This is month 4 of our “get traffic to your blog” series, where I’m showing you exactly how I’m building up a new blog from scratch to thousands of readers each month!

View month 1

View month 2

Let’s jump right in! Here’s my progress thus far.

1,000 visitors this past month! Well, almost.

In our last post, we talked about traffic and the importance of identifying where visitors are coming from. My goal was to begin to get more search engine traffic, and it’s happening slowly, but surely!

If you’d like to learn how I did this more in-depth, subscribe to the blog and look out for a future email from me. For now, I’ll just give you an idea of the breakdown of traffic sources below.

The email list isn’t seeing as much growth as I’d like, so I may need to develop some more useful content that will give visitors a good reason to subscribe.

Finally, I’ll end with the stat that the website now has 800 twitter followers, a google+ group with 8 members, a small LinkedIn group, and a Facebook page (only a handful of likes, haven’t been focusing on it).

Essential Tools I’m Using

• Email List: I’m using Mailchimp for my email list. I also recommend looking into Aweber.
• Social Media: I’m using Buffer to pre-schedule social media posts. I also highly recommend Hootsuite.
• Setting up the website: I am using Bluehost to host the website and WordPress (free) to manage it. I’ve outlined how I set up a blog with wordpress here.
• Website theme: I’m just using a simple website them for my blog, because I want the focus to be on content initially. You can also use a premium wordpress theme for your blog to make it look nice and professional.
• Gathering emails: OptinSkin (email form) and Optin Monster (popup window).

My general strategy

My strategy for growing and getting traffic to this blog can be summed up in one sentence. “Create useful, engaging, helpful, and awesome content!”

To give you an example of what I consider to be great content, I’ve linked to a post where I share how I’ve grown my podcast to what’s now 8k downloads.

It’s true, you have to be willing to promote this content, but you’ll feel a lot better about promoting content that you know is helpful and genuinely great, rather than crappy content, in the same way that you feel better when you sell a product that really helps people, instead of one that is mediocre.

My goal

Aside from showing you guys how to actually build up traffic to your blog, I also want to show you how to monetize that traffic, while adding value and making the world a better place. In addition, I want to share everything I’m learning about podcasting with the universe! Well, okay, maybe not the universe. It would be presumptuous to think that aliens can understand english.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Now that I’m the trenches, growing a new website, I’ve thought about a few different mistakes that I used to make when I first got started online. I’ve decided to put a few of them together into a list in the hopes that you can avoid the mistakes I’ve made.

1. Failing to build an email list

Get on that email list building ASAP! I can’t tell you how important that becomes as your traffic grows and grows. It’s not something that you can put off. You’ll learn a lot about email marketing and if anything should happen to your website, like it’s penalized by google or there is a zombie attack on your servers, you’ll still have your email list.

2. Not setting up a WordPress website.

Don’t host your blog on medium, tumblr, or squarespace. If you’re serious about blogging, it should be hosted on wordpress (preferably using wordpress.org and a private hosting company like Bluehost, not wordpress.com).

Why? Because there are a lot of free wordpress plugins out there with awesome functionality that you can use to expand the scope of your website. Also, there are a lot of free and premium wordpress themes that you can use to customize the look and feel of your website.

You don’t want to make the mistake of hosting it on another website building platform and then having to migrate all of the content further down the road. I made this mistake with my very first blog in high school.

3. Avoiding social media.

Just because you aren’t an avid Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, or Instagram user doesn’t mean that your readers or target readers are also social media newbies. You need to go where the people are! You can’t expect people to just discover your website, even in month 4.

Depending on your blog’s niche, you may focus more on Instagram or Pinterest than Twitter or Facebook. In the case of my blog, I’m focusing more on Twitter at the moment.

4. Writing horrible content.

Writing great content is part art and part science. But, there is a golden rule. It should always be useful or entertaining.

I know what you’re thinking. “But I want to write about what I want to write about! That’s why I got into blogging.”

It’s fine to have opinions and write about what you want to write about. However, keep in mind that the majority of published authors write for readers, not for themselves. That’s the difference between an author and a writer.

To improve your writing skills, you must:

1. Write a lot.

2. Learn from people that have mastered the skills that you’re seeking to acquire.

Questions? Leave a comment!