Want to learn how to get traffic to a new blog? I will tell you 3 ways I got traffic to my new blogs and the methods you should avoid.
Learning how to get traffic to a new blog might seem difficult, but if you follow proven strategies to get traffic, you can get traffic consistently and more easily than you thought.
You will no longer have to guess about what works and what doesn’t. You will attract the right people who want to read exactly what you’re writing about!
Having this targeted will not only get your page views up, which will ultimately increase how much money you make with your blog.
In this post, I’ll share with you the ways that I got traffic to both of my blogs, and more importantly, I’ll share what not to do to get traffic. I’ve wasted so much time getting traffic in ways that weren’t sustainable meaning I had to do more work than what was necessary.
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What is blog traffic?
Blog traffic is when a web users visit your blog. The total number of times these web users visited your blog is generally looked at as blog traffic.
It’s an important measurement to see how good your blog is doing at attracting an audience.
Types of Blog Traffic
There are two main types of blog traffic you can get: organic and paid.
- Organic traffic is traffic from free sources without any paid ads.
- Paid traffic is traffic that comes from paid sources such as advertising on Google.
New bloggers mainly want to know how to get traffic to a new blog through organic methods since they don’t have to pay for ads or traffic sources.
Luckily, you can get all traffic to your blog through organic methods for free and without paying for ads!
Where does organic blog traffic come from?
Web users that visit your blog can come from many different places such as:
- Google when they type in a search query into Google’s search bar
- Pinterest when they see and click through your Pin in the Pinterest platform
- Facebook or Twitter when they click on your link in your latest post
- Instagram when they click on the link in your bio or on stories
- TikTok when they click on your link in bio
- Email when you send out an email to them
- Other websites if another blog or site adds your blog post as a link
Why is blog traffic important?
Learning how to get traffic to a new blog is important because without blog traffic, it’s hard to make money, or at the very least, hard to get people to read our advice and thoughts.
When you have blog traffic, it’s easier to make money through:
- ad revenue
- affiliate marketing
- digital or physical sales
- speaking opportunities
- consulting and freelancing gigs
- and so much more.
Organic blog traffic can be very precise and target the exact audience who wants to read what you’re writing about.
How to Measure Blog Traffic the Right Way
Before we talk about how to get traffic to a new blog, it’s really important to know how much blog traffic you already have.
Without knowing where you’re starting off from or how much your blog traffic increases month after month, you cannot tell if your strategy is working.
The best way to measure your blog traffic from the very beginning is by installing Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is the industry standard for collecting data about your website. It includes but is not limited to:
- How much blog traffic you’re getting monthly
- Where your audience is coming from (i.e. search engines, social media)
- Where your audience is located
- What type of interests your audience have
- What people are typing into Google to get to your blog
- And so much more!
The best thing about Google Analytics is that it’s free.
You do not need to have Jetpack, Monster Insights or any of those plugins to add in a Google Analytics tracking code. In fact, I recommend uninstalling Jetpack or Monster Insights. Unnecessary plugins can slow down your website.
Find out how to sign up for and install Google Analytics here.
Key Measurements of Blog Traffic
To see whether or not you’re getting traffic to your new blog, you should take a look at these key measurements from Google Analytics: Users, Session and Page Views.
- Users: A user is a person that comes to your site. He/she can come to your site multiple times and will only be accounted as one person by Google.
- Sessions: A session is a person’s visit to your site. He/she can read one blog post or go through five posts or pages on your blog, and it’ll count as one session.
- Page views: A page view is when a person views one of your pages. If a reader goes to multiple pages in one session, then each page view will be counted as a separate view by Google. Thus, a reader can have multiple page views in one session.
By knowing how many users, sessions or page views you have and seeing the increase of them from month to month, you can better learn how to get traffic to a new blog.
How to Get Traffic to a New Blog With SEO (The Best Way)
If you’re thinking- I want to know how to get traffic to my blog for free- well, this is the absolute best method to get traffic to a new (or old) blog.
It’s through search engine optimization or SEO for short.
I love it because it’s a sustainable, long-term approach to getting blog traffic, and it’s how I personally got 35,000 page views to my 2nd blog (the one you’re on right now) in only 11 months with 27 blog posts. See my screenshot from Google Analytics below.
What is search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is the process optimizing your blog so that it can be found on search engines like Google. It is how to get traffic to a new blog sustainably.
Why is SEO important for blogs?
Reason 1 – Get traffic from the largest referrer.
SEO is important for blogs because over 60% of website traffic (depends on the study) comes right from search engines.
Considering that most people are going to websites from search engines, we want to optimize our blogs to get traffic from the largest pool of people.
Reason 2 – Attract a highly targeted reader, which is vital for affiliate marketing.
Even more important than just the number of people who find websites through search engines is that type of people who can find your blog.
With SEO, you can find the exact person who wants to read the exact blog post you wrote! It is a highly targeted method of attracting readers.
Beyond being necessary for page views, SEO is the most effective way to make affiliate income, which is when you a company pays you a small commission on a product/service a customer found through your blog.
That’s because with specific ways of writing, you can target a reader when they are in the purchasing decision phase of the buyer’s journey meaning they already know they want to buy something; they just need one more article to convince them to do it!
Reason 3 – Be more passive with your blog.
When you focus on search engine optimizing your blog, you don’t have to actively promote it on social media sites to get page views.
Posts on search engines are evergreen meaning that a user can search for your blog post on Google in 5 months from now or 5 years from now if all conditions are met properly.
You can be more passive with your blog meaning you’ll have more time spending doing what you love in your life instead of being tied to the computer.
In fact, blog posts I wrote months ago or even years ago (on my first blog) still get traffic from Google today without much extra effort on my part.
“Much extra effort” meaning that I may go back and update an old blog post that is doing well in Google about once a year. If it’s doing well on its own, I may leave it!
How do you do SEO for a blog?
Before we jump into how to start SEO so you can learn how to get traffic to a new blog, it’s good to know we care the most about Google (and not Bing or Yahoo Search). That’s because over 90% of searches done on the internet are done through Google whether that is Google search engine, YouTube, Google Maps and Google Images.
Now that you know that Google is king, let’s talk about its algorithm. The more you understand about the algorithm, the easier it’ll be to work with it.
The Google algorithm does three things: crawl, index and rank.
- Google bots will crawl websites on the internet for new and updated content.
- They will then take note of these and put them in an index.
- With your blog and other websites in the index, Google will start to analyze and rank each content.
All of this is to serve one purpose- to give the Google user the best information possible that answers their question that they typed into the search bar.
To work with the algorithm and learn how to get your blog noticed by Google, you will need to make sure that:
- Google knows that your blog exists on the internet,
- the bots can not only crawl to your site but crawl through it easily,
- and your site is secure, fast and mobile-responsive.
In order to rank, you also need to learn:
- how to do on-page SEO with keyword research specific to your blog’s domain authority
- and off-page SEO to built your site’s authority and ranking.
Most beginners doing SEO will jump right into doing keyword research and make the mistake of not setting up a proper SEO structure and strategy and really learning how SEO works, which would future proof them from any Google algorithm changes.
Keyword research is only one small piece of ranking in the top 10 spots of Google.
Properly setting up an SEO plan, doing competitive analysis and getting a deeper understanding of the Google algorithm will help you get steady traffic over the years– regardless of algorithm changes!
Start building traffic to your blog the sustainable, highly targeted way! To learn how to set up a proper SEO strategy, correct keyword research for your blog niche and build your authority in a clear and concise way, check out my SEO course specifically designed for bloggers.
How to Get Blog Traffic Fast With Social Media (After or While You Learn SEO)
The worst I mistake when I started my first blog is not learning how to search engine optimize it from day one.
Nonetheless, the “negative” thing about SEO is that it can take blog posts take about six months on average to start ranking in Google. You canNOT expect overnight results with SEO.
The work is so worth the pay off though since it is a more passive way of getting traffic, but still, you might want to know how to get blog traffic fast(er) with social media.
TikTok
You might be surprised to hear me say that TikTok is how to get traffic to a new blog quickly.
For me personally, it was a great traffic source in the beginning of this blog, and since it worked for me, I have to share it with you!
I started this blog you’re on on July 1, 2020. As you can see from the image above, it wasn’t getting too many page views.
In September or October of 2020, I made a TikTok account to share blogging tips. Whenever I posted a TikTok video with tips, I would also share a related blog post.
What was so interesting about this is that I didn’t have the link in bio feature yet, but people still went out of there way to manually type in my link into the browser to get the information I had.
This is when I realized how engaged TikTok users are and how much they want to learn!
If you have information they want, they will go out of there way to get it, even if means there’s not an easy link in bio to click through.
To get traffic from TikTok, start posting videos with valuable information, and either in your link in bio or even in the caption or comments, place a link to the relevant blog post.
Getting a quick spike in traffic from TikTok to your blog may just be how to get your blog noticed by Google.
Pinterest is also how to get traffic to a new blog because Pinterest is a search engine like Google.
Users on Pinterest can go into the site and find exactly what they’re looking for.
Unlike Google though, Pinterest is a visual search engine meaning users not only get search results in text, but they also see vivid imagery, which helps them decide which link they want to click into.
Because of this, both Pinterest SEO and basic design skills are needed for Pinterest.
Pins take some time to take off because they need to start ranking in Pinterest’s search engine too, but page views from Pinterest can come in a little quicker than Google.
Besides Google, Pinterest is my best traffic referrer to my travel blog.
I recommend first learning SEO for beginners then moving onto Pinterest after you’ve gotten the basics of SEO down.
Get my best Pinterest tips here.
What Methods of Getting Traffic to Avoid
One of the mistakes I made when I first started blogging (besides not learning SEO asap) was posting on way too many social media sites. I worked harder but not smarter, and I was spreading myself way too thin over multiple social sites.
Now that I’m an experienced blogger, I really focus mainly on SEO and Pinterest.
This is just my two cents and everyone has a different opinion on this, but me personally, I do not like to use Instagram, Twitter or Facebook to get website traffic.
That’s because posts on these platforms are not evergreen meaning content is not readily available or searchable 5 months from now or 5 years from now.
Posts on these platforms tend to disappear after 1-7 days (depending on the platform).
If you were to promote your blog posts on these site, you’d really only get traffic the day or two after you posted about it.
You’d have to actively post on these sites day after day to get traffic.
As a result, I avoid posting my blog posts regularly on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
If it works for you, that’s great though! Again, this is just my personal experience, and the above three social media sites may be the best for you depending on your niche.
If you could take away one lesson in learning how to get traffic to a new blog, it’s to learn SEO the right way, which will safeguard you from Google algorithm changes.
Get my exact strategy on growing your blog effectively with my SEO course. I will help you personally when you join our private Facebook group!
Until next time,
Sarah Chetrit
See more blog posts here or let’s connect on social:
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FB Group to ask me anything Blog and Make Money
Instagram for travel, blogging, Korean food + more @sarchetrit
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Jane
Tuesday 28th of June 2022
Getting traffic with the help of social media is that what I'm doing now. Recently I started to write blog for a company that creates soft (https://www.worktime.com/) what would you advice for it, do I need to start Tik Tok or it's a bad idea for this type of company?