Answer this question…
Do you want to learn how expert bloggers got their first 1,000 blog readers? I know youβre excited about this already. Going from 0 visitors per day to 50 is nice, but itβd be better if you scale that up to 1,000 fresh visitors. Isnβt 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 doesnβt generate income in the first 6 months, the inspiration to continue may disappear. Donβt let that happen to you. So letβs 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, itβd 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 youβre 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 youβre 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 βweight loss pillsβ, itβd 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, itβs important that you research long-tail key phrases, which your competition hasnβt discovered yet. To find such easy-to-rank keywords, hereβs 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 Iβll just type in βbest web hostingβ to see what comes out. Take a look:
Google has suggested some keywords for me. Now I can copy, βbest web hosting for wordpressβ and plug into Google keywords planner. That way, Iβll 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 βget ideas.β
Now you can see that I now have hidden long-tail keywords that I can easily dominate if I write useful and interesting content. Letβs check the competition.
Letβs copy, βwhat is the best web hosting serviceβ 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, hereβs 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.
Itβs obvious that the person asking such a question didnβt optimize to rank β but now you can do a much better job, dominate search results and drive traffic to your blog. Even though the keyword: βwhat is the best web hosting service,β 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 didnβt capture interest at first, the email open rate would be poor. See the profit chart next:
As a blogger, youβve to design your own landing page. It doesnβt 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 donβt need on your sidebar. Cluttered sidebars can slow down your blog. Google and your readers donβt want slow loading blogs.
No matter how useful your posts are, if the menu, the title, the images and the entire post canβt load within 3 seconds, youβll chase the people away.
Donβt make your sidebar like this one:
Now that youβve researched low-hanging fruits (long-tail keywords), youβve to target a particular phrase on your title.
But more importantly, write content that suits the readerβs intent. In other words, focus on the purpose of the keyword and donβt stuff because that era has been crucified by Google panda update.
Step #5: Dominate Google with content upgrade
This is no hype. Itβs 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, itβs 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.
Letβs find the idea very quickly. Go to buzzsumo.com and type in your seed keyword, and click βGo.β
By the time you hit the βGoβ button, youβd 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, itβs obvious now.
The next step is for you to study that headline, craft a better one. Since the second post is about β5 SEO trends,β 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, youβre ten steps ahead of your competition and sooner or later, your first 1,000 blog visitors will become real to you.
Conclusion
There youβve 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, youβve to know that the person who attained such a great feat didnβt 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 letβs grow together. See you ahead!
4 Responses
Thanks. It was really a great article. I got some new point to practice. As a new blogger I learnt some valuable thing. Thanks Chibuzor
Where and how can we get the services of Mike…there is no link in the author box…can you please send me an email?
Alyona. This is valuable content for any new bloggers. Can we discuss more programmatic SEO rather than surface level SEO? I got a question how is density in you code going to affect us in a few years time. That’s one concern I have. Right now my best results come from high density keyword targeting in my actual code print. Google seems to be giving me decent rankings for this technique. However I’m concerned about updates in the future. To be clear I’m not talking about keyword stuffing.
To be honest with you Wayne, I’ve not really been after keywords density since the last Panda updates. But I think there should still be a rule on the ratio of keywords in a page, depending on the length.
Tread carefully with Google, especially now that they’re giving you decent rankings for the practice. High Density Keyword targeting looks to me like keywords stuffing ( no offence).
Thank you so much for reading my post.