How to generate organic 10k website visitors per month
How to generate organic 10k website visitors per month
“If you had to grow a blog from scratch with no existing audience or mailing list, how would you grow it to 10,000 visitors per month, in just a few months?”
Over 350,000 sites have installed, but very few have reached this traffic tipping point. Maybe you’re still working to hit that 10,000 mark.
To help you get there, I want to show you how to grow blog traffic by sharing the strategy I used to increase traffic to my personal site, nateliason.com, to 50,000+ visits a month:
And I’m going to show how my site’s traffic increased steadily over the course of December, despite publishing only one article and not emailing my list:
The reason I saw so much traffic with little time spent?
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO).
Yes, you’ve read unsatisfying articles about SEO before, but I’m going to show you the exact steps I follow to take advantage of it and actually get results.
I’ll walk you through how I’d use the same strategies that have worked on nateliason.com (and some other things that I’d do if I had more time for it) to grow a brand new website to 10,000 visitors a month, all through a focus on SEO.
And, as promised, I’ll talk about how I’d do it assuming I had no existing audience, no big blogs (like this one!) to link from, no connections in the industry, NADA.
Pick the Topic
Create an Initial Article List
Prioritize Your Articles
Pick Your Top 5-10 Articles
Create a Schedule
Create a List of Similar Blogs for Guest Posting
Write The First Article!
STEP 1: PICK THE TOPIC
(Skip this section if you already have your site built)
It’s popular to recommend going through Google, BuzzSumo, Facebook groups, etc. to try to find the perfect topic to build a high traffic site around… but it’s all a waste of time.
Why would you build a site about anything you’re not passionate about?
For the sake of this article, I’m going to start a site called Nat Likes Tea at natlikestea.com.
I like tea, mention it at least once in most of my articles, and all the good “tea” puns are taken: honest tea, ingenuitea, insanitea…
Nat Likes Tea it is.
STEP 2: CREATE AN INITIAL ARTICLE LIST
With the topic in mind, I’d come up with an initial list of articles that I could write, and keep them all in a spreadsheet.
Get that spreadsheet here!
By doing this, I can make sure that I’m writing about the best topics to go after, not just picking things willy-nilly. The first couple ideas I have might be fine, but by spending some time to put all the options out there I can be sure that I’m spending my time as effectively as possible.
The easiest way to make this list is to come up with a few article styles, then mix and match styles and content to build a huge list.
For Nat Likes Tea (NLT from now on), I might have these categories:
Then, I’d make a “generator” column like this one:
Pro tip: If you paste them and get a REF error, do “Paste Values Only”
Then I’d repeat that for all the other combinations of things I could write about, until I have an initial list of possible topics:
Now, I can start listing some of the more meta topics that I can think of. These are the ones that would be longer, more in-depth posts, and will likely have higher SEO value.
This is why you should write about something you’re already passionate about. It’s way easier to come up with these big meaty topics when you know the subject matter already, and odds are that friends have already asked you questions related to some of them:
Then I just take those and add them to the list, and now we have our initial list of things I can write about!
All that’s left is lock myself in a Starbucks and start doing lines of ground coffee beans until they’re all written.
Or, for the sake of my nose and adrenal glands, we could prioritize them.
STEP 3: PRIORITIZE YOUR ARTICLES
Now that we have all of our possible topics, we need to figure out which ones it makes sense to focus on for our site (in order to get that sweet sweet SEO traffic), and which ones are fine to give to other people as guest posts.
To do that, we’re going to rank our posts by Depth, then SEO value.
RANKING BY DEPTH
I’m going to go through and assign a score of 1 to 3 for depth to each topic on the list:
1: Shorter, fun, one-off post. Probably < 1,000 words
2: Somewhere in the middle, 1,000-2,000 word guides
3: Massively useful in-depth guide on a topic, likely 2,000+ words
Don’t sell any of your posts long, if they could fit into a bigger post (within reason) then they’re a 1 or 2.
Think of it like a pyramid, with your 3s as a base that the other article ideas build on top of or expand on.
Then, take all the posts you ranked a “1” and put them in another Worksheet labeled “Later Posts”:
COMPARE SEO VALUE
With the 2s and 3s, we’re going to figure out how valuable they are from an SEO perspective. This means assessing how many visitors we could potentially get to them from Google as a result of people searching for those topics.
First, go to Google Keyword Planner.
Then, take a topic you came up with, and plug it in as you have it:
See what the results are:
In this case, there are almost no monthly searches for that topic, so we can plug some variations into that search bar at the top until we find a keyword (it’s a keyword even if there are multiple words) with a high volume:
Now I just take that Keyword and the Keyword Volume, and add it to our spreadsheet:
As you’re researching, you’ll come up with more ideas. For example, when I was looking for a good keyword for “high caffeine teas,” I noticed that there was a lot of searches for the amount of caffeine in specific types of tea:
So I made a note to myself to add more topics around that later.
And then you just need to repeat this for all of your topics, or at least all of your “3” ranked ones.
DISQUALIFY TOUGH COMPETITION
Once I have my list of keywords, I’d go through and make sure that none of them are so competitive that I shouldn’t bother trying to rank for them (yet).
This does NOT mean to look at the competitiveness rating in Keyword Planner.
That competitiveness ranking is how competitive the ads are. Since we’re not buying ads, we don’t have to worry about how many other people are buying ads.
What I mean by competitiveness is who else is ranking for this keyword in Google right now.
All I have to do is take each keyword, plug it into Google, and see what comes up. I’ll also use the Moz Toolbar to tell me how highly ranked the pages are.
If there’s a few major sites competing on a keyword, I’ll highlight it in red, but if it looks like smaller sites that I can definitely compete against then I’ll move on.
You might see results from social media, Amazon, and other “big” sites in the results, but don’t let those scare you off.
Since these sites cover such a wide variety of topics you can still compete with them, and if all you’re seeing are social media results that’s a good sign that no one has written a good article on the topic.
STEP 4: PICK YOUR TOP 5-10 TOPICS
With your list of topics (excluding the ones that seem too competitive), it’s time to pick the 5-10 that you’ll put on your site.
With just 5-10 articles, you can easily reach 10k visitors a month. I currently get ~2,500 visitors per day from just 4 of my articles, so if just one of your articles reaches that level then you’ll have hit the goal.
In this case, I would go with:
Drink these teas for weight loss
A guide to the different types of tea
Tea vs. Coffee
Best tea for your skin
The best decaf teas
New to Tea? Start here
The best low caffeine teas to go to sleep
They’re all not too competitive, have a large enough search volume to each get me 5,000+ visitors a month (anything over 1,000 is a safe bet), and they’re topics I want to write about.
Important note: the “keyword volume” is not an absolute, it’s only an indicator. For example, the keyword “water fasting results” has a monthly keyword volume of 2,400, but my article targeting “water fasting results” gets 15,000-30,000 visitors a month.
This is because 80% or more of searches are unique. They’re long highly-specific searches (e.g. “what happens to your body if you don’t eat and only drink water for 5 days”) that are rarely repeated, and Google just makes its best guess to match those to easier keywords.
10,000 visitors per month is roughly 333 per day, so each article only needs to get 30-60 visits per day. Not a crazy high bar.
In fact, you can plug in how many posts you want to write to see what traffic amount you need on the spreadsheet. Just set your monthly goal and how many posts you want to write:
Just so you know though, it won’t be an even spread. A few articles will get substantially more traffic than others (the 80/20 rule at work), so when you’re picking topics, pick ones that could be massively popular (volume of 1,000/month or higher).
Here’s the relative traffic amounts for the top 20 articles on my site to give you an idea:
STEP 5: MAKE A SCHEDULE
Before you start writing, create a schedule in Google Calendar for how often you’ll publish, both on your site and other sites.
Aim for a minimum of two posts per month on your site, and one post a week on other sites. If you want to post more, put more time into posting on other sites. That’ll have a bigger ROI for you in the short term.
But the most important thing is that once you make the schedule… stick to it. Lock it in, and make sure that you’re getting your articles out when you say you will. That’s the only way you succeed at this.
STEP 6: CREATE A LIST OF SIMILAR BLOGS FOR GUEST POSTING
We’re almost to the writing! I promise! This is the last step before you buckle down with your typewriter.
You need a list of blogs that you can guest post on, and that you want to link back to you. The reason we’re doing this now is that once you have your list, you can include links to other people’s sites in your articles to earn good karma with them.
Think about it. What’s more appealing:
“Hey I just linked to your article about XYZ from my article about ABC. Seems like we have a lot of topics in common, would love to put something together for your audience about DEF if that’s interesting to you :)”
Or
“Hey can I write stuff on your site to promote my site?”
Obviously the first one, since you’ve already done them a favor by giving them a link whether or not they let you guest post!
And ideally, you’re doing this over separate emails (so one that says “hey I linked to you” then a follow up later asking about guest posting), which means that in your first communication you’re not asking for anything, just making their life better.
Add a worksheet like this one to your content plan:
And fill it in with the blogs in a similar niche as you.
The best ways to find these blogs is to:
See what comes up in Google right now for your topics
Search on BuzzSumo for posts that performed well related to your topic
Search on Twitter for people sharing articles from related blogs
If you’re having trouble finding their email addresses, Connectifier or Email Hunter can usually take care of it for you.
Now, with list in hand, it’s time to start writing :)
STEP 7: WRITE THE FIRST ARTICLE
It’s time to pick an article, say “A guide to the different kinds of tea,” and get to work.
While writing it, I’d follow the guidelines for creating epic content that I give to writers for the Sumo blog:
It must be actionable. Someone should be able to take the post and do something, not just go “oh that’s nice.”
Focus on ONE core idea. Think of someone searching in Google. What question are they looking for the answer to, and why is your answer the best.
Think of how you can make it the only article they need on the subject. When someone finds it they should go “whoa I better save this.”
For length, think 1,500 - 4,000 words. More is fine if it’s kickass (this article is ~5,000). I find it’s hard to do a worthwhile topic justice with anything shorter.
Use pictures. Make sure the pictures enhance the explanations--some fun photos are fine, but the point of the pictures should be to make whatever you’re saying more clear. No random stock photos.
Chunk it up. It shouldn’t read like a New Yorker article. There should be helpful headings, sub headings, short paragraphs, bold text, etc.
Links links links. Include any relevant links in your article. More links = more people we can email about plugging them in order to get them to share it.
Link to my other articles. I can’t do this in the first one obviously, but for every article after that, this is important for SEO and for keeping people in the site.
These aren’t hard and fast rules, but I find that they help make sure that everything we put out is excellent. They’ll help you make sure of that as well.
As for targeting the article to the keyword you’re going for, don’t worry about that too much. The only thing to make sure of is that you put the keyword in the title. Aside from that, as long as the article is about the topic you’re going for, you should be fine.
If you want to be safe though, you can install Yoast, and use that to check your article for how well it’s set up to rank for your keyword.
Article done? Good. DON’T PUBLISH IT YET. There’s one more important step…
“If you had to grow a blog from scratch with no existing audience or mailing list, how would you grow it to 10,000 visitors per month, in just a few months?”
Over 350,000 sites have installed, but very few have reached this traffic tipping point. Maybe you’re still working to hit that 10,000 mark.
To help you get there, I want to show you how to grow blog traffic by sharing the strategy I used to increase traffic to my personal site, nateliason.com, to 50,000+ visits a month:
And I’m going to show how my site’s traffic increased steadily over the course of December, despite publishing only one article and not emailing my list:
The reason I saw so much traffic with little time spent?
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO).
Yes, you’ve read unsatisfying articles about SEO before, but I’m going to show you the exact steps I follow to take advantage of it and actually get results.
I’ll walk you through how I’d use the same strategies that have worked on nateliason.com (and some other things that I’d do if I had more time for it) to grow a brand new website to 10,000 visitors a month, all through a focus on SEO.
And, as promised, I’ll talk about how I’d do it assuming I had no existing audience, no big blogs (like this one!) to link from, no connections in the industry, NADA.
Pick the Topic
Create an Initial Article List
Prioritize Your Articles
Pick Your Top 5-10 Articles
Create a Schedule
Create a List of Similar Blogs for Guest Posting
Write The First Article!
STEP 1: PICK THE TOPIC
(Skip this section if you already have your site built)
It’s popular to recommend going through Google, BuzzSumo, Facebook groups, etc. to try to find the perfect topic to build a high traffic site around… but it’s all a waste of time.
Why would you build a site about anything you’re not passionate about?
For the sake of this article, I’m going to start a site called Nat Likes Tea at natlikestea.com.
I like tea, mention it at least once in most of my articles, and all the good “tea” puns are taken: honest tea, ingenuitea, insanitea…
Nat Likes Tea it is.
STEP 2: CREATE AN INITIAL ARTICLE LIST
With the topic in mind, I’d come up with an initial list of articles that I could write, and keep them all in a spreadsheet.
Get that spreadsheet here!
By doing this, I can make sure that I’m writing about the best topics to go after, not just picking things willy-nilly. The first couple ideas I have might be fine, but by spending some time to put all the options out there I can be sure that I’m spending my time as effectively as possible.
The easiest way to make this list is to come up with a few article styles, then mix and match styles and content to build a huge list.
For Nat Likes Tea (NLT from now on), I might have these categories:
Then, I’d make a “generator” column like this one:
Pro tip: If you paste them and get a REF error, do “Paste Values Only”
Then I’d repeat that for all the other combinations of things I could write about, until I have an initial list of possible topics:
Now, I can start listing some of the more meta topics that I can think of. These are the ones that would be longer, more in-depth posts, and will likely have higher SEO value.
This is why you should write about something you’re already passionate about. It’s way easier to come up with these big meaty topics when you know the subject matter already, and odds are that friends have already asked you questions related to some of them:
Then I just take those and add them to the list, and now we have our initial list of things I can write about!
All that’s left is lock myself in a Starbucks and start doing lines of ground coffee beans until they’re all written.
Or, for the sake of my nose and adrenal glands, we could prioritize them.
STEP 3: PRIORITIZE YOUR ARTICLES
Now that we have all of our possible topics, we need to figure out which ones it makes sense to focus on for our site (in order to get that sweet sweet SEO traffic), and which ones are fine to give to other people as guest posts.
To do that, we’re going to rank our posts by Depth, then SEO value.
RANKING BY DEPTH
I’m going to go through and assign a score of 1 to 3 for depth to each topic on the list:
1: Shorter, fun, one-off post. Probably < 1,000 words
2: Somewhere in the middle, 1,000-2,000 word guides
3: Massively useful in-depth guide on a topic, likely 2,000+ words
Don’t sell any of your posts long, if they could fit into a bigger post (within reason) then they’re a 1 or 2.
Think of it like a pyramid, with your 3s as a base that the other article ideas build on top of or expand on.
Then, take all the posts you ranked a “1” and put them in another Worksheet labeled “Later Posts”:
COMPARE SEO VALUE
With the 2s and 3s, we’re going to figure out how valuable they are from an SEO perspective. This means assessing how many visitors we could potentially get to them from Google as a result of people searching for those topics.
First, go to Google Keyword Planner.
Then, take a topic you came up with, and plug it in as you have it:
See what the results are:
In this case, there are almost no monthly searches for that topic, so we can plug some variations into that search bar at the top until we find a keyword (it’s a keyword even if there are multiple words) with a high volume:
Now I just take that Keyword and the Keyword Volume, and add it to our spreadsheet:
As you’re researching, you’ll come up with more ideas. For example, when I was looking for a good keyword for “high caffeine teas,” I noticed that there was a lot of searches for the amount of caffeine in specific types of tea:
So I made a note to myself to add more topics around that later.
And then you just need to repeat this for all of your topics, or at least all of your “3” ranked ones.
DISQUALIFY TOUGH COMPETITION
Once I have my list of keywords, I’d go through and make sure that none of them are so competitive that I shouldn’t bother trying to rank for them (yet).
This does NOT mean to look at the competitiveness rating in Keyword Planner.
That competitiveness ranking is how competitive the ads are. Since we’re not buying ads, we don’t have to worry about how many other people are buying ads.
What I mean by competitiveness is who else is ranking for this keyword in Google right now.
All I have to do is take each keyword, plug it into Google, and see what comes up. I’ll also use the Moz Toolbar to tell me how highly ranked the pages are.
If there’s a few major sites competing on a keyword, I’ll highlight it in red, but if it looks like smaller sites that I can definitely compete against then I’ll move on.
You might see results from social media, Amazon, and other “big” sites in the results, but don’t let those scare you off.
Since these sites cover such a wide variety of topics you can still compete with them, and if all you’re seeing are social media results that’s a good sign that no one has written a good article on the topic.
STEP 4: PICK YOUR TOP 5-10 TOPICS
With your list of topics (excluding the ones that seem too competitive), it’s time to pick the 5-10 that you’ll put on your site.
With just 5-10 articles, you can easily reach 10k visitors a month. I currently get ~2,500 visitors per day from just 4 of my articles, so if just one of your articles reaches that level then you’ll have hit the goal.
In this case, I would go with:
Drink these teas for weight loss
A guide to the different types of tea
Tea vs. Coffee
Best tea for your skin
The best decaf teas
New to Tea? Start here
The best low caffeine teas to go to sleep
They’re all not too competitive, have a large enough search volume to each get me 5,000+ visitors a month (anything over 1,000 is a safe bet), and they’re topics I want to write about.
Important note: the “keyword volume” is not an absolute, it’s only an indicator. For example, the keyword “water fasting results” has a monthly keyword volume of 2,400, but my article targeting “water fasting results” gets 15,000-30,000 visitors a month.
This is because 80% or more of searches are unique. They’re long highly-specific searches (e.g. “what happens to your body if you don’t eat and only drink water for 5 days”) that are rarely repeated, and Google just makes its best guess to match those to easier keywords.
10,000 visitors per month is roughly 333 per day, so each article only needs to get 30-60 visits per day. Not a crazy high bar.
In fact, you can plug in how many posts you want to write to see what traffic amount you need on the spreadsheet. Just set your monthly goal and how many posts you want to write:
Just so you know though, it won’t be an even spread. A few articles will get substantially more traffic than others (the 80/20 rule at work), so when you’re picking topics, pick ones that could be massively popular (volume of 1,000/month or higher).
Here’s the relative traffic amounts for the top 20 articles on my site to give you an idea:
STEP 5: MAKE A SCHEDULE
Before you start writing, create a schedule in Google Calendar for how often you’ll publish, both on your site and other sites.
Aim for a minimum of two posts per month on your site, and one post a week on other sites. If you want to post more, put more time into posting on other sites. That’ll have a bigger ROI for you in the short term.
But the most important thing is that once you make the schedule… stick to it. Lock it in, and make sure that you’re getting your articles out when you say you will. That’s the only way you succeed at this.
STEP 6: CREATE A LIST OF SIMILAR BLOGS FOR GUEST POSTING
We’re almost to the writing! I promise! This is the last step before you buckle down with your typewriter.
You need a list of blogs that you can guest post on, and that you want to link back to you. The reason we’re doing this now is that once you have your list, you can include links to other people’s sites in your articles to earn good karma with them.
Think about it. What’s more appealing:
“Hey I just linked to your article about XYZ from my article about ABC. Seems like we have a lot of topics in common, would love to put something together for your audience about DEF if that’s interesting to you :)”
Or
“Hey can I write stuff on your site to promote my site?”
Obviously the first one, since you’ve already done them a favor by giving them a link whether or not they let you guest post!
And ideally, you’re doing this over separate emails (so one that says “hey I linked to you” then a follow up later asking about guest posting), which means that in your first communication you’re not asking for anything, just making their life better.
Add a worksheet like this one to your content plan:
And fill it in with the blogs in a similar niche as you.
The best ways to find these blogs is to:
See what comes up in Google right now for your topics
Search on BuzzSumo for posts that performed well related to your topic
Search on Twitter for people sharing articles from related blogs
If you’re having trouble finding their email addresses, Connectifier or Email Hunter can usually take care of it for you.
Now, with list in hand, it’s time to start writing :)
STEP 7: WRITE THE FIRST ARTICLE
It’s time to pick an article, say “A guide to the different kinds of tea,” and get to work.
While writing it, I’d follow the guidelines for creating epic content that I give to writers for the Sumo blog:
It must be actionable. Someone should be able to take the post and do something, not just go “oh that’s nice.”
Focus on ONE core idea. Think of someone searching in Google. What question are they looking for the answer to, and why is your answer the best.
Think of how you can make it the only article they need on the subject. When someone finds it they should go “whoa I better save this.”
For length, think 1,500 - 4,000 words. More is fine if it’s kickass (this article is ~5,000). I find it’s hard to do a worthwhile topic justice with anything shorter.
Use pictures. Make sure the pictures enhance the explanations--some fun photos are fine, but the point of the pictures should be to make whatever you’re saying more clear. No random stock photos.
Chunk it up. It shouldn’t read like a New Yorker article. There should be helpful headings, sub headings, short paragraphs, bold text, etc.
Links links links. Include any relevant links in your article. More links = more people we can email about plugging them in order to get them to share it.
Link to my other articles. I can’t do this in the first one obviously, but for every article after that, this is important for SEO and for keeping people in the site.
These aren’t hard and fast rules, but I find that they help make sure that everything we put out is excellent. They’ll help you make sure of that as well.
As for targeting the article to the keyword you’re going for, don’t worry about that too much. The only thing to make sure of is that you put the keyword in the title. Aside from that, as long as the article is about the topic you’re going for, you should be fine.
If you want to be safe though, you can install Yoast, and use that to check your article for how well it’s set up to rank for your keyword.
Article done? Good. DON’T PUBLISH IT YET. There’s one more important step…
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