11 Steps to Growth Hack Your Way to Blogging Success
This is a 8000+ word guide on how to build a new website or blog from 0 to 10,000 visitors from scratch with communities and content
Yep, that’s eight thousands words!
If you are ready to throw your laptop on the wall because you’re starting a website from scratch, this guide is for you.
If your Google Analytics account is as depressed as you are, this guide is for you.
As soon as you get your 10k visitors per month it will be a lot easier to reach the 20k and more.
Indeed, as soon as you have an audience, people will share and like your content, tweet your posts and subscribe to your email list. But you’re not there yet.
Let’s start the game..
NOTE: This post contains some affiliate links like Bluehost which means I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you if you buy after clicking through from my blog. Please remember that I never promote products unless I’ve used and loved them myself.
Step 1: Choosing the right niche
When you start a blog or a website you want to grow and find success. Therefore you need to make sure there are growth opportunities in your niche. In this section I will help you in choosing the right niche for your business.
If you want more information I suggest you to read the article How To Find Your Million Dollars Business Idea.
What do you need to find? You have to choose a niche with the following attributes:
- good traffic expectations
- people ready to buy with a good purchasing power
- not too much competition
- enjoyable to work in
Long tail & short tail keywords
A short tail keyword is a general one that a lot of websites are already trying to rank for in the search engines. For example, the word “finance”. If you try to compete with them it will be nearly impossible as there are millions of websites talking about finance so it is unlikely that you will appear on the first page of Google when a user type “finance” in the search box.
A long tail keyword is a more specific set of keywords for which there is less competition. For example, “alternative finance against global warming”. Fewer people type this kind of search on Google so the competition is more reasonable and you may find your way on the search engines. It is good to think about these keywords and try to see if you can find many of them in a particular market.
Assess their traffic potential with Google Trends or Google Adwords (see How To Find Your Million Dollars Business Idea). It may also influence the choice of your domain name afterwards.
You need to be able to write on topics belonging to the long tail if you want to find success on the long run. Make sure there is enough to write on these long tail topics.
Passions & Interests
You need to choose a topic you love writing about, otherwise you will fail quickly. Writing good content takes a lot of time, dozen of hours, even hundreds.
How can you manage to write on a topic you don’t love enough?
However you should find also a balance because you cannot be the only one on Earth interested in this topic. Otherwise you will never attract people, you will have zero traffic and an empty wallet.
Choose a topic you love to death.
Analyze your competitors
Once you have done your first researches, you have to find the big blogs and websites in your niche. This is super important! Look at their number of subscribers, their Twitter followers, the number of comments they get and so on.
You want to make sure that you can grow in this niche. If you can’t find any big websites it means that you are super clever and you will soon become millionaire or that there isn’t much going on in that field.
So, create a new Excel sheet and start doing your market research!
You need to have competitors, otherwise you don’t have opportunities in your market.
Where is the cash?
It is crucial to have a good idea of how to make money in your niche before starting your site and building your mailing list. You have to know roughly what you are going to sell on your blog.
Don’t be like all these losers who build traffic, get subscribers and then figure out that there is no cash to do in their market because their audience is not ready to pay for their products and services. How can you know that in advance? That’s simple, analyze what the big guys and girls are doing in your niche.
Are they making decent money? Or should they better start a charity?
Step 2: Getting a good domain name
Now it’s time to choose and book your perfect domain name. It will help your blog stand out from the crowd. A good domain is sexy, relevant and memorable.
As Ramsay from BlogTyrant says,
Your domain name is extremely important. It’s how people first encounter your blog and it’s the part of your brand that communicates with them first. It really needs to stand out and it really needs to be a .com that you own.
I recommend you to buy your domain as soon as possible as someone can book the same domain name at any time.
Why should I own my domain name?
Again, Ramsay gives the following advice:
Free domains that you get with free blog hosts (like Blogger or Tumblr) do not rank as well on Google and they build the brand of that free blog host. Purchasing your own domain name is the first step to building a successful blog that you fully control as a professional venture.
It is not a problem if you already have a Blogger or Wordpress domain name because your new host can migrate your site for you for a few bucks.
You get your own domain name often for free for the first year when you sign up for a hosting package, such as with Bluehost (affiliate partner) which I use personally.
How to choose a good domain name
It is a really important process and it is not easy to change your domain name afterwards as you will face technical issues if you do so. Therefore, take a lot of time in choosing the right domain name and ask for feedback to your loved ones.
Try to choose a domain name that refers to your niche by using keywords of your short tail.
If you blog about finance, you may want finance.com but it is already taken so try to add more keywords or different variations. You can check for available domain names on the WHOIS.net website.
Whois – finance.com is not available
You can also name it after yourself if you want to promote you as your own “brand”. You position yourself as an expert but you have to give high quality content. You don’t want people to think you’re a loser, right?
There are also domain names that don’t mean anything particular but they are memorable so people remember them. For example, google.com.
Personally I like to make people dream, that’s why you are on dreamedfortune.com
Here you can make your dreams come true.
At your own scale.
Step 3: Getting your own host and setting up your blog
You should buy you own blog host and not rely on Wordpress.com. You need the flexibility to change the code yourself if needed and as Ramsay from BlogTyrant says,
Buying your own blog host is the most important thing you will ever do. Hosting your own WordPress blog is the way all the big guys do it – it’s now the most popular open source blogging software in the world due to the tens of thousands of free themes, plugins and different features you have access to for free.
How do you do that?
Follow these steps to host your own website:
Sign up for Bluehost as your blog host provider
You can choose another host provider but personally I use Bluehost (affiliate partner I love) for several years. I prefer to recommend things I use personally. With Bluehost you can install an unlimited amount of blogs, websites and email addresses and you never get any hidden fees. They have 24h live support. Each time I got a problem they solved it within minutes.
Install Wordpress
You have to login to Bluehost after having purchased your hosting package. Then on your administration panel “Cpanel” just click on the button “Install WordPress” and follow the prompts. It takes 5 minutes to install your professional Wordpress blog.
Choose a theme
You now have the backbone of your site as you installed WordPress. You need to give it a nice look for your visitors by choosing a theme that is free or a paid one with all the functionalities you want.
You can search for themes directly from your WordPress dashboard (“Appearance” > “Themes” > “Search”).
Choose a theme that fits your marketing strategy. Your theme should look clean and professional if you write about finance because people will judge you on the appearance of your website.
ATTENTION! Make sure your theme adapts to the small screen size of mobile phones and tablets as most people are using these devices today. Therefore, choose a mobile responsive WordPress theme.
Step 4: Identify Your Readers
What is the profile of your future customers? What are their demographics? It doesn’t matter to bring visitors to your website if they aren’t targeted or if you cannot convert some of them into future customers.
You want to earn some money from your business, right? Therefore you have to think about the kind of customers you want to attract to your website and write for them.
You should have a clear view about your typical customer. Think of an avatar. That’s super important as everything will fall into place from this typical customer. I’m thinking of your branding and marketing strategy and of course your content and the traffic you will get ultimately.
That’s not really easy to succeed in profiling people. You are not part of the FBI.
This is where technology comes.
Twitter Audience Insights
A good way to find your target audience is by referring to Twitter statistics for your account. Of course I recommend you to publish regularly targeted content on Twitter and see which kind of people you attract with your tweets. This applies only if you have enough Twitter followers. At least a few hundreds. Otherwise your result will be unreliable.
That’s not a big deal to get your first hundreds of followers. Refer to the article “How to get your first 500 Twitter followers and become popular” published earlier on Dreamed Fortune.
Browse this URL if you want to use Twitter Analytics: https://analytics.twitter.com
Go to the “Audiences” tab to see the Audience Insights. Select “Your followers” or “Your organic audience” and you will see some useful statistics. What is the difference between both of them? When someone retweets you, their followers are part of your organic audience even if they are not your followers.
Twitter Audience Insights offers you a broad overview of your followers, their demographics and their interests.
Twitter Audience insights – Dreamed Fortune
Twitter Audience Insights offers a full range of useful information, like the age of your followers, their gender and their country.
Twitter Dreamed Fortune – followers age
Above you see that most of Dreamed Fortune Twitter followers are between 25 and 34 years old. There are a lot more men than women and most of them come from the US.
Twitter Dreamed Fortune – followers gender
Surprisingly, 10% come from India and United Kingdom is only the third in the list.
Twitter Dreamed Fortune – followers country
Pay attention to the statistics provided by Twitter as the people who visit your site are not necessarily part of your Twitter followers. However as you publish your content on Twitter there is a likelihood that these followers want also to visit your website as they like your content.
Note also that some people are in your followers list only because they want you to follow them back. There are thus sometimes strange profiles following you.
Also, you may have added a lot of entrepreneurs such as in your Twitter list because you like this kind of person and you think they would be interested in visiting your website. In return they follow you back, but it doesn’t mean they will like your stuffs. You have to double-check these stats with other tools like Google Analytics to have a better understanding of your audience.
Google Analytics
I recommend you to use Google Analytics to gather useful data about your website visitors. You can learn a lot from their statistics. However, if you have a brand new website you don’t have a lot of traffic and if you didn’t tell Google to remove your own traffic (when you work on your website) your statistics are probably unreliable. It is better to remove your own traffic from the stats if you have a fixed IP address. Otherwise you have to pay attention to the stats you see on your Google Analytics dashboard.
You can compare the data you get from Google Analytics with your Twitter stats to have a better idea on your demographics.
Step 5: Find Out The Needs of your Target Audience
It is really important to target your website content to the wishes of your target audience.
I repeat, you have to figure out what your audience wants and give it to them.
You have to figure out where your avatar hangs out online. Search for the well-known websites and blogs in your industry that your avatar is likely to visit.
On which social networking platform is he likely to hang out online? Facebook? Twitter? Pinterest? Instagram? Google+? There are plenty of social networks online and you have to find out the habits of your typical customer.
Here is how you can proceed:
Twitter Audience Insights
Twitter Audience Insights gives you the main interests of your followers. That’s a good start. For example, the followers of Dreamed Fortune are mainly interested in entrepreneurship, technology and marketing as you see in the figure below.
Twitter Audience Insights – interests of Dreamed Fortune followers
Amazon
Use books reviews to find out exactly the wishes of your targeted audience. Focus on the critical reviews of your audience’s most read books.
Indeed, people leave reviews after reading books so that other people can get an idea of the book quality. Often people mention missing things, how they would have liked the author to cover topics and so on.
For example, let’s assume you want to start a blog helping people to create online businesses and earn their freedom like Dreamed Fortune. You may consider books like:
- The 4-hour Work week of Thimothy Ferriss
- Rich Dad Poor Dad of Robert T. Kiyosaki
- Screw Work Break Free of John Williams
- The $100 Startup of Chris Guillebeau
You can find the titles of these popular books when reading your favorite’s blogs, reviews on Youtube or at the book store. Use also the search box of Amazon with typical keywords to find these famous books.
Take a look at their reviews, especially by focusing on the 2 or 3 stars reviews, meaning that the reader was not satisfied.
You will soon discover what your potential audience is missing with reference books so it will give you confidence for writing great content in the next step, covering these unmet needs.
For example, The $100 Startup has 6% of 3 stars comments and 4% of 2 stars. We are going to focus on these unhappy readers first before looking at the 87% super happy fans.
Chris Guillebeau is the New York Times bestselling author of The $100 Startup, The Happiness of Pursuit, and other books. Chris travels the world and writes for a small army of remarkable people at ChrisGuillebeau.com. Follow his live updates from every country in the world at twitter.com/chrisguillebeau [Amazon]
The $100 dollars startup on Amazon – Chris Guillebeau
When you click on “3 star” you get access to all the 3 stars reviews, and the associated “Top critical review” comment.
The $100 Startup – Chris Guillebeau – Amazon review
In the above mentioned review you see that the reader don’t want only to hear about success stories to find motivation, but he wants also to better know the struggles for that success. He wants to learn how he can do the same, which problems he is likely to meet and how exactly he should do to find success.
It’s not enough to hear that plenty of people “got an idea, started a website, made money”. Yes it is inspiring, but the reader wants concrete facts that will help him start his own business and find success.
Therefore you may think of providing such concrete advice on how to start a business online and not just show how successful other people are. Your readers want to find success too but they don’t know how to reach it.
Provide them with the tools to break these barriers to success and they will start loving you.
Here it’s just an example, but you should read plenty of other reviews and highlight all the needs of the readers that are unmet.
Quora
You have to find out if your readership is on Quora.
Quora is “a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users” [Wikipedia].
If you can manage to find the questions your potential audience is asking, you can give solutions if you think these problems can impact people on a large-scale. Find useful topics on Quora by entering targeted keywords in the search field.
For example, with the “website” keyword I find the following question :
Quora – website keyword search
People can vote for a question by clicking on “Upvote”. So when you see a topic in your industry that is interesting for you, look at when its creation date and the number of Upvotes it gets. Of course it is better to see a lot of Upvotes as it means many people want to get an answer to the question, The more popular a question, the better your chances to get traffic on your website when you cover this topic.
When you search for a keyword Quora displays suggestions. It’s also good to know the most asked topics. People want to know which subject to choose for a website, which Dreamed Fortune explains with the article “How to find your Million dollars business idea“. People want also to improve the traffic to their Websites, which relates to this here guide!
Quora – trends
When choosing the topic “Website Traffic” we get 120 Upvotes for the following question. People want to know how they can bring traffic to their website even if they are broke. In this guide I only talk about free tools for your marketing.
Quora – generate website traffic with no marketing budget
Note also how popular is the following question:
Quora – how to earn $3K/month with a blog
The About section for “Website Traffic” category shows the popularity of this topic. You can compare with other subjects in your industry, assess the competition and do your best to offer solutions to popular questions of people.
Quora – stats, increase website traffic
According to Wikipedia,
Reddit is a social media, social newsaggregation, web content rating and discussion website. Reddit’s registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links. Registered users can then vote submissions up or down to organize the posts and determine their position on the site’s pages. The submissions with the most positive votes appear on the front page or the top of a category.
Content entries are organized by areas of interest called “subreddits”. The subreddit topics include news, science, gaming, movies, music, books, fitness, food, and image-sharing, among many others.
As of 2016, Reddit had 542 million monthly visitors (234 million unique users), ranking #11 most visited web-site in US and #25 in the world.
Like for Amazon and Quora, try to find on Reddit the most popular topics in your industry. You will write useful content afterwards.
Google Search Engine, Google Adwords & Google Trends
Refer to the article “How to find your Million dollars business idea” on Dreamed Fortune that covers important marketing tools from Google to better understand the needs of your readers on a large scale.
Really, it’s a must read! You have to know these tools.
Step 6: Create a Masterpiece
You have to write high quality content.
You don’t have to write several blog posts a week to find success.
You have to write the best resource on the topic as the competition is tough.
Why would readers take their precious time reading your website if they can find better quality easily elsewhere?
Therefore, with your list of subjects your target audience wants you to cover, choose the most popular topic and create an epic resource on it.
I didn’t say a good resource. You have to write THE resource which people see as a reference in your market.
You have to write a bestseller, somehow.
It represents your high quality standards, your brand image.
Take the time to produce it. It doesn’t matter if it takes you 30 hours or more to produce it.
Quality is better than quantity, and Google will like it. Definitively.
You will be rewarded for your efforts for a long time.
I am lazy, what should I do?
That’s great! Remember the market analysis you did at the beginning of this article.
As you know the big guys and girls in your industry, you can take a look at all the posts that these blogs have written with success. Try to figure out why they have worked, the topics and keywords targeted and how you can improve it.
Because you have to do better, otherwise there is no point of reading you.
Think of extra tools, books, plugins you can talk about to develop further into those subjects.
How to write an epic resource?
Firstly, write down all the topics you want to cover. Make a list of quickly written headlines and organize your sections.
Then you will have to look at your competitors and see what they are doing. Maybe there are interesting ideas, subjects you didn’t think about. Maybe they don’t organize the information in an efficient way. Try to find the weaknesses in the texts of your competitors, read their reader’s comments and see the points they should improve. For example, if the content should be more step-by-step.
This is a fertile ground for your own work.
An easy way to find out what your best competitors are doing is by using Buzzsumo.
The service “analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor. Find the key influencers to promote your content”[Buzzsumo].
They look at the number of shares on the social networks to sort the most popular contents on the Internet.
Buzzsumo – the number of shares in the circles, on the various social networking sites.
Take the time to write the best resource on the market compared to the competition.
If you don’t write but you post videos on Youtube or you create podcasts, I recommend you also to write your thoughts as it will help you organize your mind.
Key influencers
Mention also the key influencers in your industry directly in your content. Refer to their websites, it will help you later when you will ask them to share your content to increase your traffic.
Mention them. Link back to them.
Write awesome content
Here are a few techniques for writing awesome content:
- Develop a style with lots of spaces, headings and dot points
As advised by BlogTyrant,
People are too easily distracted these days and as such you need to create a blogging style that uses lots of lists, headings and paragraphs. The idea is to make it as scan-able as possible. WordPress lets you add bold text and list points really easily so make use of them.
- Don’t fully exhaust your topic
Also, do not fully exhaust the topic. BlogTyrant recommends to “leave some questions in peoples’ minds. This generates a lot of buzz because readers will want to share the content to find more answers from their friends”.
- Add resources
You will always see resources mentioned in viral content on Delicious or Reddit. You want your readers to bookmark your posts and come back to your website to grab the information they need. Feel free to link out to other blog posts or tools to give as much expertise as possible to your readers. They will consider you as a reference and it increases your credibility.
- Base your posts on other great posts
If you want to go viral, you need to have a look at the people who have done it. See what they did. Find out why people enjoyed it so much in the biggest blogs of your niche market. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Make it just better.
Step 7: Write an Awsome Headline for Your Epic Content
Headlines are super important to master as they are the first point of contact of your readers with your website and business. Often people see your headline on social networks and they decide if they click or not on it. If they don’t reach your website, you will never see them and they won’t be your customers.
A good blog post content is even more important than good content. If your title is well written people will click and read your content even if your introduction is a bit iffy.
Therefore you have to really prioritze on writing badass headlines for your articles.
You deserve success. Great headlines come with it.
If you need help to write your headline for your masterpiece, you can download the free Ebook we offer you on Dreamed Fortune.
It takes a lot of time to master this art of copywriting so you must practice a lot before you find success.
You can then ask your friends and family which headline is the most appealing. Use also key Facebook groups for bloggers and online entrepreneurs with several thousands of members and organize a poll. They will tell you the headlines they prefer.
A good headline can skyrocket your traffic so take time to choose and select it.
Your headline should be irresistible to your readers!
Step 8: Make it Simple to Share Your Masterpiece
It is a lot more difficult to get your first 10k visitors per month than it is to get your next 10k. Indeed that’s because you don’t have visitors to share your content with their friends, and you don’t have an audience.
You need to make it super simple for people to share your content, so your audience will grow with time and it will be easier to get new visitors.
The share buttons remind the reader to share and act as a call to action that is easily executable. [Sarah Peterson, Unsettle.org]
Okay you want your readers to share massively your content. All right. But remember you in the supermarket: if you have to choose between tens of differents products it will take time for you to make a choice and at the end you may give up.
It is the same for your readers. You should give them enough choices but not too many.
Don’t leave too many choices on the table if you don’t want your visitors to leave it without sharing.
Which social networks should I use?
Go to BuzzSumo again and find out the social networks that are mostly used for sharing useful content in your industry. Select only the relevant articles by searching for the right keywords. You can also go to your competitor’s websites and see which networks they use. Facebook and Twitter are mandatory most of the time but it depends on your market.
Social sharing plugins
SumoMe
You have several free plugins available for your Wordpress site but the one I tried were crap, except for SumoMe. You can see the sharing icons on the homepage of Dreamed Fortune.
Choose only the social networks you want your readers to use. In my case, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and the Facebook Like button.
SumoMe sharing settings
It is super easy to configure. You just have to select the areas you want to show share buttons on your website.
SumoMe sharing placement
Make sure also that the mobile sharing button is toggled on.
Easy Social Share Button
I use also this Wordpress plugin on the blog pages of Dreamed Fortune but you have to pay $19 to get it. You have access to plenty of configuration parameters and it is easy to use. I strongly recommend it!
Which strategy for your sharing buttons?
As said earlier, I recommend you to display only the main social networks for your sharing buttons.
I advice you to include also a Facebook like button for people who don’t want to share your content.
Also, avoid negative social shares behavior. If you have less than X number of shares, don’t display this number so you won’t influence your readers in a bad way. They should only see that your content is sharable and they will be even more likely to share your content if they see other people shared it massively.
Position your share buttons at the top and bottom of your articles. The top is super important as most people don’t take the time to read your article before sharing it. I noticed that the buttons just above the articles are the most performing on Dreamed Fortune.
I recommend you also to put social sharing buttons in many places on your website. By increasing the opportunities to share you improve the likelihood of seeing your readers share your content.
You are now ready for the next step!
Step 9: Catch them all
That’s great to have traffic on your website, but it takes a lot of energy if Google doesn’t bring you a lot of visitors.
Most of them browse your website quickly and leave. They never come back and forget about you over time.
Time erases memories.
If only there was a mean to be able to automate things and make sure people come back when you want..
It exists. Welcome to the World of mailing lists!
If you manage to get the email of your visitors, you get the permission to contact them personally when needed while paying attention so you don’t spam them. You can contact your subscribers when you release a new article, a product or service. If you have a few dozen of subscribers you can ask them to visit your site at any time.
Even more important, that’s where you make money with your blog! It’s a really funny model as you write awesome content to attract people and get them subscribe to your mailing list. You sell them products and services on that list and you send them your last posts so they share them with their friends. Your subscribers act also as a base for launching your new websites.
If you don’t have a mailing list, you won’t earn enough money on the long run, even with advertising.
Try to capture as many loyal and friendly email subscribers.
That’s your main goal.
How do I build my mailing list?
There are plenty of plugins available for your Wordpress installation. For example, you can use Thrive Leads as described in the article “How to run a massively profitable online business“. I personally use Thrive Leads and I think it is an awesome plugin.
It even has an automatic asset delivery service, meaning you can send automatically an ebook to the people who subscribe to your mailing list. It connects with the major mailing services (autoresponders) like Mailchimp (good for beginners and advanced users) or Aweber (for experienced people).
However it is not free, but you can get it for an unlimited amount of websites forever, with a one time payment (no subscription) at an afordable price.
The above mentioned article explains all the steps you need to follow to build your own mailing list.
Before you start blasting your masterpiece article everywhere, set up a system to capture the email addresses of your visitors.
Mention clearly what the visitor will get in exchange of his email address.
You will then send teaser emails to let your subscribers know that new content is available to them on your website to drive traffic back to your content, generating shares, comments and so on.
Neil Patel from Quicksprout recommends to use the following template to let your subscribers know about your latest posts when emailing them:
Subject: Title of your blog post
Hey,
I just wanted to share with you the latest [Insert your blog name – and make this a link to your post] blog post. Let me know what you think.
[Insert the title of your blog post – and make this a link to your blog post]
[Insert the first paragraph from your blog post]
[Insert the second paragraph from your blog post] Click to continue [make the “click to continue a link]
Thanks.
[Insert your name].P.S. [Add a promotional message here]
Neil Patel is a well known influencer in the webmarketing world and he always writes masterpiece content.
Step 10: Become a Networking Master
I suggest you to reach this step only after you’ve put in place the required tools for building your mailing list. Indeed, here we are going to send visitors massively to your website, but these are temporary waves unless you can catch email addresses.
This step is so crucial, it’s called networking and you cannot miss it.
Previously in this guide I asked you to mention influencers people in your masterpiece article. It’s now time to contact these people who already have the target audience you want to reach. Tell them you mention them and if they like your content, ask them politely if they can share it with their fans. Include some personality in your email, you’re not talking to the top management of your company.
I like the example given by Sarah Peterson of Unsettle:
Hi [name],
I just published a [descriptive word] resource on [topic] and I mentioned you in it [why you mentioned them]. Would love it if you could check it out and share with your audience. [link].
Thanks either way,
[Name]
You see, it is simple, clear, in one paragraph. Mention it if you have a preferred social channel you would like them to post to (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn,…).
Reach out also the other people who inspired you when writing your article and ask them if they can republish your content.
Sarah Peterson did it the following way:
Hi [name],
I saw your [podcast/article/video] on [topic with link] and really enjoyed it. [Insert personal connection point here].
I just published a [descriptive word] resource on [topic] and I think your audience would enjoy it. Would love for you to check it out and let me know what you think [link].
Thanks either way,
[Name]
Most of the people won’t share your content so you should reach plenty of them to increase your chances of seeing your content published on a large audience.
Send at least 10 to 20 emails. It’s worth it, really.
Create alliances on the long run with well-known bloggers. Over time they will be happy to promote your content and vice versa.
Guest posting
For the moment you probably have no content or just a few random blog posts that even your mom doesn’t want to read.
As soon as you have your masterpiece content, you may think of the idea to post awesome articles to other blogs.
Guest posting is one of the best ways to go viral by giving your best material to other blogs with guest posts.
Take time to see where you should post your content and contact the owners of these famous blogs.
Step 11: Spread Your Content Like a Virus
I suggest you to spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% promoting it. You cannot follow the same principles as the one you probably used several years ago when starting a blog. Nowadays there are hundreds of millions of blogs on the Internet. Nearly everyone can start a blog, it has become so easy to make. It’s not anymore the privilege of a few geeks.
Don’t focus on creating content several times a week. There are millions of other websites doing the same. Google will not value you more than the others.
Instead, create masterpiece content of several thousand words and spread it like a virus. Google wants to see great content with high added value that can stand out of the crowd. Google wants also to highlight popular content.
That’s a good news for you as even if you have to create better quality content, you are not obliged to produce it massively.
The quality of your blog posts is better than how many posts you publish.
You can publish once a week, or even twice a month. If your content is so much valuable you will be loved by Google and your readers.
If you have quality content and a few hundreds readers, why would you miss the millions of other people who are likely to love your writings? Think of them and spend 80% of your time reaching them. The remaining 20% are for writing new articles and the other tasks you have to do with your business.
If you spread your content on valuable sites and you get a lot of shares and likes on social networks, Google will like you.
And do you know what happens when Google likes somebody?
It sends an insane amount of visitors to your website.
Visitors who become fans.
Fans who become customers.
And if you’re good enough, maybe one day you will live under the coconut trees (be careful, by the way!)
So, what do you have to do to reach that goal?
As you probably don’t have any Twitter followers or Facebook fans yet, focus on the social communities. Otherwise nobody will read your posts when releasing them.
Share your website and blog posts in the Facebook groups, it is a great way to promote your content to targeted users. Keep in mind that more than 1 billion of people spend their time on Facebook. You don’t want to miss them, right?
However it is not easy to promote freely on Facebook. First people should trust you, otherwise they will think you are a spammer and they will probably kick you out. Therefore, it is better to post added value with short comments to the group before promoting your website.
You can also create your own group and try to attract people so you will be able to post at anytime as you are the boss. I had to figure out a workaround for Dreamed Fortune as I didn’t have enough people in my group.
I created a fake profile of a beautiful young woman and I sent friend requests to some members of a group interested in online businesses and entrepreneurship. As I noticed on Twitter that my audience is more masculine, I decided that it was a good bait. Then I got several thousands of friends requests and hundreds of messages so it was working well. Even girls added me and thanked me for accepting them. I posted my articles on my page and got plenty of likes, new subscribers on Dreamed Fortune and shares on the articles.
I put this woman as administrator of a Facebook group I manage, and with “her” account I added plenty of her new friends to the group to bring some life. I had just enough time to do that before Facebook blocked the fake account. No problem as the group still exists, with its members. Among them there are people interested in making money online, and from the external world it is more appealing to see a group with dozens or hundreds of Facebook members.
In other words, it was a kind of “Facebook growth hacking”, but I don’t recommend you to do that as you should only have your own profile. If you use the photo of someone else you have to get her/his agreement beforehand, of course.
Post to Twitter with hashtags. I suggest you to read the article How to get your first 500 Twitter followers and become popular.
Remember to use hashtags as it is a great way to reach people even if you don’t have any followers yet.
Use Buffer to schedule your Tweets at the best timing, with various hashtags.
You can use up to 30 hashtags on Instagram. Use Canva (desktop) or WordSwag (mobile) to create images for Instagram.
Don’t do a call to action post straight away. Instead, post several times with appealing content before you add a link to your content in your bio.
Google+
Google+ communities are a great way to reach targeted users according to their interests. Subscribe to the lists in your industry with at least 5000 members and publish your content there without forgetting to tease your public. Include a link at the end of your post, which should generate a resized image of the one you used in your post.
Repeat the same process for other communities so you increase your chances of having likes and shares from people.
Google+ communities
Online communities
Aside from the social networks, there are many other communities you can reach especially if you target a specific niche.
There are plenty of online communities on the Internet. If your targeted audience is using some specialized forums or communities like Quora or Digg, you should also be there.
Forums
Yes, forums are still used! Don’t let people fool you, there are plenty of forums for each dedicated niche online. Become an active member, answer to questions before promoting your website. It’s like with other communities, you have to give more than what you want to take.
Post only to active forums, that is, the ones with many daily topics opened everyday.
Quora
You already used Quora before in this article when assessing the needs of your audience. This time be more proactive by answering to questions and inviting readers to visit your website for getting more information on a specific subject. Don’t be spammy. It’s better to write some replies without inserting your link to look like a “normal person”.
Quora is a great place to show expertise on your niche and drive traffic.
Content directories
You can also post to content directories as they can bring you traffic from time to time. Often they are seen by owners of popular websites who can republish it.
Niche directories
Here are some examples of directories if you are in the same niche as Dreamed Fortune. Feel free to post on these directories and hope that a popular website will publish your content. Indeed, larger websites syndicate their content from these directories (like Lifehacker).
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GrowthHackers (marketing, business)
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Inbound (marketing, business)
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YC Hacker News (tech, business, marketing)
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Rockstar Finance (personal finance)
Advertising
Advertising is a quick way of reaching your audience for a limited budget. Even if you hate the idea of spending money for your marketing campaign, think of the time you would save by advertising a bit your blog? All conventional businesses do it, why would you do it differently?
Do it only after you have set in place the sharing buttons on your website, and your email list subscription popups as well.
Additional thoughts
Nowadays your content shouldn’t be only written words as a lot of users browse the Internet via their mobile devices. Think about creating podcasts or videos as they are digested easily on mobile platforms.
You will thus give people new pathways to find you as well as “offering your existing readers something more personal and detailed. Its like creating a new product line. Video, especially, is now the number one choice for internet marketers who want to personalize their sales pages and create more trust”. [BlogTyrant]
Conclusion
I know, it’s a long process, but it’s definitely worth it. You will see your traffic picking up as you follow these steps, until you reach an “epic win”.
It is harder at the beginning as you don’t have followers, fans, email subscribers and so on.
As time goes it will be a lot more easier as your first small snowball will get bigger until it smashes all your competitors down the mountain, one by one.
You just have to repeat this process and to write also guests posts on the websites of your competitors.
Create also other kind of content, not just posts. For example: videos, podcasts, various tools.. Mobile users will like it so much!
Repeat it over and over.
If you do this, traffic is inevitable.
Follow these steps and start generating traffic , conversions and dollars.
It’s up to you.
This guide took ages to put together but I want to make it available for free. Please consider helping me out by sharing it below..
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