I consider this blog to be more of a side project. To be honest, I haven’t really put in very much effort to grow it. However, I do enjoy sharing some key findings as I grow my other businesses.

I think this blog is fertile soil for experimentation. I can share stats without feeling defensive, because I’m unattached from any kind of outcome. I’m just doing this for fun!

For other aspiring bloggers, this info is GOLD. I wish I had access to this level of information when I first started. I wish I could directly ask other bloggers how they’re making an income from their craft.

First, I’m going to share my WordPress stats. Then, I’ll go into some lessons and advice for growing your own blog.

Oh my gosh, are those actually my stats? Yes! These are the WordPress stats for this very blog.

I haven’t worked to grow this blog at all in the last year, so my traffic hasn’t seen any spikes or growth, like it did in 2015. You’d be surprised the level of growth that you can see when you’re actively working to grow your blog.

Rather than working on business-related side projects, I’ve been doing a lot of life-related work in the past year. I’ve been learning more about meditation, emotional intelligence, and working to improve my overall happiness.

I’ve also taken a liking to filming, as you can see from one of my vlogs below, which I filmed with Shelcy of A Millennial’s Guide to Life.

Anyway, let’s get to some of the lessons that I have for you if you want to grow your blog’s traffic!

1. Master Search Engine Optimization

I like to mentor younger entrepreneurs. I’m a part of one Facebook group with teen entrepreneurs and a member randomly stumbled on one of my blog posts.

The reason that I’m able to grow traffic to multiple web properties, including blogs, forums, digital products, etc is because I’ve invested time in learning how Google works.

I know that if I spend a lot of energy putting together a killer resource and amazing content, it will pay off in the future. Of course, there are also some technicalities that you need to know when it comes to SEO.

This is not a “quick solution.” It can take up to a year to fully figure out how SEO works, make great content, and start to see results. It really depends on how quickly you learn and execute.

When I was first getting started, I mainly learned about SEO from Moz and Neil Patel. You can ask me any questions via comment below and I’ll give my thoughts on this topic.

2. Build an email list

There’s this misperception out there that bloggers are well-known celebrities and people are just regularly browsing their site, commenting on things, and interacting. Not true!

If you take the time to research even major blogs, you’ll see that there’s a considerable amount of time from when they first publish an article to when it starts to receive comments.

The moment that they tap into their email list and send out that article, it begins to get comments because they’re deliberately directing traffic to that article. They might even be asking readers to comment.

You can use a tool like Aweber to build a list of blog subscribers that’s independent from the WordPress “subscribe” button. You can also use MailChimp.

If you use the WordPress subscribe button, you’ll automatically send out an email whenever you publish a post. You don’t want that.You want to be able to send out an email whenever you want, manage your list, see how many people are opening your emails, and see how many readers are clicking the links in your email.

3. Ignore Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics sound cool, but ultimately don’t matter. The most important thing that you can do as a beginning blogger is to figure out what metrics you are trying to maximize. I talk about this a lot more in my post, How to Make a Six Figure Blog.

If you care about revenue, then focus on increasing the activities that generate revenue. If you care about short-term page views, then write articles that cause spikes in traffic. If you care about a long-term audience, learn how to create evergreen content.

Ignore any metric that will not get you towards that overall goal. For example, as much as I like to hear from readers, I really don’t care whether or not people leave comments on my other blog. It doesn’t affect my traffic generation strategy. I’m not trying to maximize the number of comments I get per article.

On the flip side, for my online forum, I care a lot about engagement and comments. I’ll go out of my way to create curiosity, so that members leave longer comments more frequently. That’s why some threads have hundreds of replies.

Figure out the metric that you’re trying to maximize and focus on that!

4. Write for a reader, not yourself

This might seem contradictory, especially when I said that this is more of a personal blog. Haha!

What you’ll find is that the majority of the articles on this blog cater to a reader in some way. They benefit a reader or provide value for a reader, even if that’s just passing on things that I’ve learned. When you learn from people who have achieved the objective you’re trying to achieve, you’ll get their faster!

The slowest way to grow a blog is to write for yourself and hope that other people find it interesting or useful.

The fastest way to grow a blog is to identify your target reader and write as though you’re speaking directly to them!

What you’ll also find is that as you flesh out that idea of who your ideal reader is, it will also be easier to monetize your blog. You’ll instantly know what products or services would be relevant to them.

5. Re-Purpose and Re-Promote Your Content

All too often, new bloggers are focused on creating a lot of content, but they don’t spend as much time marketing that content.

Rather than creating new content, you can re-purpose old content to continue to deliver value! To give you an example, I wrote a blog post on how I earned my first $3k from podcasting (see here). I also produced a YouTube video on this very same topic, as you can see below.

Not everyone will enjoy consuming content in the same way. Some people like to learn by reading, others by video, and some through audio. By re-purposing your content, you can make sure you’ll reach all of these different audiences. You can even package some of your best blog posts and give them away as a short ebook in exchange for a reader’s email address.

I am a strong believer in re-promoting your content as well. Of course, don’t be spammy, but to be quite honest, most readers don’t have time to read every article on your blog. It’s okay to tweet out the same link a few times in the span of a week or even re-share it on Facebook from time to time. I’ll also frequently reference past articles that I’ve written, as I have in this post.

In conclusion, there isn’t really magic formula that I’ve used to grow this blog, other than to be consistently useful and helpful to my readers. Would love to hear from you, so don’t forget to subscribe and then leave a comment down below!