Growing Blog Traffic: 100K Uniques P/M And 10 Lessons Learnt Along The Way

Tweak Your Biz got 100K unique visits during December, 2012. It’s taken us three years to build up to this level of traffic, and we’ve made mistakes and learnt lots along the way. Here’s what it has taken to manage a blog from a standing start to delivering this level of traffic.

Growing Blog Traffic

# 1. Ambition

To build a large audience, you have to have the ambition to believe that it is possible:

• That requires you to have both long-term and shorter goals that will challenge you to succeed.
• Expect that you will make mistakes. I’ve made plenty but ensure that you learn something from each and every one.

# 2. Consistency

The key differentiator in growing traffic is in ensuring that you are consistent over the longer-term.

• It’s easy to start off with lots of enthusiasm but then give up when you’re don’t see a quick return.
• Growing an audience takes time. It will probably take months and years so ensure that you manage your expectations and commitment accordingly.

# 3. Quality and quantity

Of course, the quality of your content is very important but producing a quality post ever few months or weeks won’t get you very far.

• Most studies indicate that it takes at least a post a day to deliver steady growth
• While this may not be an exact requirement for everyone, I would advise that you will need to at least consider a posting strategy of 3-4 posts per week.

# 4. Networking

Very few bloggers or businesses will grow on their content alone; networking is a critical part of growing traffic.

This requires you to:

1. Link out to other bloggers and businesses
2. Ask and respond to comments
3. Comment on other blogs
4. Share other people’s content
5. And generally play an active part in the blogging community

# 5. SEO

I’ve written about the importance of SEO here before but creating content without researching and carrying out the basics of SEO well is about the silliest thing a blogger can do.

# 6. Research

Every post you create should be researched thoroughly:

• Research ensures that each post is substantiated.
• It helps the reader to take what you write seriously and ultimately delivers your content ROI.
• Not only that, but researching is both a great way to network and educate yourself as you go.

# 7. Editing

All great writers spend more time editing than they do creating or writing content. Refine your message so that you are confident:

• You are communicating effectively with your reader.
• And that you are getting all your points across well.

Remember, editing is what makes one blog post stand out over another.

# 8. Headlines and formatting

Spending time on and crafting catchy and engaging headlines can make a huge difference towards getting people to read your content or not.

I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve seen good content hidden by bad headlines.

Again, formatting your content so that it is suitable for online readers on the web is extremely important and something I’ve written about on here before.

1. Images,
2. Sub headings,
3. First paragraph,
4. Paragraph length,
5. Bullets and numbering

Are all critical components towards holding the reader’s attention, online and should never be overlooked.

# 9. Social

You will need to appropriately push your content out across your social media channels and encourage your community and readers to share your content with their networks.

• Make sure this is easy for them to do by installing a reliable commenting system and social share buttons on your blog.
• Manage your social proof. People are more likely to comment and share when they see that others already have, it’s human nature.

# 10. Post length

While there is a widely held belief that shorter is better, this has not been our collective experience here at Tweak Your Biz. More often, it’s the meatier and in-depth posts that deliver significant traffic over the longer-term.

Whether you write longer or shorter posts, you should try to discover and write for evergreen content opportunities, that’s where the greatest traffic potential exists.

So there you have it, 10 lessons we’ve learnt on the way to 100K unique visitors per month (and sometimes the hard way). If you have any questions or you would like to share your experience, please feel free to comment below.

Thanks for reading,

Niall

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