I’m always telling y’all that I read a lot of blogs. These days I feel like I’m the only one, but it helps give me inspiration for things to write about. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s because I think the article is bad that I feel I need to comment on it.
These ladies knew how to drive traffic!
Someone shared a post on Twitter giving 71 tips on how to drive massive traffic to your blog. I already had a bad feeling about what I was going to see, but I decided to take a look anyway. After the first 20 tips, I decided to jump through the next 51 to see if anything stood out that actually told people how to drive traffic to their blogs. There wasn’t a single tip on how to do it… we call that clickbait.
Instead, the article should have been titled “71 tips on how to possibly make your blog successful“. There wasn’t a single tip on how to possibly drive traffic to your blog. I know that because I’ve been doing this stuff for about 15 or 16 years. I had some very good success in the early years, but once Google’s Panda slapped me down while I was consulting in Memphis this blog started to falter and I’ve never recovered, even though Alexa says I’m in the top 650,000 websites in the world right now, and I’m not going to gripe about that.
Here’s the thing. Tips like deciding on a domain name, deciding on a name for your blog, or deciding what niche you want to write in aren’t going to drive massive traffic to your blog or anybody else’s blog. That’s basically technical stuff that you want to think of before you even get started, because it helps to give you direction but it has nothing to do with driving traffic to your blog.
People who tell you to write in specific niches also can’t give you any tips on how to drive traffic to your blog because they’re probably telling you to write in the same niche that 100,000 people are already writing about. It’s going to take a lot more than a niche to help you break through that many competitors.
Having said all of that, I might have given that particular blog post, which I’m not going to link to, some kind of credit if it was new content or told in a different way. Instead, it looked like the combination of a thousand blog posts I’ve seen before, where the author just took bits and pieces from what other people had written and posted it into one article. At least if you’re going to steal ideas from other people try to be creative about it.
Do you want the truth about how to drive massive traffic to your blog? I can give you those tips, but you’re never going to do it. Why? Because it involves a heck of a lot of work and dedication, and frankly, unless you’re living at home with your parents who have a lot of money, and you have a lot of time on your hands and don’t have to worry about paying bills, it’s not going to happen the way you think it is. True, there are some people who have been able to break through the noise, but very few of us actually get that high on our own.
Not getting very high with these wings
I say that because the first tip is to write a lot of content every day. In other words, an article a day that’s between 500 and 750 words isn’t enough in today’s world. You need to have content that’s between 1,000 and 2,500 words a day to make a dent in the blogging traffic, and then you need to write two more of those every single day.
The reason for that is that the more content you can put out on a daily basis that’s not all contained in one article, the better your site has of being picked up on the search engines and helping your blog to grow. Then again, you can get away with only one blog post a day if each article is massive, which is Neil Patel’s way of doing things (which is brilliant by the way; then again, he’s got a team helping him).
The second thing you have to do is be willing to promote each one of those articles on social media platforms. At this point someone’s probably screaming “create an email list”, but how are you going to get people to your blog to possibly join your email list without promoting your content?
Many people think that Facebook is the place to go, but Facebook suppresses the number of people who get to see your content unless you pay them a significant amount of money. Therefore it’s better to do it on a site like Twitter, where you can post an article multiple times a day as long as you can figure out new ways to headline the article before you do it.
Twitter doesn’t like when you post the exact same thing multiple times a day if you don’t make any changes to it. For instance, every new article I promote on Twitter, the most I promote that article in one day is three times, which is the day it’s published, and two of those times I have an introductory sentence before I post the title in the link.
The third thing is to try to find other outlets where you can post other articles (yes, more writing) to help direct people back to your site. Depending on your topic, LinkedIn is good for that. I know some people who use Medium for that, but since I’m already writing a lot of content I refuse to put it on another platform for free.
The fourth thing you can try to do is find ways to write guest posts on very popular blogs. I hate telling you that because I’ve only ever written a guest post when I’ve been asked to by people I knew well.
The problem I see with a lot of people who guest post is that not only are their articles not all that good most of the time, but they almost never go back and respond to the comments those articles get. I don’t know how they think that’s helping them any, because trust me it doesn’t help one bit.
There are a few other tips that I could give you, but I’m going to stop there because I’m not going to do all the work for you. I will say that if your content is compelling and your marketing is creative that you’ll have a chance to get your blog more traffic and be successful with your numbers. Just so you know, some years ago this blog was ranked by Alexa at around 4 million, and even though I’m not writing as much new content as I used to back in the day, I’m writing longer articles and I promote well on Twitter, not just new articles but articles going back a number of years. It always helps to keep your name in front of the eyes of new readers
That’s all I’ve got for you. Let me know your thoughts.
Hi Mitch, you are right on, it is a lot of work and dedication to generate traffic to your blog.
And I’m glad you mentioned that Neil has a staff and is not a one-man show by any means! And that FB works only if you do ads. Pay for play there.
Not only do you need to work work hard with dedication but it takes time for SEO to work, sometimes a year or two! Yes, it really does. And then it changes and you may have to restart.
I do find guest posting is great for building backlinks and backlinks do help drive some traffic to your site as it gives your site more authority.
Slow and steady is the best way Mitch.
Hey Lisa! It’s definitely a lot of work, and if it was the only thing I was doing I could probably wank higher than I presently do. I’ve been there as far as ranking and Google placement, but I certainly never considered myself successful, and I never drove the kind of traffic that some numbers tell us, making us feel successful.
With that said, the blog I was talking badly about does give some good tips for consideration if someone’s thinking about blogging. My problem is that it’s the same exact tips and wording that others have already stated and it’s more of a blueprint for how to set up a blog for business more than generating tons of traffic. Those days are gone in general unless you’re working with a team of writers… in other words, working it like a full time business with employees… something I’m never going to do.
Hi Mitch, Running a blog is way more work than people realize. I had no idea what was involved when I started out and I think that is where the problem lies for most. They don’t understand what is involved when they are getting started, and then they start looking for the easy road when they don’t want to put the time in. They read posts like the one you mentioned and think this will be easy.
I didn’t start using Twitter until I started my blog and I actually enjoy that platform even though I feel I am still trying to learn how to use it effectively. And I now have a Facebook account that looks fake, we don’t need to get into why except to say I am not a fan. Of Facebook, that is.
I am glad I read your comment policy before deciding to comment. I am one of those people that normally use a info@ email to comment on blog posts! But I’m not spam or hired. 🙂
Welcome to the blog SharlaAnn! Truthfully, everything on social media is hard and takes either a lot of time or a lucky break. I understand the Facebook issue; I had a business page for about 7 years before I decided to shut it down. At the beginning I was getting hundreds of visits, but by the time I ended it I was getting, if lucky, one or two likes for each post; phooey! lol
As for blogging, it’s the writing part that I talk about more than anything else. The overwhelming number of people who get into blogging hated writing in school; if that’s the case then they’re going to hate writing for blogs even more cumbersome. Even if it’s a blog with mainly photographs and infographics (ugh), it still takes the written word to push the narrative along. Even if you’re doing it for business purposes, if you like to write then you’ll have fun with it; that’s how I’ve survived for so long.
Now I have to go check out your latest article. 😀
Hello again Mitch!
I really think it depends on WHY a person did not like writing in school. I didn’t like writing in school. Primarily because “I wasn’t any good at it” and maybe I wasn’t or maybe it was because I had no interest in the subject matter. Either way I am enjoying it now and will keep at it as long as that is the case. Like anything, I think a person’s writing changes and evolves as a person grows. I am actually quite excited to see how my writing changes over the next year and beyond.
Thanks for checking out my blog.
SharlaAnn
You might be an exception to the rule; let’s find out. In every article I’ve written for people who are considering starting a blog, I give them an assignment. Write 10 articles of at least 500 words on the subject you want to cover in your blog before you do anything else. If you can do that, no matter how long it takes, you might be ready to blog. I’ve never had a single person take me up on the offer. At someone who wrote 900 articles in the first 3 years of this blog, and someone who, on occasion, will write a blog post every day for a month on both of my major blogs, I know it can easily be done… at least it’s easy for me. Still, it weeds out those who really want to be bloggers and those who probably thought it was going to be easy.
Maybe that’s wrong, but that’s how I see it. 🙂
Hi Mitch,
It all used to be easier.
Before we tsunami of social media platforms and massive amounts of content we are assaulted with you really could build something of decent size with far less effort than now.
Nothing profound there or something you haven’t thought about, you have been around long enough.
I don’t find many tips that provide new ideas or direction to build traffic and haven’t in a long time. I suppose they exist, but I am not stumbling upon them.
Not really looking that hard either.
Guess I am an old and grouchy blogger now. 🙂
LOL! Actually, if we read more Neil Patel stuff we’d probably find tips to use, but I’m going to admit that half the time it’s more confusing than informational. Still, you’re right, it used to be much easier. As long as we wrote content on a regular basis, at least 3 times a week, we killed in traffic and being noticed in the search engines. I’m not mad that they’ve corrected some of those weaknesses, but penalizing those of us who had a lot of content on our sites pre-Panda was a bit much for me to forgive.
With that said, the best we can do these days is drop knowledge on what doesn’t work and move on from there.
Running a blog is far more work than individuals figure it out. I had no clue about what was involved when I began and I imagine that is the place where the issue lies for most.
Lucky for me, none of those rules applied when I started, so all I had to worry about was constantly creating content, and not always the best stuff. These days the hope is that more people know what’s coming and what it’s going to take just to make a dent online, which is why I hate articles that spout pure nonsense.
Hi Mitch,
Generating traffic is not a one-day task, it requires a lot of time, effort, and patience. On the other hand, you also need to spend some bucks to write traffic-driven content and for the optimization work i,e for an SEO. I completely agree that 500-700 words of content are not enough to drive tremendous traffic, content must go around 2500+ words. If we work consistently we can generate great traffic. Depending on how much effort that we made.
Thank you for sharing your honest opinion with us.
Thanks Anoop, but I’m going to disagree with one thing you said. I’ve written multiple articles over 2,000 words, and I haven’t had to pay anyone to do it. Only people who feel they can’t do it or are doing it for their business should have to hire someone, and they should be prepared to pay those people a professional rate, otherwise they get what they pay for… which isn’t always good. Consistency is a great step forward.