Yes, I Did It! Or How I Doubled My Blog Traffic In One Month
Finally after several months of writing, reading and researching I managed to do it: I’ve double the daily traffic to my blog! And I managed to do it in less than one month. Stay with me a little longer and I will share with you how.
Having a blog doesn’t only mean writing articles and publishing them. I perceive my blog like an online magazine with an editorial calendar, trend research and marketing strategy. Let’s discuss each of these points in detail.
1) FINDING TOPIC FOR A POST AND WHY YOU CAN’T IGNORE SEO
Let’s start with writing a new article for your blog. When I was new to blogging, all these SEO terms and tricks seemed a Chinese grammar to me. I chose the topics and named my posts how it crawls in my head without optimising them for Search engines at all. Now, tell me, how will people find out about my blog if they can barely find it in the Internet jungle?
Slowly I started to learn about SEO and I must say that it is not as hard as I thought – at least the basic rules. One of my most successful articles “TOP CAD Sofware For Interior Designers – Review” was optimised for search engines and every day it is read over hundred times. I will show you now how I did it.
First of all you need to investigate if the topic you want to write about is something what your readers are looking for.
Using Google Keyword Planner Tool is one of the easiest way to find out. You need to login to Adwords and then go to “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas”. Type phrase or words you want investigate and click “keyword ideas”:
Look, “Interior Design Software” and “CAD” are synonyms, but if the first term gets only 3600 monthly searches, the second one is looked for 9900 times – almost 3 times more! This gave me an idea that I need to use word CAD in the title of my article.
Next tool you can use to get title ideas is the Google suggest. In the search box start typing your keywords and Google automatically will suggest you the most popular search terms based on them. Other ideas are stated at the bottom of Google page:
Some of the most popular keywords within my topic were: “CAD software reviews”, “CAD for Mac”, “CAD for Windows”, “Google SketchUp”, “Autocad”. If you read my post, you can see that I have used them all.
Ubber Suggest is a similar tool to Google keywords planner, but it involves other suggest services, which results in a very comprehensive list of keywords and phrases it gives you.
2) ANALYSE
Statistics. This is a wonderful tool for analyzing where you blog stands. Go and check it immediately, if you haven’t done is so far. You can check there, what are the most read and shared posts that you have written. Think, what makes them so popular? Perhaps you might want to write more articles on this topic.
Google trends tool will help you to explore what subjects are “trendy” in your niche. For example, by simply typing words “interior design”, I found out that one of the most hot topics now is “Interior Design blogs”, which gave me an idea to write a post about it.
Social Crawlitics is a website where you can find out, what is your competitor’s most read and shared content. I also recommend to check websites not only of your direct competitors, but industry leaders as well.
3) WRITE
If you post around 1 time per month or even less, expecting a significant increase in traffic is quite naïvely. There is no shortcut – growing blog is a very hard work, requiring lots of effort and commitment. I believe if you are not ready to publish at least two posts per week, you shouldn’t even bother blogging. The more you write, the more traffic you get. However, think you always need to provide valuable content to your readers. “Less is more” doesn’t work here. Interesting or useful articles are more likely to be read and shared. That’s why I prefer to make longer posts and publish less often than I could.
About guest posting. There is a big debate about whether you should or shouldn’t accept guest posts on your blog. I do accept them and personally see no harm in it. If it is a valuable and interesting article I find no reason why I can’t share it with my subscribers. However, I don’t publish all guest posts which I receive: if I am not satisfied with content or they don’t fit my blog I prefer to reject them. Guest posts will help you to save time on writing and publish more often. Another benefit which you get from guest posts is that authors usually help to promote them using their own Social Media tools.
4) PROMOTE
After writing an amazing blog post you need to concentrate all your efforts to make people know about it. Apart from standard Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, I use the following tools in my daily marketing routine.
Google+ is becoming more and more influential. I just wonder if Google will be able to beat Facebook soon (I mean business wise), especially after the last one made it so difficult to promote content without paying. The strategy with Google+ is very simple: the more people you have in your circles is better. Don’t forget to share every blog post with them and also within Communities you follow.
HeadlinerFM – have you ever tried it? The idea behind this website is to help you to reach more people than you have among your Social Media followers. You simply write a message you want to promote and then Headliner matches it with like-minded people, which will then share it with their followers.
AboutMe – I strongly recommend everyone to create a page on About Me (and don’t forget to mention your blog on it). Once you’ve done that, don’t be shy or static – find people, send them compliments and share these compliments on Twitter and Facebook. People are curious and grateful: they will be interested to find out who watched their page and they will be feeling to share your page in return. It really works!
A couple of words about Twitter. I don’t know whether you already use JustUnfollow service, but I really wanted to mention about it as it is an amazing application helping you to find out people who “unfollowed” you or didn’t follow you back. Once you know it – unfollow them too, no mercy! You always need to have a good ratio between “following” and “followers”.
5) KNOW WHERE YOU STAND
Measuring your results is as important as working hard to achieve them. Here are several tools which will assist you to understand what you have achieved with your blog:
Google Page Rank – is an algorithm used by Google to rank your site from 1 to 10 in search engine results, where the higher is better. Apartment Therapy has 7 out of 10, Apple has 9 out of 10, so you have an idea now of what to strive for. Google Page Rank is a very complex algorithm, which evaluates so many factors: domain age and amount of back links to name a few. If your site is not ranked, try to get some back links and guest posting might be a good strategy for it.
Alexa Ranking – as opposed to Google Rank the lower your ranking number, the better. Alexa ranking is based mainly on the number of page views. Such a guerrilla among interior design blogs as Design Sponge, for example, has Alexa ranking 11407.
Klout. Do you know how influential you are in Social Media? Klout is a website where you can find out about it. It ranks all users from 1 to 100 where the higher is better. My Klout score is 58 for the moment, which is quite good for the industry. Another feature of Klout is that you can answer “expert questions”, and your answer might appear on the top of Bing search engine results. As an interior designer I received such questions as: “My bedroom is in need of a makeover. What items should I buy to spruce up the color and vibe?”
All these tricks help me to grow my blog every day, however I don’t concentrate only on traffic. I still have fun and enjoy writing and I believe success will follow.
I wanted to ask you what are the tools you use to promote your blog? Feel free to share all your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below. I am looking forward to hearing from you!
