Welcome to Month 2 of my how to grow a blog series! You can check out the first series here. It’s basically for fun, but I’m being very transparent and sharing how I grow a new blog from 0 views to…. as many as the niche supports.

Let’s get right to business. Here are a few screenshots of my progress so far for this blog.

733 page views in the second month!
1.5 pages per session.

WordPress stats show a little bit of a different story. I installed google analytics late. I’ve included my MailChimp stats below (note: you can use MailChimp to grow a list or one of these software tools).

5 Key Takeaways

The majority of entrepreneurs that I’ve talked with have considered traffic to be a bit a mystery. Up until this point in my career, I have become extremely familiar with using inbound marketing to build up relevant traffic to a website. This is only one way to grow traffic over time to a website, product, or blog. There are a lot of others.

I’ve started and built traffic up to numerous blogs. This is a new blog and I’m sharing the experience of growing it! Here are a few takeaways from this month in particular. Remember, it’s the early days!

1. Traffic doesn’t matter. Where is it coming from?

Where traffic is coming from can mean the difference between a profitable business and a not so profitable business. You could get 1,000 uniques in a day, but will you get that many a week from now, or was it a one-time event?

At the beginning stages of this blog, the majority of the traffic is from referrals and social media. Only 2% is from search engines. This basically means that I have to continue to promote new articles to get them seen!

In the early stages, an email list is crucial because it will make all of the hard work that you put in to get initial traffic worthwhile! Individuals who opt-in to your email list have a continued interest in the topic of your blog and you can continue to inform them of new articles or products further down the road.

This way, you’re not just working to get a bunch of traffic to one article and then working to the same level of intensity to get traffic to another article. You’re building up a recurring traffic generation platform, your email list.

I think that around the 8-12 month mark, we’re going to be seeing more search engine traffic to this blog, which will make my job easier because I won’t have to keep marketing certain articles. Google will have already determined that they are helpful and will connect people searching for that type of content with my content.

2. Quality matters more than quantity.

My main goal at this point is to put out useful and quality articles. I don’t care about anything else. I am putting out 1 article per week, so the time I spend on this blog is relatively minimal.

Blogging and business in general is one of those things where it behooves you to put someone else’s interest above your own. No one cares that I want a trafficked blog in this niche or that I want to share the journey of launching a site. People only care about how I can make their life easier and the problems that I can solve for them.

The quality of the content that you produce in the early (and really any stage) is the most important aspect of a blog. Developing a relationship online is hard enough! Don’t waste other people’s time and erode your reputation by publishing crap.

3. Be willing to promote your content

Believe it or not, I’ve already been asked not to promote my content (even though I only publish once a week and promote other content is not mine) on a particular community.

Part of committing yourself to growing a website is being willing to step on some people’s toes to get where you want to go. I would never advocate to deliberately do this or to not first try to form great relationships, but sometimes you just have to.

Ideally, you should seek to establish your own community online, whether that’s via google+, facebook, or an online forum. However it’s unlikely that at the beginning part of growing a website, you’ll have the bandwidth to do this. In the meantime, try to form a good relationship with community organizers and let them know you’re not out there to harm the community in any way or spam people.

4. Get content ideas from your target market.

Your job as a blogger is to solve problems and help people figure out things that they want to figure out (or delight them if it’s entertainment content). I know it sounds simple, but that’s the essence of building up traffic to a website via inbound marketing.

I know that I personally have only experienced so many problems in my blog’s niche. Therefore, my perspective is limited. To broaden that perspective, I will deliberately search message boards, online communities, and twitter to get a sense of the types of problems and issues that people are having in my niche and then write articles about those topics if I know a good solution.

This is much easier than trying to come up with blog post topics on your own and there is already a bit of validation built in, meaning that if one person has that question, it’s likely that more people do!

5. Avoid burnout by working minimally and planning for the future.

I made this mistake with my first highly trafficked blog. I would write 8 articles one week, 3 the next, and 1 or 2 the week after. My traffic would go up and down, up and down.

Rather than going all-in and trying to crank out 10 articles a week, accept that you can only humanly keep up with writing X quality articles per week and if you have a sudden surge of productivity, stay with that schedule and bump the unpublished blog posts you wrote over to the next week.

It might mean a slower growth rate, but in the longterm, it will help you prevent the #1 or #2 reason for quitting a blog: burnout and lack of initial results. Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. You wouldn’t start a marathon by running as fast as you could.

I’ve committed to the following actions for the blog, because I know any more would take up too much time and make me tired of the site:

– One good blog post per week

– Promote the article.

– Grow the website’s Twitter page

Once I begin to see some search engine traffic, I might up this schedule.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve gained something from this month’s traffic! Note, this is not the traffic data for the blog your reading, but my other new site. If you have a question, leave a comment below and then link to your blog so I can check it out!