Starting a new blog and increasing blog traffic is a proven system that big blogs use.
And my newest blog has grown its traffic quickly.
Before I go into that, this blog, Twins Mommy, started two years ago and in it’s first month I grew my blog to 4,000 pageviews. I was ecstatic and so happy.
I decided that I wanted to try to grow my blog traffic for Twins Mommy.
So, on my blog, I charted my journey to grow this blog. I have grown the Twins Mommy blog to over 60,000 pageviews!
And my blog before that? To 88,000 pageviews.
At this time, I realized that my passion and strength in blogging is my strategy to grow blog traffic in different blog niches.
Trying My Hand at Growing Blog Traffic in Different Niches
One of my passions is digital marekting. It’s my freelance writing niche and it’s what I blog as the big umbrella for Twins Mommy. I want to help other mom bloggers to market their blog so that they can create income.
And the #1 way to create income is attract traffic. The more traffic you have, the more income you can potentially generate.
So, it’s no wonder that any new blogger is looking for that blog traffic recipe to get their blog on the map.
To help my audience, I wanted to try growing traffic in other blog niches. Is it easier to generate traffic in a health niche? Or a parenting niche?
So, part of my new business plan is to build up niche blogs.
One of those blogs I took over this year is a parenting blog called Imperfectly Perfect Mama. This blogger no longer wanted to blog and what was so great about getting this blog is that it had its own:
- Pinterest account
- Instagram account
- Google Analtyics
- Facebook page
- 2 Facebook groups
This blog has been around for a year and has about 34 blog posts (but around 5 were irrelevant or too local and personal).
Traffic was low however as this blogger stopped blogging. So on average it was getting below 50 visitors a day. We bought the blog in January or February and didn’t do anything with it for a while.
It was generating around 400 pageveiws a month with no new content or much promoting.
After a month of working on Imperfectly Perfect Mama, I grew that blog to 40,000 pageviews.
Here is a comparison of before I took over the blog to after working on it for a month:
Not only that – the Pinterest account for Imperfectly Perfect Mama was around 52k monthly views (it was actually lower, but I was nurturing this profile by manual pinning a few times a day when we got the blog early this year).
Within that first month of working on the blog and using a new strategy, the monthly views grew to over 1M.
How did I increase blog traffic and pageviews this quickly on a new blog? With Twins Mommy, it took me almost year to gain 40k pageviews.
Since I’ve been blogging for a while, I’m learning that each time I start a new blog, I get better at optimizing it for blog traffic. Here are the tactics I used to go from 400 pageviews a month to 40,000 pageviews in 30 days.
1. I Used a New WordPress Theme
We ended up using a new customized theme (that my hubby created) to start branding IPM the way I wanted it to look and feel like. Even if your blog has been up for a year or less, you can change your WordPress theme to revamp your brand and get more eyes to your blog.
What many bloggers do is move from free WordPress themes to a paid or customized one.
Simply doing this one thing will increase your blog traffic. Why?
Well, people are curious and want to see “this new look” you have on your blog. You can hint at this in your email or on social media and unveil it to them when you’re ready.
Instant traffic boost.
For this new theme, I wanted to focus on the different niche topics on IPM and make this the home page. I noticed other bloggers doing this as well like Stacey of the Soccer Mom Blog.
Since none of the blogs I already have use this style, I wanted to try something different for Imperfectly Perfect Mama.
2. Made a New Logo
I don’t remember what the old logo was, but I knew I wanted to update it to make it more my brand. I used a script font to highlight Perfect and it turned out great!
If you want to create a logo, Canva is a great free editing tool that I used to create most of my logos. Here’s a video tutorial on creating your blog’s logo!
3. Opened This Blog Up for Contributors
The biggest impact for increasing my blog traffic is making this a guest blog where bloggers can submit their blog posts. The advantage of having a multi-author site is that you can create content faster.
And I know for a fact that the more content you can create in a set amount of time grows your blog traffic. I’ve proven it multiple times on Twins Mommy and with my other blogs.
So, I strongly believe that getting to that 40k pageviews in one month is due to the bulk of content that was published in relation to before.
From April -May I had 13 blog posts published.
The last blog post published before that was in December (four months prior). So to go from no blog posts to 13 in one month is a huge shift in Google’s eyes and with marketing on Pinterest and Facebook.
This almost makes me think that a blog traffic hack might be to:
- Stop blogging for several months
- Create 15 blog posts during that time
- When ready, publish them 3x a week for a month or more
Rather than:
- Create 2 blog posts in January
- Create 0 in February
- Create 4 in March
- Create 1 in April
Something to think about for sure 🙂
4. Created a New Pin Template
I knew already that I wanted to promote this new blog mostly on Pinterest. Gaining Pinterest traffic is much faster than getting Google traffic (SEO traffic). So, this meant my main content marketing plan was to attract pinners to Imperfectly Perfect Mama.
Converting a pinner to a blog reader has core tactics like:
- Bright colors on your pin
- Warm colors on your pin
- Large font and easy to read font on your pin
- Catchy title that a pinner can quickly read while scrolling
- Bright image on your pin
The pins for this blog before I took it over varied in color, graphic and size. So, I couldn’t base my template on what was already there. Instead, I researched on Pinterest and whatever caught my eye I took note. From there I created colors that were web friendly and that were bright and bold.
I wanted to use different colors from what I used with my other blogs and a new font family. This is the conversion for the pin template:
One thing that I’m doing differently with my pin images for Imperfectly Perfect Mama is to use paid stock photos instead of free stock photos.
Pinterest looks at your pin as a whole when you publish a new pin. Since Pinterest doesn’t know what your pin is about it looks to your colors, images and words on your font to get an idea.
So, using free stock photos can “fool” Pinterest and categorize your pin incorrectly. While this hasn’t happened to me (I use mostly free stock photos), what I do to make my free stock photos more unique is angle them differently or don’t include all the image in my photo.
With the quick boost in traffic, I can attest that using paid stock photos can help reach your blog traffic goals!
5. Optimized My Blog Content for Ranking on Google
Imperfectly Perfect Mama is an aged domain. I didn’t buy this website brand new; it’s about a year old.
This is a great time to start optimizing your blog for Google traffic and ranking. And the first step in doing that is to first rank in Pinterest.
This is the new blogger doorway to getting ranked in Google.
And the first two posts that went mini “viral” were, How to Support Your Husband as a New Dad.
The second one is a guest post from Mallaury of Life of a Babe – 10 Gross, Annoying, and Weird Pregnancy Symptoms (You Need to Know). When searching for gross pregnancy symptoms this post is on page one, 7th down.
So, when mom bloggers submitted their guest post idea, I researched that topic idea on Pinterest and Google to see if I can include some related keywords and optimize it better for search traffic.
6. Scheduled My Pins and Manually Pinned
In the month Imperfectly Perfect Mama grew its traffic, I used Board Booster to loop the main blog board on Pinterest. But, I recently stopped using Board Booster and am now using Tailwind to grow my blog traffic.
For Tailwind, I will schedule 20 pins a day since Board Booster was looping around that many.
My manual pinning strategy for this blog is to get any new pins “out there” by:
- Pinning to related boards
- Pinning to big group boards
- Pinning at high traffic times for the Imperfectly Perfect Mama audience
My Monetization Plan for Imperfectly Perfect Mama
Since I have enough pageviews, I can sign up for ads to be placed on the blog. This is happening now and hopefully the ads will be up soon. While this won’t give me $100 dollars a day, it is some income.
I also plan to do some Amazon affiliate marketing but it’s not a goal at this moment.
Right now, I want to keep building my traffic and give a platform for the mom bloggers that contribute.
I want to help them gain traffic from guest blogging as this is a great medium to grow your blog audience, brand and traffic. Ultimately I want this contributor site to be the “go-to” for new moms 🙂
There Ya Go!
There it is mamas! A plan to grow your pageviews as a new blogger! Tell me in the comments your journey to growing your blog traffic! I want to hear and help you! We are doing this together mamas!
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