The Blog Traffic Thread

[TenMillion]

Hey guys!

I started blogging in 2014. Since then I have monetized my blog successfully by adding a store for products and services.

The first year was just writing, writing and more writing.

I write in the bodybuilding niche with my decades of experience to draw from.

In 2015 I redesigned the blog and re-uploaded 100 of the best articles at a rate of 5-8 per week. I promoted the blog on my Instagram (20k+ followers) added all the Seo tags/metatags to each post.

All this has gotten me is around 80 views a day on average to the blog website.

No comments on articles and no email list sign ups. I even offer a free ebook for email capture (took 6 months to write)

I'm not trying to come off as complaining as I love blogging and giving back value to the fitness community.

It just seems that I have hit a sticking point with the blog traffic. I still write 2-4 quality blog posts per week.

Any fastlaners with some good advice to grow blog traffic? Much appreciated! Let's brain storm in here!

 

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[HyperFocus]

Hey guys!

I started blogging in 2014. Since then I have monetized my blog successfully by adding a store for products and services.

The first year was just writing, writing and more writing.

I write in the bodybuilding niche with my decades of experience to draw from.

In 2015 I redesigned the blog and re-uploaded 100 of the best articles at a rate of 5-8 per week. I promoted the blog on my Instagram (20k+ followers) added all the Seo tags/metatags to each post.

All this has gotten me is around 80 views a day on average to the blog website.

No comments on articles and no email list sign ups. I even offer a free ebook for email capture (took 6 months to write)

I'm not trying to come off as complaining as I love blogging and giving back value to the fitness community.

It just seems that I have hit a sticking point with the blog traffic. I still write 2-4 quality blog posts per week.

Any fastlaners with some good advice to grow blog traffic? Much appreciated! Let's brain storm in here!

Spend more time on marketing.

 

[TenMillion]

What sort of marketing?

 

[JDawg]

While I don't write or blog myself, I optimize blog posts & content for SEO on a daily basis at work.

Here are a few tips that I've found useful when writing and optimizing blog posts:

1) Know your target audience

Make sure that you research & understand who exactly you are wanting to reach with your articles - in this case, some area within bodybuilding.

2) Build a keyword list

Find out what people are searching for in your body building niche on Google. For example, "tips for body building" or "top body building exercises"

Ask yourself, "if someone searches ______ on Google, do I want my website/blog to show up?" Pick the words or "keywords" that would best fill that blank.

And then write down a list of those "keywords" that you want to focus on. (I like to start with 10 keywords)

*You can use Google's keyword planner tool to find out which "keywords" are searched the most on Google.

3) Write a blog post for 1 keyword

Pick 1 keyword. And write a new blog post that focuses on that 1 keyword.

If you are focusing on the keyword "tips for body building", then write a blog post titled "10 Tips On Body Building That Will Change Your Life".

Don't overuse the keyword or make the article look spammy, but incorporate your target keyword into what you are writing.

** Optimize everything on this blog post/page to focus on just the 1 keyword that you picked. Change the page title, the url slug, the meta data, schema markup, the image ALT tag, etc.

4) Quality > Quantity

Make sure that your content is actually informative and engaging. Google's algorithms are very sophisticated, and tend to like longer, more in-depth articles.

The average blog post that ranks on the #1 page of Google is 1800 words long. Shoot for that range.

You are better off writing a few, targeted articles that are in-depth about a specific topic than trying to write as many articles as possible.



If you follow this strategy, I am confident that your number of visitors and engagement will improve. Hope this helps!

 

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[theag]

https://www.facebook.com/ads

 

[c19h]

Write really in-depth posts. Go to your competitors' sites and check what they're writing and which of their posts are the most popular. Write even better posts on the same topics as their most popular posts. Listen to your audience (e.g. on Instagram/check other blogs and their comments/forums etc.). Write one post/keyword (as mentioned above). Build relationships with more influential people in your niche (those with major Instagram/blog audiences).

 

[TenMillion]

While I don't write or blog myself, I optimize blog posts & content for SEO on a daily basis at work.

Here are a few tips that I've found useful when writing and optimizing blog posts:

1) Know your target audience

Make sure that you research & understand who exactly you are wanting to reach with your articles - in this case, some area within bodybuilding.

2) Build a keyword list

Find out what people are searching for in your body building niche on Google. For example, "tips for body building" or "top body building exercises"

Ask yourself, "if someone searches ______ on Google, do I want my website/blog to show up?" Pick the words or "keywords" that would best fill that blank.

And then write down a list of those "keywords" that you want to focus on. (I like to start with 10 keywords)

*You can use Google's keyword planner tool to find out which "keywords" are searched the most on Google.

3) Write a blog post for 1 keyword

Pick 1 keyword. And write a new blog post that focuses on that 1 keyword.

If you are focusing on the keyword "tips for body building", then write a blog post titled "10 Tips On Body Building That Will Change Your Life".

Don't overuse the keyword or make the article look spammy, but incorporate your target keyword into what you are writing.

** Optimize everything on this blog post/page to focus on just the 1 keyword that you picked. Change the page title, the url slug, the meta data, schema markup, the image ALT tag, etc.

4) Quality > Quantity

Make sure that your content is actually informative and engaging. Google's algorithms are very sophisticated, and tend to like longer, more in-depth articles.

The average blog post that ranks on the #1 page of Google is 1800 words long. Shoot for that range.

You are better off writing a few, targeted articles that are in-depth about a specific topic than trying to write as many articles as possible.



If you follow this strategy, I am confident that your number of visitors and engagement will improve. Hope this helps!

Thanks for this advice.

The blog currently has 500-750 daily viewers.

My question now is how do I monetize the blog further?

At this point my partner and I have transitioned into Youtube as our main organic traffic source. It has been working well and we are at around 6000 subscribers with 4-7 videos published weekly. We offer a lot of value in our videos and have hyperlinks in the description to our products and services that seem to convert well.

For the blog,

It costs me around 100$ a year to keep it open.

We have around 140 articles total and the traffic picked up after this thread was created. It took awhile for it to rank on the search engines with keywords etc..


I was thinking of hyperlinking offers in every blog post.

40-50% of them would be to our products and services and the rest would amazon affiliates program products and other affiliate agreements.

What do you guys think? If I could get this blog producing 500-1000$ a month through our offers I would be very happy. It would be a major win for our company to get that monthly recurring revenue into our corporate account.

I like offers instead of crowded ads ruining the design of our blog interface.

My focus is more on our youtube and mailing list at this point for marketing.

 

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[Philip Marlowe]

The blog currently has 500-750 daily viewers.

Hey @TenMillion - how is the blog going? Were you able to increase and/or monetize your traffic?

 

[Process]

It is good that you followed the basic seo advice,

I'll disclaim I've never run a site in the body building niche, so I'll give more general advice.

You could also repost your articles on body building forums. Plus, you could answer questions to establish yourself as an authority. This will make people more likely to click your signature and homepage links on your bio. Just don't come off as a shill.

If you want to get really creative, you answer Quora questions with your profile.

Also you could run ads on Bing/Facebook (depending on your offer type) to split test your landing page to see if you are hitting the right buttons. Keep toggling and you'll end up with an email list.