How to Drive Traffic to Your New Blog Site

There are many blogs and content that answer this question, but I was curious about what actually works. I found many bloggers reporting on their experience and added the things I experienced with my previous blog.

In this post, I'll be sharing practical tips on growing your blog and driving traffic to your site.

Inside this post:

• How many pageviews is ok when you first launch your blog?
• How do you grow your blog traffic?
• How to compete with other blogs for a limited amount of traffic?
• 3 types of content that work in 2021
• What is best to do with the traffic you drive to your blog?

How many pageviews is ok when you first launch your blog?

The reality is that your first month can be a zero or close to zero. Do not expect much from search engines. It takes time for them to crawl your content.

One fundamental blogging principle you need to understand is that it's a long-term game.

People quit because they see the lack of traffic early on, give up fast.

Keep going. It's possible to have 50,000 visits a month if you think about blogging and your site strategically and give yourself enough time.

You can get around 10,000 visits in between 5 to 6 months after you launch your blog. Of course, you need to publish as many articles as you can. Think about 100 published blog posts, from which about 40 are worthwhile.

Yeah, it's a lot of work, and it requires a good amount of focused time or investments to create that much content. But these numbers I shared above are from real examples I found online.

Mostly, you see blogs on the 1st and 2nd pages of a search engine if they have a lot of content and exist for at least 2 years.

You can drive referral traffic manually, but, as a rule, don't expect any organic traffic in the first 3-6 months. Of course, there are exceptions, and sometimes new niches with high demand on content and a lack of it move your blog on top fast if everything is done right.

Don't worry about page views for the first 6-18 months. A good tip that I've heard from other people is that you don't need to check Analytics for at least the first half a year not to get discouraged or have a second thought about your blog and content.

How do you grow your blog traffic?

Keywords

Keyword research in the beginning or during writing content helps a lot to grow organically  You need to make sure you do everything possible and use the best keywords in your niche if you're serious about SEO.

Some blogs neglected to do this from the very beginning and for many years. They focused on building backlinks and social media to drive most of the traffic to their websites. However, that's not the best way to approach it.

On the other hand, you need to make sure you don't focus on keywords too much. So your content doesn't look robotic. The end goal of each article is to write it for potential readers, not for search engines, but using keywords smartly and hierarchically improves your rankings and helps you move on top of search results.

Long-tail keywords

If you're just starting your blog, it's a good idea to use more long-tail and low competition keywords. When your site is fresh, it's hard to compete with more prominent blogs and already established publishers. The keywords they're using are saturated and what you can do is try to find more specific keywords that usually are longer than those that already have a significant volume.

Sometimes, it's even a good idea to use keywords that potentially will gain interest in the coming months, a year or so. You can be the first who supply high-quality content in these keywords.

You can research trends and try to predict what's coming next. That will help you identify the low competition and potential keywords in high demand in the near future.

Read more in detail on researching and organizing your keywords and preparing in my recent post dedicated specifically to this topic.

It's somehow risky to focus only on low competition and long-tail keywords because, at the end of the day, you might not get any traffic if there are any changes in the industry and your predictions, for some reason, were wrong.

To avoid that, you can mix the high volume and low competition keywords.

Basically, you need to use 1 to 3 top-level keywords and go deeper in your niche, adding other words relevant to those top-level keywords to generate more specific long-tail keywords.

Add a year or date, location (i.e., country and city), names, events, more descriptional words to your keywords. They will look longer and that ok.

People tend to use long sentences in their search queries to find the information they're looking for faster.

Good quality blog posts

It might be evident for some, but I still think it's worth repeating that the content is the king. You really need to focus on publishing excellent content that helps people.

It would help if you learned to write content in a way everyone can understand. That helps to grow your audience faster, and as a rule, easy-to-read blogs have more returning visitors, which is good for site reputation.

Another good way to build a reputation and have more returning visitors is by writing engaging content. The content that people want to share or comment on. You can always boost it up if you host your own site and have all the tools like the comments module and email newsletter.

Original content performs the best. Use software like Copyscape and Grammarly to check your articles. 

You can easily add value to your blog post if you answer a question or solve someone's problem by it. Most of the search requests in search engines are questions.

People search for answers, and the better your blog post answers a question, the more time people spend on it, maybe share it with others. Moreover, it can go viral and bring you lots and lots of traffic.

Free Traffic from Other Platforms

Be active on other platforms like Twitter and Reddit.

Tweeting a lot helps, but that's definitely not for everyone and it's hard to get new followers these days unless you post regularly engaging and controversial content and participate in engaging threads.

Long threads with many details and visual examples perform well personally for me, but I feel like it will do much better if you're regular and show up every day on platforms like Twitter.

Hashtags still work, but it's quite often they contain spammy content with zero or close to its engagement.

Tweet replies work, and people often check your profile and links in bio, but it requires a lot of work of finding engaging threads and then chatting with people within those threads.

Also, Twitter tends to censor certain topics, and if that's the case for you, I won't rely on it too much. It's best to own your content and avoid algorithm manipulations, in my opinion.

On the other hand, Reddit has a bit different concept that reminds me of good old forums but hosted on one website.

In some way, it's more beneficial than other platforms if you can find subreddits centered on your niche. You can have a really good engagement there if the community is nice and your content helps people there.

You can drive millions of visits a day if your content goes viral on Reddit. I've heard that events like this crashed a website because servers couldn't handle that amount of traffic.

Although some of the subreddits can have highly restrictive policies regarding submitting your content there, especially if you're Newby, make sure you read moderation rules before posting anything.

Platforms like this are one of the easiest ways of creating backlinks that lead to your content.

Backlinks

Another way to do create backlinks is by writing guest posts and commenting on other blogs.

Focus on driving referral traffic whenever you can. Inputs like this send good signals to search engines which helps to rank your blog posts quicker.

Pinterest is a good way to create a lot of backlinks and get some organic traffic to your site. You can create 2-3 pins for each blog post and try using group boards that have tens of thousands of followers.

It's possible to speed up the crawl process by manually submitting your new content to Search Console. Often it improves the indexing speed. This means your content will appear in search results faster.

How to compete with other blogs for a limited amount of traffic?

If you do a quick research on your competitors, you can find that there are already high rankings. However, some of them don't have quality content. That means that you can try to compete with them.

More and more publishers are entering the blogging space, but we have to think more broadly. The vast majority of people don't blog and have no interest in doing it.

On the other side every day more and more people are using the internet. In fact, the number of new people that search topics dramatically outweighs the number of people blogging on those topics.

Time flies, and almost every niche advances. That opens up a new set of keywords.

We have to think more broadly. The internet, in general, has so much potential, and we are not even close to using all of it.

There are always more products and interests to write about than ever before.

New businesses and industries are constantly being created. You can always find more discoveries and things to uncover.

I have more good news for you. If you find many articles on the same topic that you're about to write about, you can still add something new and write from your perspective. Blog posts that ranked four or more years ago wouldn't rank today.

There is always an opportunity to do it better.

Create catchy headlines, design, or hire someone to design original and eye-catching blog post covers and pins.

Three types of content that work in 2021

Now, I'm going to give you a list of 3 types of content that perform very well nowadays and I believe will be relevant for many years from now.

Questions

People that use search engines most of the time search for answers. You can do 10-20 question-based content. You can ask people in your community directly about what questions and obstacles they have and then write articles that will answer those questions. Also, you can write about related questions, which might make your blog appear more in search results.

How-tos

Guides, tutorials, helpful articles usually have a lot of value, and people spend a lot of time reading them, which is a good signal and improves your ranking.

Product-based posts

Product reviews, comparison of products, a list of best products for a specific need is another most common type of content. Also, it's easy to monetize your blog on this type of content.

It's even better if you can write all three types of articles within your blog.

Create content fast. The more seeds you plant, the better chances you have to catch some traffic and a better ranking in search engines. That also increases your domain authority.

What is best to do with the traffic that you drive to your blog?

It would be best to think about the next step after you start getting any page views. Because people say it's about 1% of the probability that a visitor will come back to your site if they don't go through opt-in.

I have discovered that the best way to engage with your audience is to build an email list.

Set up your opt-in and newsletter from the beginning, or you won't have many people returning to your site.

Final words

A lot of people get discouraged before they can really build anything. Most people don't want to work for 1-2 years before they start seeing some results. And you shouldn't do that just because someone said it to you or you read about it somewhere. Your commitment to your blog should be your decision.