How I got 21,000 visitors to my blog

I was over the moon the other day when I logged in to my analytics account and saw 21,000 visitors to my blog in the past month.

This didn’t happen overnight, but it’s still brought a lot of potential customers to our site and beats hands down traffic brought by our advertising and affiliates.

In the old days I used to get about 20 visitors a day to the site, and I had a sit down and think about what I changed before the blog became popular. Here’s what I came up with - I hope you have some suggestions too, as I'd love this to turn into a discussion about the best way to promote a blog post!

Networking

I think this is one of the biggest points. When I started the blog I hated networking. I’m still not very good at it but my making the effort to get involved with forums in my niche I made tonnes of people who were interested in my content and would read and share it.

Images

I now make it a rule to use at least one image in every post. It makes it look better - and I believe in the cliche that a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s easier than writing a thousand words too!

Headlines

I now put an awful lot of effort into crafting killer headlines following these guidelines.

Building up a facebook page

A lot of effort also now goes into building a facebook page, including advertising on facebook, and posting daily content and most recently holding a sweepstake. I now notice an instant increase in blog post shares whenever I post something on our facebook page.

Auto-responder

We added a free ebook to our sign up form. It hasn’t grown as fast as I would like, but over time we have built it up to nearly 3000 readers, which is a lot more people to read, share and link to our blog posts.

Social Sharing

I have added twitter, google plus, email and facebook buttons to the blog, and often ask people to share the blog post. Nowadays we often get more than 100 shares - this blog post got more than 5000 shares.

Hitting the jackpot with some keywords

Time spent going through my analytics and google adwords keywords tool paid off - just one or two posts that target the right keyword can transform the blog.

Promoting every single post

I also spend time promoting every single post I have written - I have explained how I do that here.

Tweaks to the blog design

I also increased the number of posts shown on the front page, and implemented a slider at the top showing of the best posts.

What I didn’t do!

Daily Posting

I didn’t post every day! I decided to try and really good posts several times a month instead of okay ones on a daily basis. I can’t provide a great post every day, so chose quality over quantity.

Accepting Guest Posts

I wrote a few guests posts but I (almost never) accepted guest posts

I would if I was sent a good one, but I have never seen one good enough. I’d rather not water down the quality with someone who just wants to get a link to their site and doesn’t care about my readers.

I’d love to hear how you promote your blog posts - how do you get readers?

 

wow it sure have lot of info here, all in all I still think that headline is the big issue here

I tend to learn how to write killer headline

attract visitor is a big issue too

thank for the info, just add it to my bank knowledge. apply it now

 

Getting backlinks to your blog is the absolute most important step in driving traffic

 

Cool tips...there's some really solid info here that newbies should pay attention to.

 

thanks for ur info.. it's helpful.. especially for newbies like me.. haha =)

 

blog posting is one of the best way for getting more traffic.if you want to get more visitors in your site than try to post more recent news and update it regularly.you can try different social media network for advertising your site.this will help you to attract more visitors.

 

Great post! I think having Facebook / Twitter integration is a must. Not only can it get the post off the ground but also allows users to share the story/post easily

 

Glad you found it useful, Maschit! I agree, headlines are really important.

 

Thank you I see you focus on headlines too - I really enjoyed 7 reasons why blogging gets better with alcohol!

 

Well, yeah, that's true, but just integrating is pointless unless you spend a lot of time on those networks. We have had a lot of success with facebook, but I must admit I struggle with twitter - sometimes I'll get 100 facebook shares and zero twitter shares on the blog.

 

Nice share. I'm also trying to incorporate some of the ideas you have going at my Prosperity Clicks blog.

I've been doing some research on link bait articles (an article designed to spark controversy to get massive shares). Anyone used this technique with any success?

 

ok ,deAR TO JOIN this forum and thanks for the important information related to visitor

 

Really nice info. My case is same as you that i am getting only 20 to 30 in a day. Now i will implement these strategies for sure. Thanks

 

This is a good overview.

 

awesome! your strategy is much better than me with my adfly! lol

 

It's difficult - you need to incorporate something viral with some effective blog post promotion.

 

This is a great info. I have already tried some of these, currently i am focusing only on traffic through social media sites and link exchanges.

 

Great information, thanks for sharing with us...

 

We tried it with an April Fool's post here. However, it wasn't been nearly as successful as hitting a good keyword (374 shares for the 'viral' post as opposed to over 5000 shares for a post focussed on a high frequency keyword.)

 

thank you! definitely something to learn from that