Last Updated on June 21, 2021 by scottkandh
“There are over 4 million mom blogs in the U.S. alone. Today’s bloggers have to be savvy and competent. The good news is that if you make your first 1,000 monthly page views, you’re way ahead of the pack.” Gina Badalaty – Web Hosting Secret Revealed.
Since I fall into the parameters that my blog is below 1,000 monthly page views, I went on a mission to search and find out what needs to be done to meet that objective.
I was looking at the Internet for ideas on how to build my website traffic when I came across an article that showed how to look at your stats within a program called Jetpack.
I have the program but most of the time it works in the background and I hardly ever use it. That is until now. I also have a program called Google Analytics. It gives me a cursory snapshot of information. The screenshot below is pulled automatically into your dashboard if you have the plugin. You can quickly see the daily # of sessions, pageviews, average session duration, and bounce rate and the percentage increase or decrease for the previous 30 days.
Navigating over to the button for See all reports in “Go to the Analytics Dashboard provides slightly a little more information. With the free version you can’t change the parameters and until now the number of page views and session views (in the graphs) looked relatively the same (despite the difference in numbers).
I’m a big fan of the Television Reality Show called Shark Tank. I remember one episode in particular that the Sharks were grilling someone because he didn’t know his numbers. In a week, I’ve been blogging for three months without a good foundation with where I stood at any given point. That needs to change (if you don’t know your numbers – like me at this point) so that you know what needs to be changed to make any necessary adjustments.
I looked up the average number of page views that should be on a blog and a good range to be in is in the neighborhood of more than 1,000 page views per month. This was a wake-up call for me to get busy and step it up that much more and look at other things for improvement.
I didn’t put a lot of effort into examining where I stood in terms of traffic, because the first three months of my blogging journey was to create the Pinterest content to start getting followers.
But followers, subscribers, and page views all go hand-in-hand and they’re interrelated to one another. Enter Jetpack and I found a way to get better representation on where I stand, and new goal (by 31 Oct) to build up the number of page views (per month) so that it exceeds 1,000 per month. This is going to take a lot of research to determine how to make it happen, so I started to pull information together.
Jetpack Site Stats
In Jetpack, click on Site Stats. Below are my site stats for daily, weekly, and monthly (respectively) to provide a better picture for what needs to be improved.
The total number of views (all-time) is 2,256 which equates to an average of 752 views per month. I like the versatility of the Jetpack program that allows you to take a look at your progress and view it daily, weekly, or monthly.
As I mentioned above, changes need to be made in order to get to my first 1,000 pages. First, I’m going to outline a variety of strategies that can be done (many of which have already been implemented). However, there’s still a lot of room for improvement in many other areas to reach that magic number. I’m not going to fret if I don’t reach 1,000 views by the end of October, it’s merely a goal that I would like to achieve. But by aiming for 1,000 views I’m shooting for something that’s possible to achieve and then advance from there.
One of the first blogs I came across was Gina Badalaty’s Web Hosting Secret Revealed and she wrote a blog called 9 Strategies to Get your First 1,000 Page Views. Here’s what she had do say about getting to your first 1,000 monthly page views.
“There are over 4 million mom blogs in the U.S. alone. Today’s bloggers have to be savvy and competent. The good news is that if you make your first 1,000 monthly page views, you’re way ahead of the pack.”
I’m making the list so that it’s in alphabetical order. I found out so much useful information that I’m putting it into the format of a checklist.
NOTE: All of the suggestions below are meant for pursuing to get 1,000 monthly page views (for the first time).
30 Suggestions to improve page views
1. Ask People to Join Your Mailing List – Get readers to subscribe to your blog to receive regular posts. Install a subscribe button on your blog to make it easy for them. Then you can start collecting email addresses and keep in touch with your readers.
2. Backlinks: Blog: How to get your first 1,000 Page Views to your Blog. Use Backlinks as much as possible. Use as many as possible but make sure that they’re relevant to what’s being discussed. The more posts that you have, the easier it’ll be to provide backlinks.
PRO-Tip: Don’t use “click here”. Write them out so that the flow is natural, (i.e. What’s the minimum number of links to use in a blog post?).
3. Comments – Don’t worry too much about comments. As a norm, most people don’t like leaving comments. But just because they don’t leave comments, you still need to ensure there’s a place and/or a page for people to leave a comment. Bloggers are a helpful bunch and how can a blogger tell another blogger something is wrong if there’s no comments section or email info. They’d be left in the dark but could have easily fixed something bought to their attention.
Comments on other blogs: When leaving a comment on a blog drive, to drive traffic to your blog instead of using just your first name, use your first name and the name of your blog (i.e. Scott | Pinterest Artwork). Just make sure that when you leave a comment that it’s sincere and you’re simply not trying to leave a comment for the sake of posting your blog’s name (see below).
“A comment, which at first glance reveals that you only wanted to mention your own blog will often be seen as little more than spam.” – The Social Ms
4. Consistent posts: For information about are you blogging consistently visit: 5 Simple Steps to be consistent in blogging life.
“You only get repetitive and new visitors to your blog if you post consistently.” – She Means Blogging.
Aim to write or publish a minimum of at least three posts per week.
5. Create multiple variations of pins for each blog post: A recent post called: How creating 10 pins/post improves your Social Shares within One Week! Illustrates how you can improve your Social Shares by close to 25%.
6. Create Infographics: Infographics are those long pins that you see on Pinterest from time to time that are longer in length than the other pins. “They usually have a whole bunch of information crammed into the graphic to tell a story or illustrate a point.” Don’t copy infographics, you need to create your own. I probably unknowingly have one or two infographics on my SEO blog post: SEO Checklist Items for WordPress Blogs that I refer to as a checklist. Now that I look closer at the definition of an Infographic, I would consider that I have several infographics on the aforementioned post:
“Infographics do well on Pinterest because it’s a visual depiction of a blog post or piece of content. They are longer than standard pins and show graphs, icons and other stats that looks put together.” – Elna Cain from Twins Mommy.
7. Design – Visitors to your site should be able to tell what your sites all about rather easily. Don’t keep ‘em hanging in suspense. In addition to a nice design, your site needs to be mobile friendly so that people can see your site on their cell phone. The links that you have to social media should be in a prominent position that is easy to locate so they can visit your Pinterest, Facebook, etc. Social sites. The program I’m very fond of is called Social Warfare Plug-in. With the plug-in I can very easily tell which posts are being shared and the number of shares to each post (mine are located at the bottom of each post and within the sidebar).
8. Exit Pop-ups: If someone is on your site and right before they leave you want them to see a form for a last chance to do something, use the Modal Form in ConvertKit to display on exit intent. Here are the instructions to make a modal form (pop-up). I just installed a new exit pop-up so I’m crossing my fingers to see if it will make a difference.
I haven’t checked out the other two programs called Getresponse and Aweber that also have exit pop-ups. OptinMonster has it too, but that specific feature isn’t worth the cost (for me) to have it for $48/month (NOTE: every now and then they have specials at 50% off).
9. Freebies / Landing Pages: (something of value in return). Offer your visitors something of value in exchange for them to give you their name and email address. Things like checklists, forms, printables, Free Online Course, etc.
“Content marketing helps convert traffic into leads. Just like every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads. The way this works is really simple – just add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post that directs to your landing page”- Tap House Media.
On my blog, (Pinterest Artwork) I have a page set up for all of the Freebies.
10. Guest Post: “Ideally, you want to guest post on a blog that is bigger than yours and with a larger audience . . .. This is an easy way for new bloggers to establish credibility, get a backlink and promote your blog in your author bio.” Elna Cain from Twins Mommy.
11. Have A Great ‘About Me’ Page – Blogging is personal and readers want to connect with you as a person. The ‘About’ page is often overlooked on blogs so make sure you sell yourself there.
12. Headlines – For how to use Great Headlines check out the blog post: SEO Checklist items for WordPress blogs. In the table of contents look for 5.10: Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights Headline Analyzer. By using this program, I usually raise my headline score from 50 to 70 by “analyzing” different variations of the headline with power words, uncommon words, or emotional words. Also, as an example, the headline score for this particular post using Headline Analyzer improved from 47 to 84 so it’s more likely to drive more clicks with 84 rather than 47.
“ (A) recent study has proved that 8 out of 10 people read the headlines and decide whether to read further. So, do yourself a favor to take out extra time to generate killer headlines that make your readers fall for it.” – 7 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog in 2 Weeks by Shohibakz
13. How to get eyes on your blog. About three months ago I wrote a post called How to get eyes on your blog. This post is an updated and revamped version of that post with a lot more information. I’m hoping to pull in other articles too (that might need an overhaul, if they relate to increasing your page views and strategies to get to your first 1,000-page views). Bear in mind that I wrote this blog three months ago and when I designed these two pins I was just beginning my blogging journey. I’ve designed many pins since then, I like the 1st pin and decided to give it a face lift (pun intended).
The second blog post I read was called: “How to get your first 1000 Page Views to your Blog.” “You’ve launched your brand-new blog and now what? The name of the game at the start is EYE BALLS. You want to start attracting readers to your content right away so that you can develop a solid picture of how your blog is performing and resonating.” The Blog Girl Chronicles.
14. Increase your blog font-size: Get a better Google rank for being mobile-friendly.
“Ad network Mediavine mentions that increasing your font size will help with ranking in SEO due to Google using mobile-first indexing.
Most default theme font sizes are around 12px . . .
I had Pinterest Artwork font size set to 14 and I’ve adjusted it to the recommended font size of 18px.
NOTE: When you increase your font size, also increase the line height. This is the spacing between your sentences to either 1.6 or 1.7.” – Elna Cain from Twins Mommy.
15. Know your numbers and study them.
“If you want to get 1000 page views per month, that’s essentially 35 page views per day. Break down the math into small, easy to understand chunks. Get creative with hitting that 35 mark every day! You could run a contest for people to read your posts and sign up for your newsletter. Once they are on your newsletter list, it’s much easier to develop a long-standing relationship with them and get them to read your content.” – Blog Girl Chronicles.
16. List the last updated date: Elna Cain from Twins Mommy who’s fast becoming a friend of mine that I want to get acquainted with and turn to her Blog (Twins Mommy) more often wrote a blog called: 54 Simple Ways to Increase Website Traffic in 2020. One of the suggestions in this post is to install a WordPress plugin called WP Last Modified Info. What it does is install the date of your post for when you make updates. That way people can see you’re making changes to your blog posts and keeping them up-to-date and current.
16. Network – As well as inviting comments and sharing on your own blog, you should be reading and commenting on other blogs as well. Blogging is a community and fellow bloggers will share your content if you share theirs. It’s all about being visible online.
17. Niche – A way for you to increase traffic is writing about one main topic referred to as a core niche. Over time, people know which website is known for specific topics that they are looking to find. The easiest thing to do to find “your core niche” is find out something that you are passionate about so that you can write some good content for your blog.
One post I wrote called: Effective Ways to increase website traffic mentioned six items to focus on your blog:
- Be the voice of authority on your blog.
- Answer people’s questions.
- Listen to what kind of comments people post.
- What kind of topics are they looking for to solve?
- Can you help them solve their problem?
- Focus on a specific niche.
18. Pinning Schedule/Frequency: Aim for a minimum of 3 – 5 pins per day. You don’t have to necessarily create a blog post each and every day. Create the pin to point to the blog post. If at all possible, shoot to have 10 pins for every blog post. Put your principle emphasis on ensuring that you have plenty of content. The pins are secondary. The content is primary. Once you have the content you can switch to creating Pins on a regular basis and the frequency of your posts can change to 1 every other day or so.
Pin to your Personal Board first: The reason for pinning to your Personal Board first (rather than your Group Board) is because Pinterest doesn’t place priority on pins located within the Group Boards. So if you’re insistent on that you want a pin in your Group Board, pin it first to the Personal Board and then later on pin it to your Group Board. I for one was in the habit of pinning to my Group Board first so that I could schedule it to Tailwind later down the road.
The reason for using Group Boards is to display your pins to a larger audience. If you want to see a list of Group Boards to join visit the blog post called Group Boards to Join.
For other Group Boards to join that might not be on the list either visit my Front page which has a whole lot of my favorite Pinterest Group Boards or visit my Pinterest Page on Group Boards to Join.
19. Pinterest – One of the best Social programs you can use to build your web traffic is a program called Pinterest.
First, don’t know anything about it? Check out the Blog Post called Pinterest Overview.
Second, if you’re already using Pinterest be sure to look at the Blog Post: Top 10 questions everyone working with Pinterest should know how to answer.
Lastly, the third Blog Post to check out regarding Pinterest is: Boost SEO for Pinterest.
20. Pinterest Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – much like there’s SEO for blogging, Pinterest has its own SEO. Here are several posts pertaining to Pinterest SEO.
21. Post Regularly – It is extremely important to keep your information up to date. Refer back up to item #17 for the WordPress plug-in to automatically update the date on “updated” posts. By regularly reviewing and updating your posts, they should always be fresh. Don’t take the chance that people land on a page that hasn’t been updated in quite a long time and for that reason they will probably leave and are unlikely to return.
“For roundups . . . you don’t need permission to feature the people, tools, services or sites. But, I do suggest you tag the people you featured on social or email letting them know you featured them on your blog post.
If you want others to contribute to a round up – answer a question – then email that blogger and let them know your plan and ask if they would be willing to contribute.
This helps grow your brand and be established as a go-to in your niche. The fact that you are on a list with other bigger bloggers – by proxy – makes you more notable. Plus, you get a great backlink with just helps with your blog’s ranking profile.” – Elna Cain from Twins Mommy.
“When you feature other bloggers in your content, you can also reach out to them via email or social media and directly ask them to share your content.” – The Social Ms
22. Readability – If you use the plug-in Yoast SEO, it’ll help to suggest how you can improve your readability. Don’t drive readers away because the page isn’t set up nice and easy to read. For further details on Readability, refer to the Blog Post: SEO Checklist Items for WordPress Blogs – Go to Section 5.1.
23. Research: As a blogger, you need to know a lot of different things, especially in the SEO arena. Things like page authority (PA), domain authority (DA), and SEO principles. There are many tools to look at the effectiveness of your SEO. Since SEO requires so many factors, I wrote a blog post to look at various SEO tools that you can use.
24. (SEO) – For “detailed information” on how to improve your SEO check out my Ultimate SEO blog post: SEO Checklist Items for WordPress Blogs.
NOTE: I’m calling it an Ultimate Guide for this reason:
“Ultimate guides are . . . helpful for your audience because they can effectively come to one post on your blog and get all the information.”
– Elna Cain from Twins Mommy.
25. Share – Digital word-of-mouth is the best way to promote your blog. Set up social share buttons for the major platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Google + and LinkedIn) which makes it easier for readers to share through their own networks. Obviously, you should share your blog on your own social media and other websites you have as well.
Social Warfare Plug-in. Download the Social Warfare Plug-in which is so easy to use. With this plugin, you can easily see the number of shares for Facebook, Pinterest, and a couple of other social programs.
“Share, share, share – Continually share your posts, over and over again.” – Unknown.
27. Tailwind Tribes – Tailwind is a program to schedule your pins so that you can put a whole weeks’ worth of pins in less than a hour instead of sitting in front of Pinterest manually pinning. For a list of Tailwind Tribes to join visit Tailwind Tribes. If you’re new to Tailwind and need more information, visit Learning the basics for how to use Tailwind.
28. Traffic Tactic Courses: To boost your blog traffic these are two highly recommended traffic courses from proven bloggers that are successful in traffic growth.
As of yet, I haven’t taken either of the courses (mentioned below). Regardless of whether or not I reach my goal, I’ll be taking both courses for maximum growth (after October). Out of fairness to the bloggers who wrote these courses, I won’t be sharing “that” information on my blogs. However, I’ll keep churning out blog posts to increase “your” blogs growth.
Blog: Twins Mommy – by Elna Cain – Ready, Set, Blog for Traffic Course.
Create and Go – by Alex and Lauren – Pinterest Traffic Avalanche
29. Use Amazing Images – Nobody wants to see a wall of text. Break it up with great images which highlight and illustrate your content. Either take your own pictures or download images from stock images. My personal favorite program for stock images is Canva.
30. Write Great Content – You need great content and catchy, searchable headlines to gain traction in the blogosphere. Use Google Analytics by MonsterInsights plug-in that has a built-in feature called Headline Analyzer to bring traffic to your posts.
Simple Math: In order to get the views you need to have content, the more posts that you have the better of people reading your information. You see having more content on your site isn’t just about looking like you take blogging more seriously, it’s about giving people more opportunities to find your content
If you’re trying to get 1000 viewers on your blog with only 10 blogs post it’s going to be much harder because approximately 100 people would need to view each post. But say you have over 30 blog posts on your site then you make that number even smaller for the number of people who need to find you for you to reach your goal.
The average amount of posts on-site that ranks well, is 50 posts. So if you’re trying to grow your blogging numbers, before you start going heavy on promotion (which I’ll talk about in a sec) you need to focus on getting more good content on your site.
I noticed that there’s a common theme in getting 1,000 monthly views. And the two key ingredients to get there are is that you need to work at it and produce great content. I’m taking the first step of getting to 1,000 daily readers by first getting the 1,000 monthly views and then concentrate on the 1,000 daily page views later down the road. I’m going by the expert’s advice that have already capitalized on what needs to be done. The expert advice in this particular case is:
“Your first idea target should be to get 1,000 daily readers. If you reach up to this mark, you start making money through your blog. It will definitely make a huge difference to your blog.” This is important for two reasons that she points out.
1. “You cannot make a successful blog without doing endless hours of work” and2. “You cannot make money if you don’t build traffic to your blog.”
Traffic for Beginners – How to get 0 – 1000 Daily Blog Readers.
Update: Added to post:
31. Plug-ins. There are a number of plug-ins that you can use to help your blogging. Be sure to check out this blog post (especially for new bloggers) on recommended blogging tools to benefit your blog called: 25 Blogging Tools for WordPress.
How to make the most out of Pinterest?
Check out these highly-recommended Pinterest tools and resources.
- A Pinterest Online Course for new bloggers to show you how to set up a blog, grow it, and use Pinterest the right way. For the first four subscribers to my blog, you’ll get emailed a promo code to take the course for Free (normally costing $30).
- To learn more about Pinterest, visit Top 40 Pinterest Blog Influencers in 2020.
- SEO Checklist items for WordPress Blogs – my number #1 Blog Post. NOTE: But this blog post is quickly catching up to it and might surpass it.
- Top 10 Questions everyone working with Pinterest should know how to answer
- New bloggers: Be sure to check out: “How to generate marketing for your blog.” Because having a marketing plan for Pinterest and your Blog allows you to concentrate on the four main elements of a marketing plan:
- Why you need to use Canva for creating Pinterest pins.
- Freebies: Free resources for you to download and use as ready-references.
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