a lot of useful things (more than 200 words).
Will it work for everyone? Probably not. First, you need to be able to write. If you hardly connect a couple of paragraphs, then an article in 2000+ words is not for you. Maybe you better make videos or podcasts.
If you want to start a blog, I would advise you to do the following study:
- what are the more successful blogs in your market, in the industry, in a niche?
- what others do not do?
- how can your content be noticeably better or different from others?
We get visitors
If you start a blog without the support of your existing audience, do not wait until "people find it" or "SEO will work." This is not how it works.
Obviously, you need to add widgets to distribute links in social networks. You need to collect email readers to deliver content directly to them. I spread my posts as I could.
- contacted the people and companies that I mentioned in the post, and many of them then distributed these posts
- but did not solicit retweets (do not do this)
- sent short emails: “Hello, ABC, I just mentioned you on my blog post at www.xyz.com . Kisses, Vasya. "
- shared posts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. In LinkedIn you can do mass posts in the groups of which you are a member.
okdork.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/LinkedIn-ConversionXL-How-to-Mass-Post-2-e1391909108691.png
- posted posts on Reddit, StumbleUpon and Hacker News (there was not Inbound.org and GrowthHackers.com yet). Some posts were spread by the viral method.
How to make a viral post?
You can advertise a post only if its content is interesting enough. People will distribute it if they like it. Your creation should be perfect. And then you need to figure out how to bring it to influential people.
A lot of these people found my posts at HackerNews. And then Tim Ferris dropped my blog by sending too much traffic there.
By the way, about it. My post about the experiment with prices reached the first place on HN in the first month of blogging. Because of this, my server fell (better to use CDN, Content Delivery Network (and distribution)). After 7 months, someone found this post again, and again posted it on HackerNews. I was in the top ten for two days in a row - this is a very serious traffic. And then, immediately after the end of the traffic from HN, Tim Ferris shared it on his Facebook and Twitter.
Although visitors with StumbleUpon, Reddit and HN give a very poor conversion of “visits to emails,” they help in a different way. What is becoming popular there, then retweet, so I earned a bunch of followers on Twitter and a bunch of links to my blog from others. And these links raised a blog on Google.
Guest posts in other blogs also attract traffic and audience well. But your guest posts should be more awesome than the posts on your blog. These posts, in fact, are high-quality advertising. If you want users to go to your blog, you need to write an epic guest post. It is hard - so do not write such posts for small blogs.
Do not be afraid of big blogs. Good content is needed by everyone, and they will even pay for it. All top blogs pay guest posters ( want to write for me ?) With SmashingMagazine, hundreds of visitors come to me every month, although I last wrote there a year and a half ago. Here is an analysis of traffic for the last month:
- content syndication. Business2Community and BusinessInsider are engaged in syndication
- settle for all the podcasts and webinars. Every mention increases your traffic. And offer yours
You probably know other strong players in the market. Do not know - find out. How to find out who invites guests to webinars and podcasts - suggest your own topics. If you are good, then everything will work out. Make sure your blog has enough content and you have specific ideas to discuss.
I have my personal record for webinar attendance when I was invited to Unbounce webinar (Unwebinar). There were more than 3,000 visitors. I still get subscribers from there, and I meet people who first heard about me there. Use other people's audiences to increase their own - only for this you need to provide high-quality content.
SEO
SEO helps, of course. But I did not cooperate with SEO companies and did not generate a heap of left links to myself. All links are real, deserved good content.
In addition to using the SEO plugin on my WP, the only thing I do in this regard is to write key phrases in the post headers. And then I insert the same phrase a couple of times into the text. I come up with a 2-3-word phrase that people will most likely look for when they need what I describe in the article, and use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to estimate search volume. If the volume is greater than 0, I use this phrase. Previously, I did not compete with highly competitive phrases, because I had few backlinks to my blog. Now I can afford it.
Today, my main traffic provider is Organic search:
For money, I did not advertise.
Update frequency
For the first year I wrote 76 posts. One post in 4.8 days. It is available to everyone. Then I slowed down to 2 posts per month - the work was distracting. But I saw that the frequency of posts affects the traffic and the number of subscribers. Every time I clicked “publish” and sent it by email, I received a bunch of visitors. I am sure that as the amount of content increases, my traffic will increase. I'm working on it.
Have patience
It is critical to have patience at the very beginning. Everyone wants to wake up successful, but this does not happen. Perseverance and constancy. I helped many blogs increase their conversion, and had access to their statistics. And I met such a thing on the traffic graph every time: slowly, slowly, slowly, BABAH!
Here is my traffic from organic search, from the very beginning to the present day:
Plateau, growth, plateau, growth. Low points are weekends. Great failures - the Christmas holidays.
You need to constantly work on a blog. If you determine for yourself that in the first year you will not achieve anything special, you will not be very worried about the results and will be able to continue working.
Here's the same situation with Derek Halpern's blog :
Every next year is better than the previous one. And it happens to everyone who regularly produces good content. Do what others cannot do for a long time.
If you want to make quick money, then blogging is not for you. The main goal of the blog is building an audience. The audience that trusts you, loves you and wants to buy from you - what you sell now, or what you will sell in four years. And you don’t even need to know that it’s your audience that will tell you that.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/286662/
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