In this blog post, I’ll share how to get people to visit your blog, how to grow your blog traffic, get more views on your blog and how to create a strategy to promote your blog that drives more targeted traffic.  

I’m not going through all the usual tactics you always hear – for example, sharing your blog on social media posts. Instead, I will focus on the work and strategies you can put into practice right now and start increasing your views on your blog content immediately.

Because quality traffic is essential to monetize your blog; more traffic means:

• More email subscribers
• Better domain authority and improved search rankings (if your blogs aren’t getting any traffic, Google has no reason to feature them in search results)
• More leads generated
• More money – whatever your monetization strategy is

However, I want to clarify that it’s NOT about getting as much traffic as possible.

It’s about consistently getting quality traffic so that your blog is seen and growing your income.

That’s what you need to focus on – not so-called vanity numbers that ultimately don’t make any real difference to your bottom line.

If you have asked how to get more traffic to your blog and generate upwards of 5,000 visitors in the first month, read on.

How to get your blog seen: Easy steps to drive traffic to a new blog

Focus on evergreen content

Whenever you create any content for your blog, try to ensure it’s evergreen. When you create evergreen content, content that stands the test of time and continues to be relevant months and even years down the line, it eliminates the need to create new content constantly.

Plus, the longer your content is relevant, the more backlinks it will get, the more social shares (and don’t forget to leverage social media management tools to help you save time). Not to mention how it will help increase blog traffic.

And that is amazing for SEO. Organic traffic: the most important traffic you’ll ever get.  

Each blog post you write needs to target a keyword with high search volumes.

And even more so, your blog posts need to be bigger and better than all the other blog search results you get for that keyword.

Think of it this way; at the moment, you’re working on creating 4 staple blog posts that each target a specific keyword:

• The first one gets about 10,000 searches per month
• The second, 5,000
• The third, 6,500
• And the fourth, 7,000

In total, that’s 28,500 searches every month.

And recent data shows that about 31.7% of all clicks go to the first Google search results.

In that case, that would mean that if you get the top spots for these keywords, you will get at least 8,000 website visitors every month from these 4 keywords/blog posts. Which is highly targeted traffic, and they are searches from people genuinely interested in learning what YOU can show them.

In other words, the large majority of them are potential leads for your business.

And that’s HUGE.

This is why SEO should be your number 1 focus.

Even if I personally grew my blog on the back of my social media presence – Twitter, I still love you, too, I promise! – the truth is, I was there from the beginning, so that’s a big reason I was able to build such a big audience on social media and use it to drive thousands of visitors every month, just from Twitter.

But social media is fickle and filled with so much content competing for people’s attention. That said, if you are posting on social media ensure that you schedule your posts and make sure you know the best time to post – I find it helpful to create a social media content calendar so I can keep track. And whilst I want to focus on other ways to drive traffic to your blog, social media is still very powerful and the obvious choice. Don’t be afraid to link text to your web pages where relevant as well.

Search engines are here to stay. And while algorithms might frequently be changing, SEO is still the best strategy for generating high-quality traffic consistently.

So, if you haven’t already, get SEMrush to research keywords, research your competitors’ SEO strategy and create backlinking campaigns (which we’ll get to in a moment). Get the SEOPressor plugin for your blog to help optimize your blog posts for search engines.

Start your backlinking campaign

Backlinks – links from other blogs and websites that go to your homepage or blog pages – are extremely valuable.

They help boost your SEO (Google looks for backlinks to decide how authoritative a website or page is) and can also help you get traffic directly.

But the most crucial aspect is the SEO value.

Backlinking is something that you should constantly do every month to drive as many backlinks as possible to your site.

However, not just any links will do; you need to get links from quality websites; otherwise, Google will penalise you (plus, they don’t count for much if the website is too small).

So focus your efforts on getting backlinks from websites with a Domain Authority of at least 30-40. As for the big websites (top-tier sites with a Domain Authority of over 75), you can leverage guest blogging strategies to help you generate new, high-quality links every month.

Here’s what you need to do.

First, understand what you’re looking for, i.e. authoritative and relevant websites.

You can find out how authoritative a site is by their:

• Domain Authority – google “domain authority checker” on google, and you’ll find a bunch of free tools that you can use (look for websites with a DA of 30+) – or even better, use SEMrush to quickly look up any website (and even see their traffic and other interesting goodies)
• Domain Rating – google “website authority checker” to find out and focus on blogs with a DR of 50+
• Relevancy: getting links from just any website won’t work (Google caught on pretty quickly that people were abusing backlinking strategies and getting links from just any websites they could get); you need to focus on websites and pages that are related to the page or blog post you’re trying to promote

And here are a few other tips for backlinking that you need to keep in mind:

• Links in the body of the text hold more value
• Creating profiles on various websites and forums and posting your links there won’t work (and it might even be detrimental to your cause!)
• Your link anchor text (i.e. the clickable text where your link resides) should not be identical to your link – websites have massively abused this, so Google might look at your matching anchor text/link as spammy. For example, if you were selling a social media tool and constantly using the anchor text “social media tool” to link to it, it might do more damage than good in the long run.
• Focus on “dofollow links” whenever a link is marked as rel= “nofollow”; Google takes that as a link it shouldn’t consider when ranking your page.

Now, let’s talk about backlinking strategies.

Strategy 1: Create unique visual content

Whenever someone uses a visual on their blog created by someone else, they have to link back to the source.

(and if they don’t, you can email them to let them know and get them to place the link)

So this is a really easy, quick way to generate some backlinks; here are some types of visual content you can create:

• Interesting statistics about your industry
• Diagrams and charts
• Infographics (with statistics, factoids, tips, etc.)

Strategy 2: Email outreach backlinking strategies

Outreach campaigns are the easiest ways to generate large numbers and backlinks to your blog.

And it’s so straightforward to do.

• First, you need the content that you want people to link to
• Look for relevant websites to get a link placement.
• Then, you’ll need to find out their email addresses: use Snov.io to find them quickly (as you’ll need to find hundreds, even thousands of emails – you have to automate the process as much as possible, or it will simply take much too long)
• Reach out to all of these bloggers using an outreach tool – as before, you need a tool to automate the process, or it will take too long. Get a tool like Buzzstream, and you’ll be able to send hundreds of personalized emails a day – trust me, it will make things so much easier for you.

Keep in mind that these types of campaigns are all about numbers. You won’t see results if you reach out to a few people daily.

Not only do you need a lot of links for this to work, but most of these contacts will probably not answer or take action. That’s why you need to email many of them so that you’ll get a percentage of them to link to your content.

Let’s discuss strategy.

The Backlink Gap

The easiest way to discover backlinking opportunities – and quality ones too! – is to find the websites that are already linking to your competitors but aren’t linking to you.

To do this, get SEMrush and use their backlink gap tool – all you have to do is enter your blog URL along with up to 4 other competitors, and it will tell you all the backlinks they have that you don’t.

It’s really that easy.

From there:

• Separate all the big websites, the ones with high authority scores of over 85 (you can order the list by their score). For these, you’ll need a different strategy – a more personalized approach or, in most cases, you’ll need to guest post for them (so check to see if that is how they got the link as it usually is the case!)
• Then with the “smaller” sites – those with an authority score of under 85 – you can make a separate list to reach out to a cold outreach campaign.

Just from this strategy alone, you can potentially find hundreds of thousands of backlinking opportunities.

Plus, you can take it further and look up other similar blogs and websites from your niche – they don’t even have to be direct competitors.

And it’s really that easy.

All you need are a few tools:

• SEMrush, to help you find these backlinking opportunities
• Snov.io to help you find their emails faster
• And Buzzstream to help you reach out to them at scale

Guest blogging on high-tier sites

The best backlinks – the ones that count the most weight in Google’s eyes – are those from high-tier sites: the most popular blogs in your niche. Think The Next Web, Inc., Forbes… those sites.

Plus, those sites can bring back some traffic directly – you can expect a few thousand clicks a month coming from these publications if you guest post for enough prominent publications and have published multiple articles. But that takes time to build up.

So, to build up your backlinks from high-tier sites, set yourself a monthly goal to pitch:

• 5 high-tier websites a month with a DA of 85+
• 10 medium-tier websites a month with a DA of 70 to 85

As for finding them, it’s super easy.

You can start with my list of 5,000+ websites that accept guest posts in over 35 niches (including business, marketing, finance, social media, food, parenting, pets, and so many others). It’s the most up-to-date list you can find online: most others haven’t been updated in years (or are automated!), but this list is hand-picked and super up-to-date.

Or google your niche + “guest blogging guidelines”/” guest blogging”/” contributor guidelines”.

Then, check out their guidelines page – there, you’ll usually be able to see exactly what they expect from your pitch and your article (also, many of them now require you to write the content first, then submit it).

To help with this process – as it does take time to write all of this content – you should get a freelancer to assist.

It might cost you, sure, but it will help you save a lot of time which can be better used elsewhere for things that are difficult to outsource: monetizing your blog.

Think of it this way: you’re the owner of this business. And this project is a part of your content marketing strategy. You can’t do it all yourself – you need to hire someone else to do it.

You can find bloggers and writers on platforms like Fiverr – I recommend you try to find someone for $0.10 per word (prices generally go up to $0.25 per word, but in my experience, you can find great writers for much less than that).

It will take some time to find the right fit – someone who not only writes well enough but that knows your industry and gets your style – but once you’ve found someone good, you’ll have a good collaborator you can rely on.

Other strategies to consider

While SEO should be your primary focus, that doesn’t mean you should rely on a single traffic source. Quite the contrary, you need multiple streams you can rely on monthly.

Here are the other strategies and platforms that you should add to your promotional strategy:

• Install the Social Warfare plugin on your website so that your readers can easily share your content
• Build up your social media presence and share your posts regularly (not just once, but repeatedly) – use a social media scheduling tool to schedule all of your content so that you only have to spend a few minutes a day on social media. If you don’t want to deal with that, get my social media calendar here – it has over 500+ ready-made images and updates for 12 different categories (including business, marketing, finance, food, parenting, pets, and many others)
• Join relevant social media groups and blog-sharing groups – there are quite a few great ones on Facebook.
• Promote your content to your email list (especially when you have something new and exciting) – you can use ConvertKit to manage your list and easily send email broadcasts
• Join blogging communities to boost social shares (basically, you’re getting other bloggers and influencers to share your content with their audience)

And don’t forget to check your analytics regularly.

Find out where your traffic is coming from, which blogs get the most traffic. This will help you see what channels to focus on – and what other content to write in the future.

To sum it all up, here’s a wrap-up of everything we discussed today:

• Focus on creating evergreen content
• Get SEOPressor to optimize your blog and SEMrush to find backlinking opportunities properly
• Create visual content that other bloggers will want to link back to
• Start a backlinking outreach campaign using Snov.io (to find emails at scale) and Buzzstream (to send thousands of personalized emails automatically)
• Start a guest blogging campaign: target 5 tier sites every month (DA of 85+) and 10 mid-tier sites (DA of 70-85)
• Get a freelance writer (contact me here if you’d like to learn more about my content writing services) to help you create content at scale.
• Add other platforms and strategies to your blog promotion strategy (social media, blogging communities, social media groups, email broadcasts, etc.)