Last year was a rough one for me, just as I’m sure it was for many of you.
Faced with less work, and more time on my hands than usual, I decided to reinvest my time in growing my website traffic. My guess was that most people would be spending more time at home, for work and casual, and that would mean more time spent reading blogs.
So starting on August 31st, 2020, I decided to get serious about growing my blog’s traffic. Here’s what I did.
I Needed More Content
From January-August of last year, I wrote and published a grand total of 17 new posts. That’s roughly 2 posts a month. It’s almost impossible to sustain, much less grow your blog traffic if you only post once every 2 weeks.
So the first step I took to increase my website traffic was to create more content. Originally, my goal was to create 6 new posts a week here. That proved unattainable within the first month or so.
I decided to scale back and settle for at least 2 new posts a week here. I’ve been able to stick to that schedule more often than not. Moving forward, I want to get back to doing Monday’s Marketing Minute every Monday, and then publish new posts every Tuesday-Thursday. This will give me 4 new posts a week, and I think that will be enough new content to continue to grow the traffic here.
In August of 2020, I published one new post. Last month, I published nine new posts. That alone shows you how much my content creation increased in just one year’s time. This made a huge impact on increasing my website traffic, but it wasn’t the only factor.
I Needed to Improve My Existing Content
In addition to creating more new content, I also focused on optimizing and improving my existing content. This was the second step I took to increase my traffic.
I am a huge believer in going back and optimizing your older content. My pal Andy Crestodina also believes strongly in revisiting and improving older content. You can learn a ton about this process from reading his blog.
What I did was go back and target posts I had written on the core topics I want to be known for. I then looked to optimize these posts.
I focused first on SEO. I used the Yoast SEO plugin to make sure I had the proper keywords targeted and that the post was optimized for the selected phrase.
I then edited the post to make sure it had relevant, and recent information. If there were any new research studies or news stories I could add to the post, I did so. I also made sure images and visual content was correct and on point for the topic.
Finally, I linked to any new content I had created on the same topic, that might be beneficial.
I started this process in April. On average, posts that I optimized saw a 20% lift in search traffic within the first 2 weeks of being optimized. Not bad.
Here’s the results: I increased my website traffic by 52% in one year:
That’s from Google Analytics, my August 2020 traffic vs August 2021 traffic. An increase of 52.46% in website traffic.
On August 31st of last year I committed to growing my blog’s traffic here. I talked yesterday about how you had to build a platform before you can sell a product. That was a big part of my reasoning for wanting to blog more here, I needed to build and grow my platform if I wanted to sell more products and services.
Thankfully, the results of the hard work are starting to show. There’s one thing I wanted to point out: For the first 4-6 months of this push to increase traffic here, I saw marginal improvement at best. And that was frustrating, because for the first 6 weeks or so, I was publishing up to 6 new posts a week.
But for the last 4-6 months, I’ve seen accelerated growth. As late as February or March of this year, 75 visitors in a day was considered average. I hit that many visitors today by 10 am. The point is, when it comes to increasing traffic, growth is rarely linear. I saw a 52% increase in traffic after one year of this strategy. Yet, if I stick to this same strategy for another year, I could easily see another 100% or 200% increase in traffic for next year.
Let’s see if I can do it. Thanks for reading and I look forward to giving you a lot more valuable content to read over the next year.
PS: Want me to design a strategy for your blog that will help you achieve an increase in traffic? Fill out the form below and let’s set up a call to discuss your needs.