I'd been blogging since 2014, but in March last year (2017) I decided that I wanted to focus on my blog to make it my full-time job. But I didn't know where to start.
I knew it was possible to make a full-time income from blogging, but I knew that all the income streams would require traffic and/or followers. My research told me that the main income streams for bloggers were the following:
- ad income
- sponsored posts working with brands
- selling ebooks and courses
- affiliate income
Bu the problem was that all of these are dependent on having page views and followers! And guess what, I didn't have any.
In March 2017, my traffic had completely plateaued at only 3,000 monthly page views and a combined social media following of less than 1,000 (most of these were my friends anyway).
Another thing that worried me was that I was coming to this too late. Everyone was saying that growing a blog following was much easier in the past and that it was becoming more difficult by the year. The social media channels were changing their algorithm unfavourably and there was so much competition in a saturated market.
So I wanted to learn how to actually grow my blog traffic, but nobody who was talking about how to earn money online was actually teaching the most important thing: how to actually grow your traffic.
Everyone was just vaguely throwing around all these buzz phrases like:
- "content is king"
- "know your audience"
- "work harder not smarter"
- "brand consistency"
But I didn't really understand what any of these meant and nobody gave me any tangible ways in which I could actually implement these theories in practical ways that would actually let me grow the reach of my blog and get more traffic.
Do you feel this way too? Are you trying to grow your blog but don't know where to start and feel like you're banging your head against a wall? I get you. I get you, because just over a year ago, I was there too.
After a year or so of hard work, trial and error, and many, many epiphanies, I finally understood what everyone meant when they said these things, and found a way that I could actually use to implement these strategies into growing my blog.
And so I grew my traffic from 3,000 to 150,000 monthly page views in just a year, which has allowed me to earn a full-time income from my blog too, without freelance work and other side jobs.
Now, I get over 360,000 monthly page views!
So I want to share everything that I've learnt so far, and my goal is to actually explain everything in the way that others don't! I want to actually explain all these buzzwords with proper examples of how I've implemented these strategies into growing my blog.
Start here
1. 8 Ways to Grow Your Traffic Without an Established Audience
To start, I recommend you to download my FREE ebook with 8 tried and tested ways to significantly grow your blog traffic, which can be implemented right from the very beginning even before your get your very first page view or follower!
This isn’t just a list of ways to get traffic to your blog (like Google search, email list, Pinterest etc). Because those all take time and you realistically won’t be able to get traffic from Google or your email list for a long time.
This isn't a list of sources of potential traffic, it's a list of actual strategies you can use to grow your blog readership and see results right from day one.
Joining an ad network is a great place to start if you want to start earning income as a blogger. They’ll manage your ads for you and know how to optimise them for better revenue so that you can passively earn a substantial amount of income each month. However, ad networks have minimum traffic requirements for you to be allowed to join.
Mediavine is a popular ad network, but they require you to have a minimum of 25,000 sessions per month (sessions not page views!) before you can join. As a completely new blogger, 25,000 sessions per month will seem impossible. It certainly did for me.
So I decided to compile a list of realistic, easily achievable, tried and tested ways to significantly grow your blog traffic. They’re all ways I used to grow my traffic from 3,000 to 30,000 monthly page views in just 3 months, which allowed me to join an ad network and begin to earn income!
Some of the points on this list are specific to food blogging, but others will work no matter what topic you blog about.
2. Learn how to start a blog
You can learn how to start a WordPress blog in 6 easy steps, with step-by-step instructions and screenshot tutorials.
3. Check out our Blogger Toolbox - a complete list of all the software you need to run a successful blog
Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of different online services there are out there? We did too. With so many to choose from and so many conflicting reviews, it’s hard to know which ones offer the best value for money, and are worth spending your time learning to use.
We’ve listed all the online services that we currently use for the blog - any money we’ve spent on these, we’ve got back by revenue or from time saved. It's taken a lot of trial and error to find products that work for us, and we'll keep this list updated with whatever we're using at the time.
Contact
If you have any questions about anything, or requests for future topics to be covered, you get in touch with us anytime at [email protected].