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Do you want to learn how expert bloggers got their first 1,000 blog readers? I know you’re excited about this already. Going from 0 visitors per day to 50 is nice, but it’d be better if you scale that up to 1,000 fresh visitors. Isn’t it?

Rather than give you personal advice for getting few visitors to your blog, I want to show it using my step by step formula. This guide will help you thrive in this ever seemingly competitive world. If you want passive income, it begins with getting qualified visitors to your site.

The blogging industry is highly competitive. According to Forbes, there are over 60 million WordPress blogs already. And this number is expected to grow as more and more people get online. Everyone wants a piece of the pie, but only those who work smarter will smile to the bank.

Because if your blog doesn’t generate income in the first 6 months, the inspiration to continue may disappear. Don’t let that happen to you. So let’s get started with 5 simple steps to a thousand blog visitors:

Step #1: Dare to get off your blog

If you ever see someone climbing the top of a high mountain, then you can tell that the person is highly determined & brave. Blogging is for brave soldiers.

When I started blogging in 2011, I was scared to approach authority blogs like businessweek.com, problogger.net, businesinsider.com, inc.com and even marketingprofs.com. And I struggled throughout the year to get traffic, but failed woefully. As long as you refuse to connect with editors on these authority blogs, it’d be utterly impossible to get your first 1,000 visitors.

You see, there is more to blogging than publishing new posts on your blog regularly. If you’re still a beginner, get off your blog and write for other blogs with bigger audience.

The visitors you need are somewhere else, not on your blog yet. If you’re a small business owner, you could review the break down the top crm software, how to use it to automate sales and customer relationship. No small business blogger would reject such an indepth tutorial.

Step #2: Grab low-hanging fruits

If you target a seed keyword such as ‘weight loss pills’, it’d be difficult to rank in Google because high PR and authoritative blogs are already ranking for such search terms. Before you write a blog post, it’s important that you research long-tail key phrases, which your competition hasn’t discovered yet. To find such easy-to-rank keywords, here’s how to get them.

Visit Google and type in your seed keyword. Take note of the suggested search terms. I review hosting services on my blog. So I’ll just type in “best web hosting” to see what comes out. Take a look:

Google has suggested some keywords for me. Now I can copy, “best web hosting for wordpress” and plug into Google keywords planner. That way, I’ll be able to uncover alternative long-tail keywords with low, medium or no competition at all.

Go to Google keywords planner here. Paste the key phrase you copied and click “get ideas.”

Now you can see that I now have hidden long-tail keywords that I can easily dominate if I write useful and interesting content. Let’s check the competition.

Let’s copy, “what is the best web hosting service” and see how many pages are competing for that term. Bear in mind that any competition less than 150,000 is a positive sign for you to move on.

When I searched for the term, with a quote around it, here’s what I got:

The long-tail keyword has 130,000 results, which is a good thing. One of the sites that are ranking in Google top 10 is a question on Quora.com.

It’s obvious that the person asking such a question didn’t optimize to rank – but now you can do a much better job, dominate search results and drive traffic to your blog. Even though the keyword: “what is the best web hosting service,” has 70 monthly searches, you can expect more than 400 visitors from that term alone, because several seed terms are inside it.

Of course you need quality backlinks to improve your rankings. But if you can provide indepth, sharable and extremely useful content, other blogs will link to you and promote your posts naturally.

Step #3: Create high-converting landing pages

Conversion rate experts generated $1 million U.S. dollars for Moz, with a simple landing page and few emails to their loyal list. If the landing page didn’t capture interest at first, the email open rate would be poor. See the profit chart next:

As a blogger, you’ve to design your own landing page. It doesn’t have to be out of this world, just make it useful to the target audience. Make your headline bigger than the text and let your visitors/readers opt-in to your list.

Develop a funnel and use that to educate, inform and inspire fresh visitors to become loyal to your blog.

Step #4: Eliminate sidebar clutters

Bettyreddesign.com clearly pointed out the 10 things you don’t need on your sidebar. Cluttered sidebars can slow down your blog. Google and your readers don’t want slow loading blogs.

No matter how useful your posts are, if the menu, the title, the images and the entire post can’t load within 3 seconds, you’ll chase the people away.

Don’t make your sidebar like this one:

Now that you’ve researched low-hanging fruits (long-tail keywords), you’ve to target a particular phrase on your title.

But more importantly, write content that suits the reader’s intent. In other words, focus on the purpose of the keyword and don’t stuff because that era has been crucified by Google panda update.

Step #5: Dominate Google with content upgrade

This is no hype. It’s still possible to dominate Google top 10 results, if you implement the right tactics. For instance, one of my posts is ranking in #3 for a highly searched keyword, all because I upgraded a particular article written by my competition.

So how does content upgrade work?

Well, it’s a simple practice of discovering posts that went viral in the past. When you find a great topic in your niche that everyone is raving about, study it carefully and then get to work.

Let’s find the idea very quickly. Go to buzzsumo.com and type in your seed keyword, and click “Go.”

By the time you hit the ‘Go’ button, you’d see the best posts that generated a lot of social signals. See screenshot below:

See, you no longer need anybody to show you topics and headlines that will go viral, it’s obvious now.

The next step is for you to study that headline, craft a better one. Since the second post is about ‘5 SEO trends,’ in order to upgrade that, you should provide 12 SEO trends and explain all of them using data-driven points and screenshots like I did on this post.

Remember that content upgrade takes some time before you can nail a successful one. But as long as you follow the tips here, you’re ten steps ahead of your competition and sooner or later, your first 1,000 blog visitors will become real to you.

Conclusion

There you’ve it, the ultimate step by step guide for getting your first 1000 blog readers. Now you can spur action on your site and boost conversion rate just by providing useful, valuable and richer content than what is obtainable out there. In all, keep the fire burning in you and stay consistent.

There is no overnight success and if you ever find one, you’ve to know that the person who attained such a great feat didn’t sleep the night before the sudden success.

As usual, I would like to know how you generate qualified visitors to your blog. Share your strategies and let’s grow together. See you ahead!