Growing a site from zero to 10,000 monthly visitors is a BIG deal.
Did you know that 81% of blogs NEVER get more than 100 visitors a day?
If you are struggling to grow your website traffic, this post is exclusively for you.
But before diving into the details, let’s first talk about the benefits of getting 10,000+ visitors per month to your blog or website.
- Your affiliate product sales will skyrocket
- You will see more social shares
- You will start getting more buzz online
- You will generate more blog comments
- Your overall website sales will improve
Now, let me walk you through few insider strategies you can use to grow your site from 0 to 10,000+ visitors a month.
Growing A Site from 0 to 10,000+ Visitors Per Month
#1. Create highly shareable content
You may think writing great, lengthy content and publishing it is enough.
No, it’s not.
Once you are done with content creation, you must give a reason for your readers to share it extensively.
Some content easily goes viral on social media. You need to make your content more actionable, include attractive images and great design. You need to produce the type of content that gets shared crazily.
You need to ask yourself, will the content I am publishing be relevant after 1 year? If you create content that is visually appealing, useful, and informative then it will be automatically shared.
WHY?
Because, more social shares = better search rankings.
You need to create such engaging content that your readers can’t resist sharing it.
That being said, the question remains – how can you create shareable content?
- Make your content more visually appealing. How? Use Infographics. No matter what the topic is, it gets easily shared.
- Be unique while writing content. Never duplicate the content on your site. Why? If the same content is available on several other sites, why would anyone come and visit your site? So, always write unique content.
- Use simple language that is understandable by anyone.
- Bring a positive emotional feeling in your content that connects you with readers. If possible, tell an inspiring story or report on thrilling and exciting news based on your topic.
- Write a title for your blog post that attracts your readers. It should instill excitement in the reader's mind and entice them to read and share. For example, “He saw a different shadow in the midnight, what happened next?”, “What are the amazing things you could do during pregnancy?”
- Most of the viral content is based on controversial topics. If your chosen topic has something that has controversial statements, then use it.
#2. Do these 5 things after publishing a blog post
Well, you spent good amount of time in writing amazing content and you finally published your article. Now, the most important thing you need to do is to PROMOTE. Without promotion, your content won't get any attention online (especially if you are a beginner). Here’s how you can promote your posts to get more buzz online.
- Share on all of the popular social media platforms. Don’t limit your post by only sharing on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Use the power of social media and get the most out of it. Try using Pinterest, Instagram or even Snapchat!
- Write answers to relevant questions on Quora and link back to your posts. Why? Quora is a great platform that can bring a huge audience to your blog.
- Leave comments on other blogs. Why? In order to grow as a successful blogger, you must connect with other bloggers. To expand your network, leave worthy and useful comments on other blogs in your niche.
- Do blogger outreach: Blogger outreach is all about building relationships. You can write guest posts for other blogs, conduct expert interviews, help other bloggers to come up with amazing topic ideas and so on.
- Use forums: Blog communities or forums are like social network for bloggers. In order to drive good amount of traffic to your site, you must engage with other bloggers. Check out: MyBlogU.
What you will get by promoting your content and collaborating with other bloggers?
- You will build relationships with other bloggers.
- Submitting posts in forums can increase your site's rank.
- You will get quality backlinks which improves your site PA (Page Authority) and DA (Domain Authority).
- You will get latest updates related to your blog niche.
Here are few places where you can promote your blog posts for maximum exposure.
Recommended: Social Media For Bloggers: Learn How To Drive Hoards Of Social Media Traffic To Your Blog
#3. Promote other bloggers
No one succeeds alone. You need the help of others to succeed in any field. But the most common mistake majority of the bloggers make while promoting their blog is they promote themselves.
Instead of self-promotion, promote other bloggers. Read other blogs in your niche, share their stuff on twitter, Facebook and leave comments on their posts. Link out to their blog posts frequently and let them know about it. Sooner or later, they will start doing the same things for you!
You can also create “weekly roundup posts” where you can link out the best blog posts from others in your niche. Once you are done publishing them, you can simply ask the bloggers whom you’ve linked to promote your stuff.
As a rule of thumb, share at least 5 posts of other bloggers on Twitter, Facebook, and Google plus weekly. Make sure to tag them with their usernames so they get notified whenever you give a shout out to their content.
It’s also a smart strategy to link out to other bloggers frequently. Let them know when you do link to other bloggers and as time goes by they'll also reciprocate by linking to your blog’s content. That’s how blogging works. Focus on building relationships by helping others and you will get the rewards in the long run.
#4. Start using long tail keywords
Long tail keywords have high conversion value because it has less search traffic and more importantly they are specific. To generate organic search traffic to your blog, you must use long tail keywords in your blog post.
There are several sources to get targeted traffic but among all those search engine is evergreen. You can get traffic from search engine only by using long tail keywords in your post.
How can you find long tail keywords?
- To get long tail keywords for your blog, use Long Tail Pro keyword research tool. It gives you so many keyword suggestions and ideas.
- If you want more keyword ideas, you can use Uber Suggest which generates more keyword ideas than soovle.com.
- Get the best out of most popular question and answer website Quora. It helps you to frame keyword ideas for your niche blog. While using this for your blog, search your blog niche topic questions.
- There is yet another awesome free tool to generate long tail keywords is Keywordtool.io
- With Google ads planner, you can find what type of keywords are growing popular. It will be very useful to find long tail keywords.
- Try to find the long tail keywords with less search volume. Select those keywords with 500 to 2,000 monthly searches so you will have better chances to get first page rankings.
Still not satisfied? There is one powerful tool which generates lot many keyword ideas in addition to top ranking URL’s for those keywords. It gives complete details including page authority and domain authority. Go to Moz Analytics Keyword Analysis Tool.
Quick tip: Make sure to use a better hosting service to run your WordPress sites as your hosting affects your website speed and rankings to a large extent. So if you are just starting out and thinking about building a high traffic website, give #1 priority to your web hosting service and you can stay peacefully in the long run.
Answer the Public is a new keyword research tool you should use. Take a look at this video to see how it works:
#5. Build backlinks, the more the better
If you are the one who struggles to make your blog to the top of Google, you would probably heard about the power of backlinks. You might also have heard about on-site SEO and off-site SEO.
Through off-site SEO, you can build quality backlinks from authority sites. What is offsite SEO? It is to get good number of backlinks from high authority sites.
Now, how to build backlinks to your blog?
- Do guest posting on authority sites related to your blog niche. Authority sites are the ones which has high PA(Page Authority) and DA(Domain Authority)
- Take an active participation in your blog niche forums. Submit your new blog posts on relevant forums in your niche.
- Do blog commenting related to your niche and use your recent blog post links while commenting instead of using home page links.
- Submit your posts to blog communities
- Make pdf out of your blog posts and share through document sharing sites.
- Interview influential bloggers.
- Use wikipedia to build backlinks. How? Anyone can edit the information and add pages to wikipedia. Find broken links and update them with your blog link.
#6. Proper on-page SEO can boost your search rankings
Make sure to learn the basics of SEO if you’re struggling to get more traffic from search engines. If you are craving to improve your website’s ranking position, you must know proper on-page SEO techniques
Both off-page SEO and on-page SEO are needed to get maximum exposure in search engines. However, on-page SEO is more important as it is where you optimize your content for a target keyword.
Well, how you can boost your search rankings using on-page SEO?
- Content is king. Only a well-written article survives in the digital world. Always write unique and useful content. It affects your blog SEO ranking based on the amount of time visitors spending time on your blog. You can increase this time only through lengthy(minimum 1000 words), unique and useful content.
- Write catchy titles for your blog post. The first thing that appears in search engine is your post title. If that is not interesting, readers won’t even click on it.
- Use attractive sub-headings in your blog post. It instills enthusiasm to readers to read the complete article.
- While ranking your website, Google and bing considers website page-loading speed so make sure that you optimize image sizes in your post as it helps in reducing file size.
- Improve user-experience. You can do this by using proper heading tags in your content.
- Use Yoast SEO plugin for basic On-Page SEO and never forget to add meta description to your post. Make sure you include proper keyword in it.
- While writing content, make sure that you keep the keyword in blog post title, first paragraph, image alt tags.
- Do internal linking to your blog posts.
- Use Infographics in your blog post and give your blog link in it.
Final thoughts on growing a site from zero to 10,000+ visitors a month
Starting a WordPress blog is really easy. But making it profitable is really not. Building a high traffic blog takes time so you need to be consistent with your efforts.
Set goals. Create a content plan for next 3 months. Use keywords wisely while writing your content and attract as many links as possible to your content. Soon you will start noticing a huge growth in your search rankings and traffic.
Do you have any questions? Do you have any more tips to grow a site from 0 to 10,000+ visitors a month? Do let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Hi Anil,
Great info. Even though i have been blogging for more then 2 years now still i never made use of infographic’s in my blog. This article has given a different edge to think overall.
Thanks for sharing !
Hello Anil
Really thanks a lot for sharing your valuable thoughts with us. Many things I have found new in your post. Really it was interesting and surprising. Thanks a lot for your words and sharing your knowledge. After all, Sharing is Caring.
I thought that I have to stop reading your post in the middle way, but the writing quality was so motivational and interesting that I had to complete the whole post. Its really valuable for my own personal skills. I will keep following and of course I expect more posts from you for increase my knowledge base. Thank you once again.
Hi Sinha,
Thanks so much for the appreciation.
Writing long form of content is NEVER easy especially when you are writing about difficult topics like SEO. And increasing traffic of a site is not hard when you have a proper plan.
Having a plan, SEO strategy and implementing your plan – these are the keys to SEO success.
Keep rocking.
Hi Anil,
Great tips here, you have done a fantastic job!
The best tip I can give to help generate more traffic to a blog is to do an expert roundup. These posts are bulletproof and if executed the write way can generate a huge amount of traffic and social shares.
Start by crafting a question that answers the biggest questions your audience has. Don’t just jump on the first topic though. Do your research and find what really makes your readers tick.
Quora is a great place to find burning questions. You can also look at amazon book reviews on the topic and see what questions come up time and time again. Lastly check out niche forums, Reddit and similar sites.
This is more than enough to help you find that burning question.
Now create a spread sheet that has a column for a name, email and Twitter URL. You are going to populate this with experts that you want to contribute. I would always aim for around 100 because some will not reply or will not want to participate.
Last step is to email them all and ask them your question. Keep the email brief and straight to the point. Once you have all the questions back compile them into a blog post.
When your post is live ask the experts to check it out and share!
I would suggest any new blogger does this to really get the ball rolling!
Thanks again Anil….
Joe
Hi Joe,
Fantastic.
I personally like Quora. It’s a great platform to connect with a ton of great people.
Make sure to spend quality time in writing great answers instead of just linking back to your stuff. That’s how you get more fan base through Quora.
And what you said about doing expert interviews is TRUE.
They attract a ton of shares, links and traffic really quickly.
Thanks for stopping by!
Agreed. Expert roundups are good if done in moderation. They are easy to share and those who do contribute will share too.
Having a small group of dedicated bloggers to support you is also a good tip. You can have a small FB group with people who compliment you and serve similar audiences.
Great tip Sara.
Having a small tribe (even if it’s 50 to 100) is great.
They can boost your social shares. They can link back to you. They can refer you. They can increase your overall engagement.
Thanks for stopping by.
Hello, and wow that is a huge amount of visitor within a month. Hope it works for me too. Thank you for sharing this amazing thing with us. Will ping you back with my results.
Thanks for great tips,
Generally most web pages allow us to put only homepage link, not keyword.
Hey Anil,
This year is going to be a productive year for many bloggers. People are taking a step further for the SEO.
Writing the shareable content is necessary. The most important thing is how you manage to get is shared.
On-page SEO is always the best thing.
Comment on other blogs and build human bonds. Spread the love and get it back.
Thanks for sharing the guide.
~Ravi
Hi Ravi,
SEO is evolving along with the years.
Over a decade ago, you would have gotten first page results just by churning out more content but it’s not working now.
What’s working now is “quality over quantity”.
That’s why people started creating HUGE posts to get better rankings. It also helps readers to get in-depth information about particular topics.
Thanks for the comment!
Anil, that was great! Those tips are a serious eye opener for me.
Hi Anil!
Thanks for this awesome article. It’s been a long time since your last post. Your SEO tips are always helpful. Keep up the great work.
Hi Anil,
Wonderful article! I agree with your all points and thinking that I’m not doing guest blogging. This is added in my to do list of 2017.
Writing the good content is not enough now we need to work very hard to compete with other. We need to write and promote heavily on all social media sites to get more social signals.
Leaving comments on other blogs is still works and will always work. We need to read the the article understand the topic and then leave a meaningful comment and don’t forget to appreciate the author. This way we can build the good relationship with other bloggers. Also, make sure before you leave your comment, share that post on social sites and follow the author.
Thanks for sharing the great post!
Hi Bashir,
Guest blogging is the surest way to build relationships.
Just don’t consider it as a link building strategy. When you have good relationships with other bloggers, getting links from them won’t be hard.
That’s why focus on people, not links or traffic.
Also make sure to write detailed comments by adding value (just like you did) to get attention from the blog authors.
Keep rocking.
From 0 to 10,000 visits per month!! That would be a dream come true for me. But honestly, it requires a lot of effort from your side. It is never easy. The tips shared above are great but requires consistency from your side as a blogger…I feel so. You cannot just start and leave things as it is and keep hoping for miracles. All the tips shared above should be followed strictly and regularly to gain expected results from your blogging efforts.
Hi Ashwani,
In deed that’s a tough job, but possible.
Just make sure to do keyword research before writing posts. Also learn how to properly optimize your posts for search engines (you can use WP SEO by Yoast plugin).
Do social media posting, commenting and guest posting on other blogs by linking to some of your posts that are relevant. That’s how you get initial traction with SEO.
Let me know your thoughts.
Thank you for great tips Anil sir. These SEO tips would really be helpful for newbies like me. 🙂
Hi Anil,
Great post. Getting 10,000+ page views is not an easy task. But I’m sure this strategies you outlined here will be very helpful.
Appreciate the tips.
To be successful one must tap each possible source that can contribute to traffic. A 360° campaign is a must. Identify a niche, write around such a topic, look for specific keywords to include, promote it through referral sites and use social media effectively. This way ensures fruitful results.
Pleased to find a mention of backlinks and SEO. This is something that many of the writers don’t find important.
Thanks Anil!
Hi Hemang,
Perfect thoughts. Having a bird view around your niche helps a TON.
It also gives you ideas about how to write great content, drive more traffic and increase your sales. Here are few more..
Always make sure to do a thorough competitor research before diving into a niche. That way you can easily do SWOT analysis.
Also focus on keyword research so you can easily validate your ideas and monetization strategies.
Keep rocking.
Woow!
I never see a short article with great content like this and which are on point.
This is an awesome post every blogger should read to grow our site.
This is my first time in your blog and its will be my breakfast everyday.
Thanks for sharing useful information.
Cheers,
Hemant.
Hey Anil,
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to monetize online content. While there are many true stories of Internet entrepreneurs amassing small fortunes by delivering high-converting referral leads to affiliate businesses, this relatively straightforward concept isn’t always as simple to execute as it appears.
Affiliate marketing is an effective money-making strategy for countless online entities – however, as straightforward as it is in theory, success is rarely as easy as it looks. The best way to build a dedicated audience for any blog is to carefully and clearly define its target audience right from the start, and then create content that caters to that audience. It is also considered as important strategy for creating and publishing a successful blog is to develop content that isn’t readily available elsewhere in the blogosphere or on the web. Eventually, thanks for sharing your experience with us.
With best regards,
Amar kumar
Hi Anil, thanks for sharing this. I have just recently heard about Quora and had it in mind to go over and check it out. Reading this has just confirmed to me that I really should be using this! Thanks for that!
Enjoy the journey!
Thanks, Anil, for this post. For a site to succeed the first step is knowing your audience well. And to cater the audience and gain their curiosity and interest regarding the business is something that can only be done by creative and excellent content marketing. So thank you for this post!!
That’s a great insight.
Knowing your target audience is the key to succeed online. By knowing your audience, it becomes easier for you to really focus on what matters to them (content, products and freebies).
Also make sure to focus on analysing your competitor sites. Figure out how they are getting more traffic and links – that way you get a ton of ideas on what works better for your site to increase search rankings.
Huge traffic is the main target of any blogger. Blogging communities and social media sites help us a lot to grow a site.
I appreciate Anil for writing the post in detail. You have covered all important points and it looks like an encyclopedia for new bloggers.
Cheers !
Hi Manoj,
Thanks so much for the kind words.
Well, it’s not an encyclopedia.. I just wrote around 2k words by including some of the best SEO tips I have been using for my sites to grow traffic.
I’d be glad if you implement them and get some great results.
Let me know if you have any questions..
Hey Anil,
Thanks for sharing some great tips to grow blog traffic its really helpful for my blog
Hi Anil,
I like the advice of picking a topic that is somewhat controversial and then making use of those controversial topics. It makes a lot of sense as people are very unlikely to share something that is quite bland.
Thank you so much for sharing these tips, Anil. You have provided nice blogging strategy and driving traffic strategy in few months.
Actually, Reaching 10000 visitors per month is really a good thing and in this matter, the keyword research and analysis needed very much.
Hello Anil,
Lately I have been reading a lot of importance about infographics, though I have never used one in my blog. I really have to look it up and get one going.
Thanks for all the tips.
Hi Praveen,
They work like a charm.
You can use tools like Canva to create stunning infographics or you can find someone on Fiverr for cheap to get unique designs (if you don’t have time).
Make sure to pick the best topic for your content and also give others an easy way to embed your infographics on their sites.
Thanks for stopping by!
Hi Anil,
Great article these guidelines will really help me in generating good traffic to my site. I’ll make sure that all the tips by you should be followed in same manner as described in the article and will update you with my feedback on it.
I started doing that on Quora already, but I will use some of your other suggestions as well. thanks.
– Use Yoast SEO plugin for basic On-Page SEO and never forget to add meta description to your post. Make sure you include proper keyword in it.
This part needs updating, while Yoast is OK for some basic on-page SEO, Google is now focusing on semantics and a broader context. Classic keyword “stuffing” won’t work anymore. MOZ’s Rand Fishkin recently did a great article on this topic.
Also, rich snippets play an important role in optimizing content for SERP, you could add that as well to the list.
Other than that, great article 😉
Hi Anil
I just want to thank you for this very informative post. I’m completely new to blogging, and this captures the main things I feel I should be focusing on at this point. I especially found #4 helpful, as I’ve installed Yoast SEO on my blog, but been struggling to figure out how to do proper keyword management.
I’ve bookmarked this post now, and will definitely check it out every now and then, depending on which area I’m focusing on.
Again, thank you so much!!
Great tips! Whenever anyone says blogging is easy has never tried it – the sheer quantity of work that goes into every post and then the promotion having to be 10x that…I just blog as a hobby and I have a lot of respect for anyone who can make it work. Bloggers need to have that 360 view of the process you’ve outlined here, often it’s so easy to focus on one element – content, social, backlinks and not deliver on all of them.
Emma
Hey Anil,
Great list of actionable steps for improving traffic. If you ask me organic search is the smartest investment, and writing epic content for long tail keywords is probably the best strategy for the long run.
There are few things I can add here…
Relevance is probably the most important factor in determining what is shown to users versus what is not. So not only does your text need to be relevant, but you have to achieve relevance site-wide. This means more articles using a similar niche jargon, and more related topics covered. Interlinking from such relevant pages will be far more valuable.
Then, citing authoritative resources will help even more. All things being equal, the page that points out to authority websites will always be deemed more credible. Just for example, our guide on how to lose belly fat includes citations to more than 20 relevant studies.
User metrics are very important if you want your page to stay relevant. So improving time spent on site, minimizing bounce rate and increasing completion rates is crucial.
For increasing completion rates, a good tactic would be to include a Pdf resource as a downloadable file.
Original images also help. So instead of using stock footage, try creating your own pictures. A simple entry-level DSLR camera can suffice.
Hello Anil
Thanks for sharing, this is really useful and informative.I`ve never heard/read anywhere that you can share your recent blog link instead of the standard homepage link, this is something really worth trying.
Now to on page SEO, using keywords in images Alt tags, now if I’m doing a product review, let`s say im doing ……..pictures review, do I include the word review in the ALT tags for the images?
This is confusing, we learn to tag images with the keyword but not sure about this.
Very informative, thanks for sharing
I switched from All-in-One SEO to Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin as I think it does a better job overall. Love it.
Very interesting article
I have been optimizing my on page SEO lately using Yoast plugin which I am a big fan. I do agree that building website is easy but getting traffic is harder.
I am interested to know how do you do blogger outreach, how do you know which one to contact and how to get in contact with them. Would be great if you can write a post on that.
Cheers