To increase your blog traffic to over 400,000 thousands visits per month you need more than just good SEO. You need a solid plan and a strategy that will differentiate your blog from the rest. It’s not easy to do but it’s not impossible either. During the process, I have learned a lot of things and I hope that this post will help you understand how to do the same and grow your blog traffic to these numbers.
Let’s take it from the beginning, the blog is Calorie Secrets. It is a weight loss / fitness /nutrition blog in an industry that is considered to be a ‘million dollar industry’. Thousands of people per day are searching the web for advice on how to maintain their diet, lose weight or switch to a healthier lifestyle.
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The fact that ‘dieting’ is a popular subject automatically means that the competition is huge and this makes it even more difficult to create a blog to compete with the rest. If you also take into account that dieting is a topic that is covered in detail by online newspapers and magazines this makes things even more difficult.
How it all started
Before launching Calorie Secrets in 2012, I had more than 5 years working experience in the weight loss field as a blogger. I developed a number of websites, wrote hundreds of articles, knew who were the main players in the field and had a good knowledge of the industry from an SEO perspective.
I was monitoring rankings for several keywords on a daily basis and I could see websites come to the surface or disappear every time Google was making a change to their ranking algorithms (and this was even before Panda and Penguin).
All this information and knowledge helped me a lot in creating a solid plan for Calorie Secrets which turned out to be a successful one that got the traffic of the blog to over 400K visits per month, three years later.
The numbers you want to see
Before explaining how I created the blog, what things I considered important and how the traffic grew to these levels, let me show you some data that will make this post more interesting.
The screenshot above shows the total traffic for January 2015. As you can see the organic search was 476 thousands and the rest comes from direct visits, email, social and referrals. Traffic in the diet field is seasonal, it goes up between January until August and then drops to lower levels in September until the end of the year.
Keep reading to see how long it took the traffic to reach the 400K milestone.
The Calorie Secrets Story
Picking up a domain name
When starting a new blog the first thing that you need to do is pick up a domain name. Back in 2012, it was debatable whether keyword rich domains had a ranking advantage (today it is clear that they don’t). Nevertheless my aim was to get a domain that is maximum 2 words, easy to remember and descriptive about the content of the website.
I was not willing to pay extra to get a premium .com domain so I went for the .net version. I did have experience with .net domains before so I knew in advance that this wouldn’t have any negative effect on my efforts to rank this website in Google.
Choosing a blogging platform
This was an easy decision, the best blogging platform is WordPress and never thought of choosing something else. When it comes to theming I wanted something simple and flexible and at that time Thesis was among the most popular themes so I spend $50 (if I remember correctly) purchasing it. This was the first money I had to spend on the website.
Creating the blog
I didn’t spend a lot of time creating the website. Thesis had a lot of configuration options and I also had programming experience to make some customizations I needed and everything was good to go in a couple of days.
My idea was to keep the blog structure simple with 4 basic categories together with the rest of the pages that are essential like the about us, contact us, sitemap and privacy policy.
I did some changes to the homepage though to showcase 5 sticky posts together with a list of the latest articles. It’s a good practice to keep your most important content on your homepage or sidebar because it helps in a number of ways. I am using the same practice on this blog, look for the ‘Must Read’ section on the right sidebar.
Creating a content plan
So far that was the easy part of the process. Once you register a domain name, pick up a nice theme and setup your blog things get tougher because it’s the time to think about the content. Empirically this is the point that many bloggers quit because it’s easier to say ‘I will create a blog and write content on it’ than actually doing it.
There are a lot of challenges to overcome and a lot of questions to answer. What should I write about, how to write it, how to make the content interesting, how long to make my posts, how often to publish new content; questions that are important for the success of your blog in the long term.
What should I write about? The weight loss / dieting in an endless topic. There are so many things to write about which are related to the field and this can make your life difficult in the beginning.
As I mentioned above, I had experience in the niche so pretty much I knew what my focus would be, that’s why I have chosen the categories ‘weight loss tips’, ‘diet tips’, ‘fitness advice’ and ‘how to’.
People searching to lose weight or become fit, in the majority, they have questions and they need answers, tips and step by step instructions on how to achieve their goals.
Two important decisions I took at that time, which are still relevant today more than ever, for any type of blog, were:
First to provide for evergreen content and second to target low competition, long tail keywords.
Evergreen content is simply content that is relevant for a long period of time. People looking to lose weight in 2012 had the same questions as people in 2015 and probably this will be the same for many years to come. So, my intention was to find topics that would be relevant for many years and not topics that were news or trending for a limited period.
When I did my keyword research to come up with the actual titles, my aim was to find search phrases that were long tail keywords (i.e. more than 2 words) and low competition. Luckily enough, the nature of the weight loss industry allows you to find a lot of search queries that meet the above guidelines.
People tend to use more words when looking for information about dieting because most probably they already did the typical searches i.e ‘weight loss’, ‘diet’, ‘fitness’ and they did not find a specific answer to their question so they use more words to come up with a more precise search.
For example you will find phrases like “how to lose 5 pounds in a week’ or ‘weight loss tips for women over 40’ that are perfect to be used as exact match post titles.
How to write it? If you have good knowledge about a topic and can devote the time needed you can write the content, if not then you need to find other ways. In my case I wrote hundreds of articles about related topics in the past so at the beginning I decided to write the posts myself.
The problem is that besides being interested in fitness & healthy lifestyle I was not a real expert, meaning I did not have the qualifications or the academic background to back up my articles with real data. I didn’t like the idea of building a diet blog based on my enthusiasm about the topics but I wanted to raise the bar and only publish content written by real experts who could prove their expertise.
It was also that time that Google started taking into account the ‘authority of content’ and introduced Google+ authorship (which is no longer used) as a way to make the web less anonymous.
So, I took the risk of hiring professionals to write the content for the blog. Each and every blog post published since then it is written by certified professionals and it is also backed up by research studies and real data.
In my opinion this contributed a lot to the success of the blog because it is important to know that when you read something that has to do with health advice is not just written by someone who is a fanatic about the topic but by professionals who have studied about it and can guarantee that the information provided is accurate and scientifically proven.
I know that some people may disagree about this approach but this is how I decided to differentiate my blog’s content from the majority of the fitness sites you will find on the web.
The risk taken related to content was to find good writers and pay them, waiting that at some point the blog will generate enough traffic and money to get your money back and start making a profit.
How long should the blog posts be? I will expand further about this in a new article, but for Calorie Secrets I decided that the minimum word length of any post published on the site would be 800 words. There was no maximum limit, and all my posts adhere to this rule.
How often to publish new content? Frequent publishing has many advantages especially for topics related to healthy lifestyle and dieting so I have set the publishing frequency to be 3 times per week (Mon, Wed, Friday), a schedule that I use until today.
How to increase your blog traffic
Once you sort out the content part, the next step is to start thinking of ways to increase your blog traffic and preferably your organic traffic which is the most valuable type of traffic.
I know that if you are still reading this post, this is the part you want to read the most so I will try and give you as much details as I can.
Before the go live
Before start publishing content on a new blog, I always prefer to have 4-5 posts ready in advance in draft mode and then publish them one per day to get the ball rolling. There is no real SEO advantage or benefit from doing this, it’s just my way to start a new website. It’s good to give an indication to the search engine bots from the beginning that the site will be updated frequently but other than that there is not much to it.
Keeping a schedule
What is important after you go live is to keep a constant publishing schedule. I made sure that once the blog was live, it was updated 3 times per week with good quality and unique content.
Webmaster tools, Analytics and Rankings
As soon as I published the first posts, I have registered the site with Google and Bing webmaster tools, submitted the sitemap and added analytics. This helped me a lot in monitoring the performance of the blog, improvement in rankings and increase in traffic.
I also registered with SerpBook, the tool I use to keep track of the ranking position of different keywords in Google and Bing. This is very helpful and necessary because it helps you see how your ranking positions are improving over time.
As you will read below, you won’t get to the first page of Google immediately so its good to know your progress. After I registered with SerpBook, I have created a list of keywords from both my keyword research and also from Google Webmaster tools (search analytics report under search traffic).
First organic visitor
It took a couple of months do get the first organic visit from Google. At that time the blog had already 10+ published posts and I was glad to see that I started gaining rankings in the 3rd and 4th pages of Google. While that didn’t bring any real traffic yet, it was a very encouraging signal.
Free tools and repeating visitors
If you read the ‘About’ page you will see that the philosophy of the blog from the very beginning was to provide useful information but also free tools people can use to achieve their fitness goals.
I always believed that besides the content, you need to give more reasons for people to come back and for that purpose I have developed a free calorie counter, different calculators and diet plans you can download or use for free.
This method worked pretty well as I started noticing in analytics an increase in the number of repeating visits.
Android, Chrome and Amazon
In parallel to publishing new content on a weekly basis, I also created an android app and published it to the Google play store (downloaded more than 250,000 times until today), a Chrome app and published it to the Chrome store (has more than 20,000 active users) and an amazon app for the Amazon app store.
It did cost me some money to develop those apps but they really helped a lot in spreading the word and they also contributed in the increase of direct and repeating visits.
Newsletter
In addition to the above, I also started a newsletter that has now more than 30,000 members that generates a good amount of traffic every time I send out a newsletter.
Social Promotion
As soon as the blog had a decent number of posts, I started social media campaigns in Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. In Google+ I already had a good presence so the posts started gaining a decent number of +1s and shares and on Facebook I used facebook ads to increase the page likes. A tactic that I am still using today and that’s why the blog fan page has close to 100,000 followers.
For pinterest I created a business page and update it every time I publish a post and for twitter although I do have an account, I am not actively using it. Pinterest does create a few thousands of visits per month but for sure it is a channel that I am not using to its full potential.
I also created an instagram account but only used it for a couple of weeks.
Despite the fact that social traffic today is much less than organic traffic, it contributed a lot (and it still does) in getting more natural links from other websites and blogs.
Adwords
In the beginning and once the blog was 4 months old (and before adding any ads on it), I also used adwords to get direct visits from Google. It cost me to run the campaigns but it was another opportunity to promote the content, get more subscribers, get more users for the tools and increase the number of repeating visitors.
Blog Commenting
When the traffic gradually increased to a few thousands per month I also started receiving comments for the posts. I decided to have a very strict comment policy (I still do) because I wanted to avoid spam or comments that added no value to the content.
I didn’t approve any comments that included links or that were made for the purpose of getting a link or added no real value to the page. This may have helped in the long run because I never had to delete content from a page because it was spam or not related to the post.
Advertising and monetization
My initial goal when starting Calorie Secrets was not monetization. I first wanted to get a decent amount of traffic and then add ads to it. Most fitness blogs were full of ads (at that time) and did not want to create another made for adsense website.
I believed that if you showed respect to the users by not making a site full of ads they would come back again and again. I also decided not to use any affiliate programs and get into the mode of trying to convince people to buy a particular product or diet plan, my idea was to give them the facts and stay unbiased.
I added adsense when the blog was 8 or 9 months old but my ad positions are not aggressive or in any way violating adsense guidelines or the user experience. I do make a decent amount from adsense and I most probably stick with adsense in the long term.
Mobile friendly
Long before Google decided to promote mobile friendly websites, I noticed that the mobile searches were increasing more than the desktop thus contributing to a large part of traffic and income. Although my website theme was not responsive, I created a responsive version and that contributed to a further increase in the organic traffic coming from mobile.
Link Building or lack of it
I deliberately did not discuss about link building yet because this is not a practice I followed for Calorie Secrets. It may sound strange but that’s the case. I started the blog right after the release of Panda 3.5 and Penguin and the last thing I wanted was to get a Google penalty.
That’s why I decided to concentrate more on the content, tools and apps (as described above) and less or almost nothing on building links. I did do a couple of guest posts in high quality websites but that’s about it.
The blog has a decent amount of incoming links which is the result of natural links created by other bloggers and websites in the niche and this is something that definitely played a big role in the traffic increase (especially the organic traffic).
Social promotion was a great way to put the content in front of other bloggers and as the rankings became better more natural links were created because of the quality of content.
I am glad that I followed this route because I never feared that I would lose traffic after a Google update.
Health on the web
Health on the net foundation is a non-profit organization that verifies the trust and validity of health websites. If you see on the sidebar of Calorie Secrets there is a badge you can verify the HON certificate. Being certified for HON is important for health related websites since it is an indication to the reader that what they read is reliable and trustworthy. There is a process to get certified that takes a lot of time but I consider this to be very important if you want to create an authority website or blog.
Organic traffic grows to 100K, 200K, 300K, 400K visits per month
A lot of people ask me how long it took for the traffic to grow and since this is interesting and helpful information to know, I will outline some numbers below.
Organic traffic (mainly US traffic from Google), reached the 100,000 thousand visits per month as soon as the website was 12 months old. At that time I had 184 published posts.
Four months later (blog was 1.5 years old) organic traffic doubled to 200,000 with 237 published posts.
It reached the 300,000 milestone after 2 years with 333 published posts and it passed the 400,000 thousands visits (organic, direct and referral) in 2015 with close to 500 posts.
Lessons learned that you can use in your blogging journey
From what you read above (if you are still reading), it is obvious that the success was not due to extraordinary SEO tricks or to excessive link building but to the other factors that helped the site kick off fast and grow steadily.
If I had to summarize the lessons learned from working on this website, these are the main points:
#1 – Don’t start a website in a niche you don’t know well – before even starting, get to know as much as you can about the niche. Find out the leaders, do your keyword research, take note of what kind of content they publish, how often etc.
#2 – Make sure that you can provide good content for the topics you choose – if you are not an expert, either become one of hire people that are experts.
#3 – Be prepared to spend some money on the site – Maybe you have to hire writers, do some adwords or Facebook, buy a theme or plugins; consider this as the initial investment that will pay off later.
#4 – Respect your users and give them incentives – Don’t create a website full of ads or affiliate links. You not only risk in getting penalised by Google but you also drive repeating visitors away. Try to find some free tools or books to give them and keep them coming back.
#5 – Don’t forget the newsletter – Email marketing still works and one of your main objectives is to grow your email list.
#6 – Look for other promotion methods besides SEO – SEO is a must but other methods work good and they indirectly help SEO.
#7 – Go Social early – Social media promotion is the best way these days to get more visits and attention until organic traffic flows in. Use it wisely avoiding spammy techniques and practices.
#8 – Never violate or think of violating any Google Guidelines – You may read promising posts from people making tests on how to get top positions or stuff like that – stay away from anything that may be considered as a rule violation. Stick to the guidelines and aim for long term success than a short term burst and then failure.
#9 – Mobile is a must – Make sure that your website is mobile friendly from day one and that if you use ads on the mobile friendly version these are not violating any guidelines (for example you are not allowed to have a 300×250 ad above the main content on a mobile page).
#10 – Go slow on building links or don’t do it at all – It may be ok to build a couple of links in the beginning but do it only from trusted websites and only if the links matter. Avoid creating links from low quality websites. It’s not a matter of quantity any more but quality.
#11 – Be patient – It takes time for SEO to work, don’t get disappointed if you don’t get any results in the first months, keep doing your work and results will come.
#12 – Be consistent – Try to keep to a publishing schedule. This is good for SEO but also for direct visits.
#13 – Engage with your readers – Reply to comments but don’t publish comments that don’t make sense or look spammy.
#14 – Don’t spend too much time on the design – Do create a nice, simple, fast and functional website but no need to spend hundreds of dollars in design or themeing.
That’s about it, that’s how I created a successful blog and that’s how you can do the same. If are somehow lost and don’t know what you are doing wrong, there is always the opportunity to get professional help at an affordable cost. Check out my seo audit service or find other people in the field who have the experience to get you into the right direction.
I hope you found this post interesting and informational, if you have any questions let me know in the comments and will do my best to answer them. Don’t forget to share this post if it was something that you liked.
Hi alex,
Can you post on how to drive traffic to an ecommerce website ?
Thanks
Hi Simol
I will write a more specific post about ecommerce websites but in the meantime have a look at this: https://www.reliablesoft.net/how-to-promote-your-online-store-and-increase-sales-160/
Thanks
Alex Thanks to share This Important information with us
your article is very helpful.
Thanks, happy to assist.
Alex
This is very helpful article, but can u please also write about a tech blog site ?
Thank you Thomas.
Same rules apply for tech blogs as well. Good content, lot’s of content, solid promotion techniques…I will try and find a good example of a tech blog site and expand more on this soon.
Thanks
Thanks Alex… I am gonna apply these strategies for my own blog. I believe this will help to increase my blog’s traffic.
Hi Alex,
This is an extremely helpful and detailed post. Thanks so much for sharing, keep up the great work 🙂
Viral
Thank you Viral. I hope this will help you achieve your traffic goals as well!
Thank you very much for this Great article
Hi Alex,
I want to start a blog in health niche. But I have very low experience with it but I am very interested in it.
Do adsense give more CPC in health niche. Your advice will be appreciable.
Hi Rahul
It depends what is a good CPC for you. The amount you will get per click depends on a number of factors and it is not the same for all niches or even countries. The health niche has a lot of competition but also a lot of readers and advertisers. Compared to other niches (i.e. SEO), the health niche pays less but if you have a lot of traffic then you can get a good monthly income. Sorry for not being able to give you exact numbers. You can always use the google keyword tool to see the CPC for the keywords you are targeting for specific countries.
Hope this helps
Alex
Hi Alex, I really loved reading your post. The clarity of thought and conversation style is really cool.
I got more from this post about setting up a profitable blog than I have from thousand dollar IM courses.
Congratulations on the huge success of your blog and I wish you bigger success in your journey.
You sure know what it takes to success as a blogger and I will be sure to come back to your site for more lessons.
Do you have any ideas as to niche selection? I know you advised we blog in a field we are knowledgeable in.
Can I pick a niche I am interested in a start a blog around that? How would you go about it if you are in my shoes?
Also how do you find experts in a chosen field? Any thoughts on that?
Thanks.
Hi Joe
Thanks for you nice comment!
Before starting a new blog check a few potential keywords you would be targeting using the google keyword tool to get an idea of how many people are interested in the niche. The volume doesn’t have to be very big but it does need to have people interesting (and searching) for the niche.
If the niche is something you know very well it will be easier for you to write good content otherwise you will have to hire experts to write the content and this will cost you a considerable amount of money in the beginning. If you are confident about the niche you can make the investment, otherwise you may end up with a blog that does not have enough readers and the initial cost to pay the experts to create the content.
You first attempt to find experts is using websites like upwork (formerly odesk).
Hope this helps
Alex
Can you please let me know how can we decide on which topic will write an article/blog.How can we increase ROI of our business ?
Hi Anu
Read the part about keyword research in this article: https://www.reliablesoft.net/category/digital-marketing-tools/ and also this: https://www.reliablesoft.net/how-to-use-evergreen-content-to-increase-your-organic-traffic-300/
Thanks
Alex
Thanks for giving this information for organic traffic
Alex,
Impressive writing, it gives you instant credibility in this field. Continued success.
Carlos
Thank you Carlos. I hope this will give you a good idea on how we approach the whole SEO and digital marketing process.
Alex.
Hi Alex,
Thanks very much for this very well written your experience, to get many things clear, especially to keep consistency for new post and other many things. I will surely list your blog in daily blogs read feed.
What can i say .. lucky that u born in america. I have 20-30k visits perday, 400 clicks and how much money do i earn ? nothing. maybe 25 euro at the end of the day if i’m lucky
Some days i wonder why i bother to continue ..
Hi Mike
I not in America, I am actually in Europe like you. You don’t have to be in a country to target its audience. I understand what you mean though, maybe you should start a site in English and target US and the rest of the English speaking countries instead of your country and language only.
Thanks
Thanks, Alex. for the article. Very informative. I like case studies because they really are proof that the subject in question can be done.
While you have laid out the process, starting it really quite difficult, referring to you #1 above.
Every time I have a niche idea and start building on it and spend long hours and days on it, I become frustrated after finding out that the big companies have already dominated the overcrowded market.
So, my thought process is to come up with another niche idea, only to find out that again, it is dominated by big time bloggers. This leaves me out of focus all the time. This has been going on over 4 years 🙁
If I had started a niche and kept going for four year, I was not even sure if it will be successful.
Anyways, thanks for the very useful article.
Cris
Hi Cris
I think you just highlighted one of the most important factors that keeps people from having success online. All niches are highly competitive, don’t spend your time finding a niche that’s ‘easy’. There is no easy niche. Do your research, get your plan together and start working on it.
I understand your feelings, I also had to spend a couple of years wandering around but one thing that I learned for certain is to do more working than thinking. Even if you fail, at least you would know that you tried.
All the best
Alex
Alex! I read full article its an awesome, Can you suggest some tips for blog of furniture store which kind of topics perfect for this niche?
Hi Alex,
Viral here again – it’s been 6 months since you published this article so I just wanted to find out how the site’s traffic has performed – has it been growing? What kind of organic search numbers are you seeing at the moment?
My own site has started to slowly get some traction but I am still a long way off from reaching your numbers! Hopefully I should see a spike in January, similar to how you did!
Thanks again Alex 🙂
Hi Viral
I will be updating the article soon so stay tuned for updates!
Thanks
Hi Alex,
Nice descriptions about blog traffic, I am blogging since one and half years in blogging tips niche where I am getting 40 visitors per day with 144 posts published, I am very depressed to see those results.
I am thinking I did not build backlinks to blog to get organic traffic, after reading your post I am thinking I should wait some more days to get organic traffic to my blog, thanks for sharing the information, I will focus on long tail keywords from next article.
Hi Siddaiah
Focus on long tail keywords, do some quality link building on highly reputable websites, improve your content in any way you can and your traffic will eventually improve.
Hope this helps
Alex
Alex,
It would be nice to hear the monetization policy you adopt to make earning from the site. And how much money it generates from a visitor per month.
Thanks.
Great read! Having a content plan is very important. You have to post long form content and be consistent which I’m learning to do.
Hi, Nice Case study on Blog Traffics.
I was writing posts without doing SEO, Got to know the best Way to drive Traffic .. Search engine. I am gonna Implement this Strategies.
Thanks for sharing …
Regards
Saitheja Guntuka
This is a brilliant article, I learnt so much from reading it Alex! I am guessing the traffic to calorie secrets continued to grow? How many monthly visitors are you getting now on average?
Also, I am quite surprised that with so much traffic you only monetize with AdSense. I follow a lot of health / nutrition / fitness websites and noticed they monetize with Media.net and other cost per view networks. Is there a reason you have only used AdSense? Wouldn’t your revenue be significantly higher with multiple networks?
Awesome strategy and the traffic is cool. you’ve done something which many dream of. Hope so, following your guidelines help me get my required traffic.
Hello Alex Sir,
This is an amazing article…….currently my website 3 months old and I don’t get a good amt of traffic but I got motivated after reading your wonderful article. I will work smartly from now on.
Thank you so much for such an encouraging article.
Thanks, Alex! for this wonderful article. I am Improving my blog’s traffic through Search Engine Optimization and By adding some Quality Content and Keywords. It works Most of the time Depending on a lot of factors. I would try to implement your tricks to increase the traffic. Thanks once again.
Actually i am stunned. How are you getting so much traffic without “SEO”. Really you are doing miracle job.
Adword is alternative of SEO,is it so?
Three years later, and this article still ranks well on Google adds a lot to your credibility. Alex, this is a really helpful article, thanks for sharing. I’m going to bookmark this and your site to keep coming back for tips and tricks.
Keep at it, friend.
Thanks for the wonderful post information very useful guide helped me a lot.
To be honest, i really got a lot of answers from this post, especially the link building part which has been very tiring for me!
But all the same thanks a lot, this article was very helpful to me.
Thanks for sharing with us this amazing and informative article. This will surely help me a lot to drive traffic to the website. From all these tips I like the tips regarding Content. This will become so much helpful to readers or bloggers.
Seriously it’s an inspiration! Well written content I ever seen
Thanks a lot! this article was very helpful, this has helped me to increase site traffic. It has clearly explained the ways to increase site traffic instantly.