Hey all! Hopefully, you’ve had an opportunity to read my first post in this series, How to Start a Blog Part 1.  If not, I’d suggest heading on over there and giving that a look before you go any further with this bad boy.

All caught up? Great.

So you’ve started a blog.  You’re writing, promoting, have got some traction, and then. . . you plateau. Your daily visitors, after growing for a while, have simply leveled off.

So what gives?

There could be any number of reasons why this is happening, which I’m going to explore here in a sec.  I’m also going to throw out some solutions for fixing the plateau and, once again, increasing your blog Traffic.

We all know that traffic is the key to making any blog successful. Whatever your end goal is, whether it’s making money through your blog or simply getting your ideas out there, traffic is the only way to do that.

And this journey is different for everyone.  For some, getting 1,000 visitors per day is a snap. Others struggle to break the 100 mark.

If you’re still in the beginning stages, or haven’t even started your blog yet, here’s a step by step guide to the beginning stages.

So how do you drive a huge amount of traffic to your blog? The first step, while it may seem fundamental is essential: Work hard and produce great content.  Content is king in blog-land, and you have to regularly publish in order to keep readers coming back for more.

Set some bite sized goals for yourself.  If you’re under 100 pageviews per day, set a goal to get to 100.  If you’re over 100, get to 200, et cetera.  These goals will keep you focused and driving forward (plus you can cross them off of your to-do list, which is one of my favorite things ever).

As most of you may already know, blogging is not easy. Sure, it seems like a simple concept – start blog, write posts, put up ads, make money. Poof! We’re all millionaires.

Except it doesn’t really work that way.  There has to be passion and purpose driving you in the blogging endeavor, otherwise you’ll fizzle out real fast. Make sure you’re focused and committed.

Because, see, you can’t have a successful blog without doing hours and hours of work. When I first started, I was putting in 40+ hour weeks at my “day job,” then spending at least that much time working on my blog during evenings and weekends.  My husband, bless his heart, was very patient with the process, but it couldn’t have been easy losing me night after night to the Interwebs.

And tied in with that, you can’t make money if you don’t have traffic to your blog. Again, I know it sounds easy, but it’s a concept that a lot of people struggle with.  Why can’t I just set up Google Adsense, put up a few ads, and then quit my day job and retire a millionaire?

Yeah, that’d be nice, right? There have to be people reading your content.

To take this one step further, what if you want to write an eBook or publish a blog course or start an online community? If you have no traffic, no trust from your readers, you have no audience for those products.  This is not an, “If you build it, they will come,” type of situation.

Is it easy? No. Will it take time? More than you ever could have imagined.  Is it worth it?

Absolutely.

Whatever you write, give it your all.  Create evergreen content that you can leave up and Promote indefinitely.  Go back and read old posts, and edit and rewrite if that’s what your gut tells you to do.  Same with images.

My images from my early blog posts are, to be kind, embarrassing.  I had no idea what I was doing, I just snapped photos with my phone and didn’t give any thought to the background.  So one of my many projects is to go back and redo those sh*tty photos.

That’s okay, though, because the posts are evergreen so I can keep improving and promoting them to, hopefully, new readers.

My point is, after all of that ^, to treat your blog like a business, not a job.  As in, treat it like it’s your baby, your brain child, your passion project, your means of income.

Because it is.

Now, I’m sure you’ve also heard a lot about Pinterest for bloggers.  Seriously, Pinterest is my #1 biggest driver of traffic. I wrote a post about it a little while ago, How I Got My Monthly Pinterest Views to 389k and Counting.

And guess what? My monthly viewers are currently at 735,000. And it hasn’t even been that long!

So do yourself a favor, join Pinterest, put some pinning strategies into place, promote, promote, promote, and your blog will see the results. And by promote, I mean promote on group boards as well as your own, and if you don’t know where to start with those go here.

If you are just clueless about Pinterest and have absolutely no idea where to begin or how to get it going, take a Pinterest course.  I took everything that I’ve learned about how to get started on Pinterest and put it into a course, Become a Pinterest Pro. It will teach you everything about Pinterest, from how to set up your profile all the way through to pinning strategies for driving traffic.

You also have to be consistent with your content in order to have anything to promote on Pinterest, right? No content = no pins = no promotion = no traffic.

Set up an editorial calendar.

This is really just a fancy way of saying plan your blog posts.  I have a calendar on Google docs where I plan and track all of my blog content at least a month in advance, so I’m not scrambling to get posts up on Mondays and Thursdays.

And yes, we’ve all been there – posting day comes up, you realize you’ve fallen a bit behind because, you know, life, and so you decide to just skip that day and post on your next post day.

This is blogging suicide. You fall into a dangerous loop where you’re allowing yourself to skip posts because you’re unprepared, and instead of putting out three posts a week you’re now down to two or one. . . or none.

So failing to plan is planning to fail. Do the work, get your content up, and make sure your readers have new stuff to read.

Think about it, if there’s a blog you follow regularly, don’t you want to see new content? Of course you do. You don’t go back to that blog and read the same stuff over and over; you want fresh content!

It shows that the blogger cares about her audience. It shows that she is there for you. It shows that she is committed.  And those things are important.

Bottom line: you will only get repeat visitors, and new ones, if you post consistently.

Now if publishing content were the only thing you needed to do to attract readers, life would be a cakewalk.  But there is a bit more to it than that.

In this case, you have to work smarter, not harder. Once you have set your editorial calendar, decide when you are going to write. Schedule it. Stick to it.

Visit other bloggers’ blogs and leave comments. It’s a great way to increase traffic to your blog and interact with others in the blogging community.

Make sure you set up social media accounts for your blog from the get-go.  If you haven’t set these up already, do it.  I felt so stupid setting up a Facebook account for BC when I first started and only had one blog post, but I am so glad I did it.  Set up Twitter. Use Instagram. Be consistent with them!

A great tactic for growing your email list and attracting viewers to your blog is offering a freebie. I have two that I offer; one is a self care checklist and another is a beauty product expiration tracker.  MailerLite is a great way to set up subscriber boxes like the one I have on the right side of the page, and a landing page that directs readers to put in their email address in order to get the freebie.

The bottom line is this: the idea that blogging is a simple way to make money is a misnomer. It takes hard work, dedication, and strategy to grow and succeed.

What is the best way you’ve found to grow blog traffic?

The post How to Start a Blog Part 2: Increasing Blog Traffic to 1,000 Pageviews Per Day appeared first on Beauty Chaos.