Every blogger’s Holy Grail – Increased Page views, am I right?

But I am here to tell you that there is no shortcut to this goal.

Yes, I did get 10,000 page views in 30 days but I didn’t go from zero to 10k in 30 days, let’s be clear.

I’ve been blogging since 2007. For the first six years, I blogged solely for myself.

For the next 5 years, I built a blogging community through social media.

While I switched to blogging as a business in 2018 March, it was only in November 2019 that I began to pay serious attention to the idea of increasing traffic to my blog.

Then, between December 2019 and January 2020, I hit one of my first-quarter goals for this year:

Hitting 10k Page views AND qualifying for a premium ad network, Monumetric

In this post, I am going to walk you through the various steps I followed to make this goal possible.

Most of it was through things that I did, personally. One was a stroke of luck thanks to a partnership. More on that later in the post.

This post contains Referral/Affiliate links. What that means is if you click on some of the links and make a purchase, I get a commission at no extra cost to you. Read my complete disclosure policy here.

Decide why you want 10000 page views

It’s a lovely vanity metric, sure. It’s nice to show off on our social media pages.

But getting 10k page views must have some actual value.

And the best value in terms of increased traffic is the ability to get into a premium ad network.

Most bloggers start off with Google Ad Sense. Now that is a problem for a number of reasons.

Google Adsense is a pay-per-click network. That means you won’t generate any revenue unless people actually click on the ads that they see.

A premium ad network such as Monumetric, Mediavine or AdThrive, however, is a pay-per-view network.

That means you generate income from the number of impressions that your ads receive.

Locate your best traffic sources

For each of us, this will vary distinctly, but it is fairly easy to determine what your top traffic sources are.

Go into your Google Analytics>> Head to Acquisition>> Click on Overview>> Sort by the last 90 Days worth of traffic.

Then determine which are your top ‘Social’ channels and see how much Organic and Direct traffic you are getting.

In over 90% of the cases, the top referrer under ‘social’ would be Pinterest.

In terms of the easiest source of organic traffic, your best bet both as a new blogger or a veteran is to focus on Pinterest traffic.

Pinterest is a marvelous search engine and it’s ideal for driving search-related traffic your way.

If you’re completely new to Pinterest, start with my detailed 10-step Pinterest tutorial for beginners.

Once you get a good handle on Pinterest, you can learn to focus on SEO and Google traffic.

The key here is to understand what we call user intent.

Find out what your audience is searching for and then create content that satisfies those search criteria.

In my personal case, I had 3 Major sources of traffic that contributed to the increase in page views: Pinterest, Google and a promotion campaign run by an affiliate partner on a product I wrote a review about.

Write More Long Form Content

Now, most bloggers would tell you to write more blog posts for more traffic.

While that isn’t completely untrue, I personally would ask you to focus on writing more long-form content.

That means, every post you write should be detailed, comprehensive and so complete that your readers wouldn’t feel the need to go looking elsewhere to get answers.

Let me give you an example with this post by Brian Dean of Backlinko:

How to Write a Blog Post: The Definitive Guide

You’d notice that the way the post is laid out is like a mini book of sorts.

It has chapters and sub headings and images to explain every single point.

A good rule of thumb would be to aim for at least 1500 words and then go higher.

You may be thinking that it sounds like an awfully long post, but you’d be amazed when I tell you that all I did was publish four posts, each of 2000 words or so in length, in the month that saw me reach 10k page views.

Seriously!

Write content for your readers

So, here’s the nub of it all.

While you should write long form content, you should ensure that the content you write is actually relevant to your target audience.

How do you determine that?

Two tips:

1. Ask them. I usually ask my readers in my e-mail newsletter, my Facebook group and my Instagram page what they would like to read.
   
   Based on what my most engaged readers and loyal subscribers say, I create content according to that.
   
   I also ensure that the content I create is both seasonal and if necessary, built around a particular theme.
   
   
2. Your readers will actually be found amongst your competitors’ audience.
   
   Find out what they are writing about and aim to target similar pain points when it comes to your audience.
   
   Listen carefully to what people need and deliver over and above their expectations.
   

I explain exactly how to do this using a 90 Day Content Plan which I chalked out in mid-December, for my blog.

Write better headlines

I confess I had ignored this tip myself for the better part of a decade!

Headlines are the secret sauce to getting way more organic traffic than you’ve been getting already.

And I am not just talking about blog post headlines.

I’m also referring to the titles you use to share your post on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

I’m referring to the key words that trigger emotion when you put them on a pin image.

A really good headline will do the most important role: compel people to take action, such as clicking through to read your post in its entirety.

Want an easy way to generate the best headlines for your blog posts and social media shares?

Use this free tool from Co-schedule.

That spike in my blog traffic is partially made possible every month thanks to good headlines.

Create a value-based newsletter

Not going to lie here, but I didn’t just have the goal of 10,000 page views for this first quarter.

I also wanted to increase my list of engaged e-mail subscribers.

Because, everyone knows that the money is in the list.

But I wanted to ensure that if I did get subscribers, they really wanted to be on my list.

And how did I do that? By adding a link to my free weekly newsletter at the bottom of my posts.

Yes, I know most people would tell you to have an opt-in or a lead magnet to ensure better sign ups, but I don’t do that anymore. For one thing I’ve realised that opt-ins get you extremely cold subscribers.

Read more about why I did away with my resource library here.

Add more internal links to your top posts

It’s not enough to send people to your new posts, if traffic is your aim.

Once they land there, it’s a great way to keep them on your blog and have them click around to read more of your content.

That’s where internal links come in.

Plus, they’re amazing for on-page SEO.

For every blog post that you write ensure that you link back to at least 2 or 3 related posts in the body of the content.

*Have you heard of the term ‘dwell time’ in Google Analytics? It’s the amount of time a person actually spends on your blog.

Why is this important?

Because, for advertisers, one of the things they look for is how long people stay on your site. So, the longer they stay, the more they will see the ads displayed on your site.

Better for advertisers; better for you too.

Find your Top Performing Posts and optimise them

So this is a tip that many bloggers ignore when they are looking to increase page views.

They forget about their amazing older pieces of content on their blogs.

Publish one new blog post a week as I mentioned earlier.

Then, go in and fix 2 or 3 older posts on the blog and bring them up to par with the standard of your new blog post.

That means you’d have to add newer, brighter and more eye-catching images to the content.

You’d have to re-format the posts and structure them for better readability.

Go ahead and break up the longer paragraphs into more bite-sized pieces of content.

For a list of 20 things you should do to every blog post, download this checklist and follow that to update your older content on the blog.

Watch your traffic grow.

Re-share your top posts on your social media channels

I love the fact that social media channels exist for us to promote older posts and shower some love on much-neglected content.

Once you’ve worked on updating those older posts I talked about, go ahead and schedule them out on your Facebook page, your Facebook group (if you have one) and your Twitter page.

You don’t have to be active on all of these platforms, trust me.

Just schedule out the content to be shared at optimal times and you’re good to go.

I’d recommend watching this video for a neat trick on updating your post with catchy headlines for both Facebook and Twitter. 🙂

Another tip I can share is to share the post on relevant and related threads of Quora.

Quora is a crowd-sourced forum of experts and users who ask questions and share answers on a variety of topics. If used right, Quora can actually send decent traffic to your blog.

Just remember not to be overly self-promotional.

The idea behind Quora is to be genuinely helpful and offer assistance as much as possible.

Stop spending time on social media share threads

Now, this is a tip that many bloggers may find challenging to follow but I urge you to do it.

It’s one of the things that freed me up to focus on the quality of my content.

Blog sharing threads and link ups on Facebook and Twitter, while fun, can be very time-consuming.

What’s worse is that the traffic you get from these posts is not really organic.

The ‘I scratch your back, you scratch mine’ philosophy, which most blog sharing threads are built upon, is very detrimental to your blog’s growth trajectory.

Ditch the threads.

Focus on writing high value search-oriented content.

Take courses that will help you reach this goal

The only way I actually reached 10k Page Views in a single month was due to a few people.

I purchased courses that they sold, buckled down and worked on every single one of their tips and watched my traffic climb.

Here are the ones I wholeheartedly recommend:

Pinteresting Strategies: The Definitive Manual Pinning Course by Carly Campbell that sends 100,000 Page Views per month to her blog. 🙂

Pins made Happy: The Most Comprehensive Pin Design Course that you will ever find on the market. It contains detailed and in-depth videos about the psychology of pin design and also has a Facebook Support group for paying customers.

SEO: There are two SEO books that you must absolutely buy to get your organic traffic up and going consistently.

One is Easy On Page SEO by Debbie Gartner and covers every little detail about SEO that you could possibly imagine.

The other is the sequel to her on page SEO book and is called Easy Backlinks for SEO and is incredible in the way it helps your site build authority using tried and tested white hat SEO methods.

CONCLUSION:

Getting to 10000 page views can seem like a formidable goal and to be honest, it takes a lot of persistence and hard work to make it happen.

Don’t be upset if you don’t see results within the first month of trying these tips.

Go back to the drawing board, revise your strategy and implement what you’ve learnt to keep creating quality content.

Before you know it, you’d be applying to that ad network of your dreams.

Shailaja V

Hi, I’m Shailaja, a blogger who’s been writing since 2007. My interests include books of all kinds, digital minimalism, veganism, health, nutrition, fitness and staying open to learning all the time. Welcome! Click here if you’d like an email when I publish new posts