How to get 1000 daily visits to your Blog in 6 months

How to get 1000 daily visits to your Blog in 6 months

The keys to acquiring qualified traffic to your Blog are patience, persistence… and a good content strategy.

3 essential requirements:
– You must love to write
– You must be passionate about the topic you are writing about
– You have to know about this topic (or willing to learn)

If you don’t know anything about a topic, don’t worry… you can always learn. If you have a hard time writing, you have other alternatives… like making videos or podcasts. And if you do not like a certain topic… look for a topic that you like, there are many to choose from!

Do you meet the three requirements? Here are 5 key points that will help you to define your content strategy:

1. Set your goals

Which is the main motivation for writing a Blog? There isn’t a single correct answer to this question, since there are many reasons (get recognition, self-promotion, monetization, hobby…) to write a Blog and all of them are perfectly valid.

Besides a motivation you need to target goals. It is easier to get to a point if we have previously identified it and we have drawn up a plan to reach it.

The two most important metrics for a Blog are the number of daily visits and the number of subscribers. There are other important parameters (bounce rate, average time on site, page views per visit…) but I recommend you to focus only on the first two metrics.

Do not forget to measure your goals using Google Analytics (you can set goals and conversions) and set temporary milestones every two or three months to make sure you are reaching your goals and take action if it is not.

It is essential to measure your results

2. Choose a market

A market is made up of people who offer a product and people who are looking to buy that product. Supply and demand.

Analyze the Demand: Before you start writing, make sure there are people who are searching for that topic. Study the terms people would use if they were Googling for your content (you can use AdWords Keywords Planner Tool for doing your research). If there is no demand on a specific topic, I recommend you to look for an alternative, because making a big effort and not getting results is frustrating.
 

Analyze the supply: Research the most influential Blogs in your industry and study the type of content they are offering. Look at:

– How many words do the articles have?
– Are they well structured or are they a block of text?
– Do they offer objective data or personal opinion?
– What kind of images do they use?
– Do they include tables, images and videos?
– Do they link to external websites and contents?
– Is it well written and has good grammar?
– What size/color/type font do they use?

Once you have analyzed several Blogs and know how the most successful ones are, give it a thought and you’ll find some ways to include your own style and excel from the average. There is a lot of noise on the Internet and to highlight you need to offer something unique or better than the rest.

3. Define your product

If you have a Blog, your product is your content. The key to win your audience is to offer something that differs from others.

There are many «gurus» who think that articles should be limited to less than 500 words. However, there are studies like the one that appears in this article on Moz that assure that the articles with 1800-3000 words are the ones that more links attract and those that more times are shared in Social Media channels.

There is also the belief among many Bloggers that to get traffic you have to write at least one article daily. My personal recommendation: Do not write for the sake of writing. If you are able to generate premium content every day… congratulations! But if you have to choose, quality is more important than quantity. If you can write 2-3 good articles per week it’s perfectly fine.

4. Follow a plan

Having an editorial calendar (and sticking to it) is an important factor for the success of your content strategy. Don’t force yourself to write every day, but mark yourself a minimum of 2 weekly articles.

Plan monthly the issues you are going to address and try to establish a monthly theme, with articles concatenated to create expectation. Planning your articles every month helps you not to be left blank, because if you have in mind the topic you are going to try during the current month you will always come up with new ideas to write, that you can write down to develop later.

We all have our sources of inspiration. Spend some time each day searching for and reading articles that will serve you as a basis for writing about a certain topic. I follow a few Blogs and I’m subscribed to several newsletters that talk about Startups, technology y Online Marketing.

On internet you can get Excel templates to create your own editorial calendar

5. Promote Your Blog

In my opinion, this is the most important point.

Have you ever heard about the 20/80 rule? As a general rule, the Pareto Principle also applies to managing a Blog. You should spend 20% of your time writing articles and 80% promoting them and interacting with your followers.

If you’re starting from scratch and you don’t have any followers, don’t wait for «people to find your Blog for themselves» or for «the SEO to start delivering results». It doesn’t work like that.

There are some obvious changes you should make to your own Blog to increase your audience, such as including Widgets to share on Social Networks or add a conversion form so people can subscribe. But the most important job you must do is getting your articles in front of your future followers.

The two most effective options are:

– Promote your content through forums and groups in Social Networks.
– Contact Influencers of your sector directly

You can use our tool to search Influencers on Twitter to locate influential people in your sector.

Make sure you already have some quality content before you carry out promotional actions, it will greatly increase your chances of success.

A case study

As example case I can talk about MetricSpot’s launch. We finished developing the Beta Tool in January 2013 and later that month we contacted directly some of the Spanish-speaking Bloggers with more influence in the Online Marketing sector.

Of all those we contacted, two agreed to write a review.

We had a peak of traffic in early February that later stabilized and has been growing progressively so far (with traffic slumps in summer and Christmas). Even so, the promotional efforts didn’t end there and we had to «revive» the traffic from time to time through newsletters to our users and broadcast on Social Networks.

Although we haven’t written in the Blog every week, we haven’t stopped creating and promoting new tools and resources, such as our Twitter Influencers search tool or our competitors analysis tool.

Visits graphic of MetricSpot from January 2013 to February 2014

Do you notice that during the month of January 2013 we hardly received any traffic? That’s because during this time we only share the tool with friends and followers through our own Facebook and Twitter accounts. If we hadn’t spent time promoting our website outside our circle of friends, we probably wouldn’t have been so successful and you wouldn’t be reading this article right now 😉

And to finish…

Although getting to have 1000 visits a day in 6 months seems a difficult goal, it really isn’t. It only requires patience and persistence.

Once you accomplish this goal you will see that it will be much easier to reach new milestones. In addition, you’ll have a very important asset: your audience. They’ll help you to spread new projects in which you embark, give you feedback on your ideas, give you business opportunities and expand your network of contacts.

I would like to ask you a question: what’s your favorite blog, and why?

Leave your comment below!