26 Mar How To Get Your First 1000 Blog Visitors in 2021

Starting a blog can be a daunting task. If, however, you somehow manage to overcome your apprehensions and start creating content and publishing it online, if nobody reads it, the whole affair can feel very demotivating.

For this reason, it is important to set your expectations right. Long lasting and real results in the digital landscape require time and relentless consistency.

That being said, there are ways to drive traffic to your blog from day one. Without wasting any more time, let’s look at how you can start making your blog visible to the right people right away:

Make Your Blog Worth A Visit

What’s the point of driving traffic to your blog if users are not going to be greeted by a professional website? While most website templates have made the job of bloggers easier than ever, it is important to check and recheck for missing pieces in your website architecture. These include, but are not limited to:

• A professional looking homepage with plenty of visuals such as original graphics, photos, and videos. Most successful bloggers source their own photos, and you can easily create graphics using free tools like Canva.
• Descriptive “About Us” and “Contact” pages. A website that displays “this page is under construction” on any of its pages is bad user experience. And bad user experience is the recipe for failure in the digital landscape.
• Most importantly, generate superb content that is either extremely entertaining or actionable. Starting a blog is usually a matter of doing what you love. When you write about something that you love, even if it is something boring like “how to drive traffic to your blog”, it shows in the quality of the content you generate.

Once you have ensured your blog is truly worth the time of a potential visitor, it is time to venture off your website to drive traffic.

Enlist The Help Of Your Friends And Family

If you haven’t already done this one, let me reassure you it is a great idea. The chances of finding someone interested in reading about something you are interested in sharing are extremely high within your direct social circles. Moreover, friends and family are usually very supportive and would happily share your content within their own social circles, even if they personally don’t have any interest in the same.

This, however, doesn’t mean you will spam them with requests to visit and share your blog. Simply shoot out a single email to an email list that consists of your family, friends, coworkers, people that you previously worked with, business associates, basically everyone you know. Politely ask them to pay your blog a short visit, and share it within their own circles.

Similarly, if you have a Facebook page for your blog, send out an invite to like it to ALL your Facebook contacts. It literally can be done with a single click.

Start Finding Guest Posting Opportunities

Guest posting is arguably the best way to give your content the audience it deserves. It works especially well if you are adept at creating high quality, insightful content. Moreover, since your website is not a business website, but a blog, you can expect a lot of absolutely free guest posting opportunities.

Start by identifying bloggers in your niche, that are at the same or at a similar stage as you. That means, when you are just starting with your guest posting endeavors, limit your efforts to reaching out to “peers”  in your niche, instead of “authorities”.

This is not to say that authority blogs are absolutely out of reach. However, once your blog has established its footing within the industry, it is much easier to convince authority blogs or influencers for guest posting collaboration.

There is an exhaustive guide on this subject, which contains all the information you need to start with and succeed at guest posting.

Get Your SEO Right

Search engine traffic is the lifeline of any successful blog. That being said, saying that ranking on the first page of Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) is difficult would be an understatement. 

While it may take literal months (and sometimes years) to reach the first page of Google search results, you have to start optimizing at some point, and now is as good a time as any. You can start preparing with SEO optimized WordPress themes and popular SEO Plugins to make things a little easier for you.

While SEO is a complex undertaking, there are a few simple steps involved, that you can execute on your own in addition to choosing the right themes and plugins:

• Keyword Research

There are several premium and free keyword research tools to choose from, but the simplest way to conduct keyword research is with Google’s Keyword Planner. It is free, easy to use, and comes with a user manual.

The basic function of the tool is quite straightforward. Simply put your website link or niche specific terms into the tool like this:

And the result would be a list that looks like this:

Once you have a list of keywords, you can start including them in your content. However, don’t go overboard with this strategy. Stuffing too many keywords in your content will negatively affect your rankings.

• Optimize For Speed

Website speed is a known ranking factor for search engines. Moreover, users absolutely hate slow websites. So much so, that if your website takes more than three seconds to load, over half of the people that visit your website, will bounce. Choosing the right web hosting provider will help alleviate slow website performance, especially Managed WordPress Hosting options that are marketed specifically for WordPress blogs.

Once again, higher bounce rates are frowned upon by search engines. If your website is slow and bounce rates are high, you can bid farewell to your biggest potential source of traffic, Google.

Thankfully, Google offers a free tool with which, you can test the load times of your website. A test on Google PageSpeed Insights looks like this:

The best part is, Google also tells you the various opportunities that you can leverage to improve the load speed of your website:

• Create High-Quality, Relevant Content

Almost every article about blogging will mention the importance of quality content. And that’s because high quality content is truly the king when it comes to online success.

The most important thing to remember is relevance. For instance, if you rank for the following search term:

“How to bring traffic to your business website”

The content needs to outline actionable strategies to increase traffic on a business website.

Remember, search engines want to improve user experience. When a user asks a question from a search engine, it wants to present them with websites that answer that question in a succinct and straightforward manner.

If you post exhaustive and truly helpful content on your website, the chances of ranking on the first page will improve dramatically.

Conclusion

If done right, the strategies outlined above will get you your first 1000 visitors. However, that is just the beginning of your blogging journey. Remember, real, lasting results take time, patience, and consistency.

Did I miss out of any of your favorite traffic strategies for new blogs? Share your thoughts in the comments!