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Last updated on May 11th, 2019 at 07:19 pm
If you’re struggling to grow your blog traffic, the 5 steps outlined in this post can help.
Last July I had a real nice bump in my traffic. In less than a month my page views had doubled, even though I posted only twice that month.
While I didn’t put out new content consistently in July, I didn’t just stay there doing nada. There were days I’d spent 10 hours at my desk until my eyes were bleeding.
The result?
A nice little hunchback and traffic that doubled itself.
Now, I’ll save the advice on how to get a hunchback for another post, but here are 5 things I did to BAM, explode my traffic.
5 Things I Did To Double My Traffic In One Month
For Newbies: If you feel like you never know enough to start your own blog you might want to check out my free Step-By-Step Blogging Guide For Beginners teaching you how to launch your blog with a cheap and extremely reliable hosting (get 60% off) and the two most important keys to become a successful blogger.
1. I Created Beautiful, LONG Pins And Added Them To My Blog Posts
I thought a pin is something that I need to upload directly in Pinterest to save some space on my blog (hello, scarcity mentality).
What I would do before is: upload the pin to my own Pinterest board and then repin it every day to my group boards (yes, blogging is a fairy tale).
This did kinda work for a while, but there was a problem.
Because the people who actually came to my blog did not have that pin to repin from the post. There were only my horizontal pictures, which people would pin, but then nobody else would repin later. So in June, I started creating bright and colorful vertical pins in Canva and uploaded them to my blog.
Now, when people came they repinned that beautiful pin and it got more popular because also their followers would repin it. I added 2-3 pins per blog post.
That month I got 5 viral pins. Which brought a lot of traffic.
I did this with most of my older posts and made sure to include text on there that solves someone’s need or is something people search for.
Pinning and repinning did take a while, so now that I have even more pins I use a scheduling tool to schedule my pins ahead and stay consistent.
2. I Added Alt Text To My Images
Can you believe I never cared much about the description to my pins and thought SEO is a myth? Oh, yes I did.
In my pin description I would just write something like: Soup with spinach and bulgur.
Now this isn’t bad, at least it’s something. But how many people really search for those exact same words on Pinterest or Google?
Not that many.
Easy vegan soup recipe? That’s better.
I also didn’t add that description in the Alt Text of the post image, but directly to my pin in Pinterest.
That’s bad because when people pin from my blog, the description would be whatever the name of the picture was. And sometimes it was IMG_467323784368. How many people look for that?
When I uploaded my new pins to my site, I also put alt tags for the first time.
I looked for keywords in Pinterest, wrote a helpful pin description that included those keywords and put that description in the image alt tag – directly in my blog.
This way, when someone pins from my blog, that pin already has a keyword-rich description, which helps it rank higher in Pinterest. And Google.
When people look for those exact same words, that pin is more likely to show up.
3. Improved My Uptime And Site Speed
Okay, having your site up and running is important for you to get traffic, right? I mean duh. Good site speed is another essential for more blog traffic.
I didn’t have both of those things for a while. I tried everything – smushing my images, not displaying images, having a very minimal site and yet my site would be slower than a snail.
I knew I didn’t have the best hosting, but the thought of switching to a new one and transferring all my site scared the crap out of me. So I put it off every single month.
Then I had Jetpack check my site for downtime and it turned out that my site was down every night for 8-10 minutes.
8-10 minutes don’t seem like much, do they? But I found out I got most of my traffic in the evening and people wouldn’t be able to access my site for those 8-10 minutes, which made me look like a loser in front of Google and Pinterest. I also don’t think many people would return to a site that was down.
So I HAD to face my fears and deal with this now.
I needed to get better hosting and figure out how to transfer that site. I looked at a number of hosting plans and had a slight breakdown, trying to decide which hosting to get.
But finally I decided to go with Siteground because they are cheap and had all the things I needed:
- Free site transfer! I really dislike spending money (I’m getting better!) and I definitely didn’t want to pay for transfer or spend time doing it. Siteground took care of it all for me and it was such a relief.
- 99.99% Uptime. They have the best uptime with 99.99%. For the last year mine has been 100%, which is awesome. I’ve not gotten a Jetpack message like this since I switched.
- Faster loading time – my site speed did improve, even though I’m adding way too many images now and having more traffic.
- amazing customer support that is 24/7 – I usually use the chat, because I never feel like talking on a phone – but you can do both.
If you already have a good amount of traffic (more than 30.000 PV) and want to change blog hosting – I highly recommend purchasing the GrowBig Plan by Siteground because it’s cheap, reliable and you can get a free site transfer with it (usually it costs like $100). Here’s the link you can use for free site transfer.
4. Bought A Faster And More Engaging WordPress Theme
I used a free WordPress theme for 2 years. During that time I didn’t make any money and I started getting traffic only 1.5 years after I started. A free WordPress theme isn’t bad if you’re just starting out, but I was almost 2 years in and this decision affected my SEO, site speed and engagement.
So, finally, I decided to invest while crying a little inside. It’s funny how I would spend a lot of money on food and coffee, but when it came to something I wanted to do and something I could actually make money with one day, I was super stingy and afraid to make an investment.
I decided to go with Genesis as so many people recommended and chose the Divine Child theme. Within a month (!) my site started to rank higher in google and my bounce rate decreased.
I’ve heard amazing things about Genesis and they turned out to be true. I chose this child theme, because it was so versatile. I loved how easy it was to customize and that it allowed me to showcase most of my content, so I can keep my audience more engaged.
5. I Joined New Group Boards On Pinterest
Last but not least, I joined some new group boards on Pinterest.
I was a member of many recipe group boards, but not so many health, fitness or general group boards. So, my health & fitness content suffered a lot and wouldn’t have any shares. I did some research by taking a look at Pingroupie and also by checking out the group boards of other pinners in my niche.
Then I asked the groups I liked for invites via email. I got accepted to about 90% of the boards and this exposed my pins to a brand new audience.
So that is pretty much it! If you want to grow your traffic quickly: 1) build a great foundation; 2) stay consistent 3) try to improve as you go and it will pay off!
I hope this post helps you focus on the right things when trying to grow your blog traffic! Let me know if you have any questions. And if you have even more suggestions, please share, I’d love to hear them, I think it’s safe to say we’re all always looking for ways to grow 🙂
