ESI Money

Three Simple Steps to Wealth

Five Steps to Creating a Winning $25k Blog, Step 4: Drive Traffic, Part 1

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure statement for more info.

By 41 Comments

Note: As we continue this series, some may want to get started asap. If so, I recommend getting started with BigScoots.

Welcome back to our series on five steps to creating a winning $25k blog.

Up to this point we have determined our strategy, established basics to get the site ready, designed a great site, and started writing awesome, shareable content.

But all that work will be for naught if no one visits your site.

That’s why today we’re covering one of the most important topics — and largest pain points — for many bloggers: how to get traffic to your site.

FYI, I’m going to break this up into two posts since it’s over 5,000 words. Today we’ll cover part 1.

Traffic is the Lifeblood of a Site

Getting traffic is probably the biggest issue most bloggers face. Why? Because success or failure depends on traffic.

A site with amazing design, awesome content, and no traffic is dead in the water. A site with questionable design, weak content, and tons of traffic is a home run!

Those are two extremes of course, but they illustrate the fact that with traffic many things are possible. Without it life is going to be tough.

I’ve heard some say that you should spend 20% of your time writing and 80% marketing. This doesn’t mean to whip off something quickly just so you can get to the “real” work. It means take a TON of time to write something awesome, then spend four times that amount of time promoting it. That’s how important getting traffic is!

I don’t go that far on allocating your time, but the idea isn’t lost on me. You need to spend a good deal of time marketing and driving traffic because of its importance.

I am by no means an expert in driving traffic. I’ve done well but haven’t been in the stratosphere like many others. That said, I do know enough to get the amount of traffic needed to create a $25k blog.

In addition to my thoughts, I’ll link to some posts on driving traffic and I’m sure others will chime in with their suggestions as well.

Ten Ways to Drive Traffic

There are hundreds of way to drive traffic, all with various levels of effort, success, and cost.

I’ll detail the ten traffic-drivers I have used, found success with, and recommend. From there you can decide what works for you.

Here’s my list of the ten best ways to drive traffic:

1. Capture email addresses using a free incentive, then use the emails to drive traffic.

Before you do anything to drive traffic, you need to set up a process to capture email addresses. You do this so you can send emails to interested readers and thus drive traffic back to your site.

The emails you will send out generally take one of two forms: a copy of part or all of your posts each time you write a new article or a “special newsletter” that is sent out at some predetermined interval (weekly, monthly, etc.)

You’ll need to decide which one works for you. And yes, you can do both. FWIW, I do the first one so nobody misses a post when it’s fresh.

Here are the main steps needed to capture email addresses:

  • Contract with a service to manage your emails. Yes, you can get these for free if your list is small enough. Many bloggers use a free service until they get to a certain level. That’s fine with me but personally I like to select a service and stick with it as I grow. It makes things easier IMO since you don’t need to transfer your list from one to another. I use and recommend GetResponse and Convert Kit. I use GetResponse at ESI Money and Convert Kit for Rockstar Finance. Both are great and either will serve you well, though their functionality is different. For instance, GetResponse offers RSS-to-email features that ConvertKit does not.
  • Give something away. In order to encourage email sign ups, your best bet is to offer a free “product”. This can be an ebook you create, an email series that teaches something, or anything else your readers find valuable. Yes, you’ll need to create it and yes it’s a pain to do. But if you do it right, you can use many of your first few blog posts as either a book or email series and not have to do that much extra writing.
  • Get a pop-up to bring the offer front and center. What I’m talking about here is a little box that pops up when a visitor is ready to leave your site. It presents your offer and allows visitors to sign up in the box. (FYI, this can be done with a plug-in.) Bloggers differ on the size, frequency, and even whether to use these or not. To me, you don’t want to be a complete user-experience killer (like a full page offer or three pop ups before the reader even sees the content), but a simple, prominent, valuable offer to the reader is completely fine IMO. If the offer is right, readers will see this as a service and not a nuisance.

Once you get the email signups, you need to set them up with your provider to deliver your content, newsletter, or whatever else you promised to send readers.

And only send them what you promised and nothing else. You do not want to be a spammer.

2. Leave intelligent and useful comments on other blogs.

Now that you have a way to capture emails from new visitors, it’s time to begin driving traffic.

One place anyone can start is simply leaving intelligent, useful comments on other blogs.

Most bloggers allow you to leave a link to your site when filling out the comment section details. Include your site name and a link to your site there. If your comment is truly intelligent and/or useful, other readers will like it and you, and visit your site.

I say to leave “intelligent” and “useful” comments to separate them from unintelligent and non-useful ones. A couple examples of the latter are comments like “Great post!” and “I agree!” These are throwaway, add-nothing comments. They contribute zero value to the conversation and even less to others’ perceptions of you and your site. Leave a comment like these and NO ONE will visit your site.

But if you add something meaningful to the conversation, and especially do it over and over again on many posts, traffic will be headed your way.

Even worse than the comments above is something like this:

Great topic! I just wrote a post on it: visitmysite.com/imadoofus

Do NOT do this! In fact, do not leave a link to your site in the comments text section AT ALL. Doing so is considered poor form and will not make you a friend of the blog owner. Why is this? Think about it. You’re basically trying to steal her hard-earned traffic and direct it to your site. Most bloggers will not appreciate this.

If you did just happen to write a post on the subject being discussed (or have one in your archives), go to your post and copy some of the best parts — then leave those as a comment. That will be leaving an intelligent, useful comment and you’ll benefit from it.

In addition to driving traffic to your site, leaving good comments opens up guest post opportunities. Bloggers will notice regular site contributors and thus are more open to accepting guest posts from them.

Just so I’m clear, leaving comments won’t drive thousands of people to your site, but it’s an easy and free way to drive some traffic when you are just starting out. After all, if you only have one visitor and a comment drives one more, you’ve increased your traffic by 100%!!! 馃槈

3. Network with other bloggers.

Want to take a guess at who has readers who would probably love your site? Other bloggers in your niche.

So it stands to reason that you’d want to work with these bloggers to introduce your site to their readers.

But why would other bloggers help you out? Wouldn’t this hurt their sites? A few thoughts:

  • Most bloggers are willing to help others. They know that there are almost a limitless number of readers out there and the more great content is published the better it is for everyone.
  • Bloggers are especially willing to help those who have helped them (one of the basics of networking). You can help by linking to them, sharing their posts on social media, and commenting on their sites. Even though your audience and impact might be small, they will notice and appreciate you…and be more willing to help you out.
  • My recommendation is to give, give, and give before you ask for help. And when you do ask, make sure there’s something in it for them. A guest post (covered below) is a good example where you both benefit.

That covers what to do, but where do you do it? How do you connect with other bloggers? Here are some ideas:

  • Their site. You can leave comments and interact with them there. It’s also the location where you can find their email address or contact form when you want to chat privately.
  • Social media. I ALWAYS tag the blogger when I share one of their posts and I appreciate those who tag me when they share mine.
  • In person. If you’ve never been to FinCon, you need to go. You can meet hundreds of money bloggers over the course of just a few days. And let me tell you, those relationships can lead to some great things! If you don’t write about money, look and see if there’s a conference for bloggers in your niche. FinCon also has local meetups that run throughout the year.
  • Fin Con Facebook page. You can meet money bloggers on the Fin Con Facebook page but also do so much more! You can ask questions, find sources, get advice, and simply chat about money. How cool is that?! Again, if you’re not a money blogger, see if there’s a Facebook group for your niche.
  • Rockstar Finance forums. There are two parts to the Rockstar Finance Forums: the public part where we chat about money-related issues and the private, blogger part where we talk about the details of blogging. If you’re a money blogger, you should request access to the private blogger section and you can then talk with a whole host of money bloggers. And as we’ll see below, there are some other traffic-driving reasons to be part of this group.

These are just some of the ways that have helped me connect with others and certainly the most effective.

4. Make the most of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

For most bloggers and especially those of any decent size, Google is their biggest source of traffic.

So working to attract Google’s attention (and that of other search engines as well) is a worthwhile endeavor.

Adjusting posts for the express purpose of ranking better with search engines is called search engine optimization or “SEO” for short.

The Ins and Outs of SEO

Before we get into what I think you should do for SEO, let me first share some general thoughts on the topic:

  • SEO is an art, despite the fact that many will present it as a science. The truth is that no one knows exactly what Google and the other search engines are looking for, so setting up content for them is a shot in the dark at best.
  • There are some who swear by SEO and claim they know the “secrets” to doing it well. Not surprisingly, most of these people have books, classes, and so forth selling their secrets.
  • The heart of SEO can get your writing off track. Most of the SEO how-tos begin by discussing key word research. This often leads to subjects that you think you can rank for. Whether or not these subjects are of interest to you is ignored. But that’s a big deal to me. I want to write about what I want to write about, not a post on “Six Ways to Save on Car Insurance” or “50 Steps to Eliminate Debt.” There’s nothing wrong with these topics, I just don’t find them interesting.
  • Others are willing to write about whatever topics they think will do well with Google — and they seem successful at it. They find obscure word combinations, write posts on them, take a few other steps (like generating links to those posts), and then get traffic. It works for them, but if I had to do this to make my blog work I’d rather not have a site. I simply find it mind-numbing.

Given these, my general feeling has always been that you can’t go overboard with SEO or you’ll lose the fun of your site (by writing for machines, not people), your identity (by getting into topics that aren’t true to your site’s personality), and the time you could be putting to better use elsewhere.

SEO Tips from Google

This has always been my approach to SEO and after attending a conference earlier this month at the Google headquarters, I am even more convinced that it’s the right course of action.

While at Google, they shared several pieces of information on how to best rank in their search engine. Here were their key points:

  • Google wants to give readers what they want. And what readers want is content that gives them information, answers their questions, and so forth. So spend your time writing awesome, sharable content and most of the SEO work will be done!
  • 90% of building a great site that ranks well is offering quality content and services.
  • “Content is king!” The best SEO is great content.
  • There are over 200 (or so) factors that decide search rankings. Some of the keys are: 1) freshness of content, 2) number of times terms appear in content, 3) quality of the site, and 4) user experience.
  • To help Google a bit, describe what your post is about in detail with a tailored snippet in WordPress (using the Yoast plug-in). Be as descriptive as possible — as if you were explaining the post’s meaning to a friend.
  • Use descriptive alt tags for images and use text around images to describe them (computers can’t see images so you have to help them out).
  • Create a descriptive “about us” page — describe in detail what makes your site unique.
  • Use proper grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. on your site.
  • Think mobile first. Users are increasingly using mobile devices and sites that focus on the mobile user experience (which includes site speed) will win.
  • Site slowness boils down to the following: 70% of problems are caused by images; 20% are caused by javascript; 10% are miscellaneous issues.
  • Images under 500KB are good; under 100KB is great. Use a compression site or software to make images smaller whenever you can without losing too much quality.

The summary of everything above boils down to 1) writing great content and 2) making sure your site performs well for the user.

The Google speakers also shared some resources to help in these efforts:

My SEO Recommendations

Taking everything above into account, here’s what I recommend doing for your site’s SEO:

  • Verify your site with Google Search Console.
  • Once you do this, be sure to have Google regularly crawl (look over) your site.
  • Pick the subjects you want to write about. A subject you are passionate about will lead to better content anyway. Then write EPIC content.
  • Install the Yoast SEO plug-in. You can use the free version — there’s no need for the paid option. This plug-in will then give you practical advice on how to make your posts more Google friendly (like using proper headings, focusing on certain words, and writing a specific post description). None of these tasks are too intrusive or take too much time.
  • Be sure your site is performing correctly. Run the PageSpeed tests and if adjustments need to be made, make them to improve user experience.
  • Once a month use Google Analytics to determine where you are getting traction. You’ll begin to see where Google is sending people to your sites (which posts it likes). I then link to these posts from other posts on my site. I’m not sure it does much good, though I’ve seen others say it does, but it doesn’t take much time and effort so why not?

That’s it. Some bloggers might feel this is a lame approach, but my feeling is that if you write great content, do some basic SEO, and get your posts out there, people will link to them and SEO will take care of itself.

If that seems a bit naive to you and you want more, here are some non-Google articles to check out:

That’s it for this time. Anything to add?

To read the next part in this series, see Five Steps to Creating a Winning $25k Blog, Step 4: Drive Traffic, Part 2.

Don’t Miss a Post

ESI Money is about helping you grow your net worth. The path to get there involves three simple steps starting with the letters E-S-I. You can read more about the site, the author, and keys to becoming wealthy here.

You can sign up to receive ESI Money articles via email or by RSS. For email newsletter subscriptions or RSS updates updates, visit this link.

Comments

  1. The Physician Philosopher says

    Haha what great irony. I left a link in one of th comments to your post yesterday. It was completely on topic to the Millionaire being interviewed, but now feel like a total twerp! Sorry for that.

    I do completely agree that leaving valuable comments will drive some traffic. I’ll also add that when they come from a source filled with similar topics (rockstar forum, a similar website/blog, etc) it not only drives traffic, but it drives the kind of traffic that is more likely to sign up for your email list.

    I haven’t made a free “something” to get others to sign up, but have taken the vowe not to spam my email list. Maybe I’ll think of something that would be worth the risk.

    Great ideas, and I appreciate you forgiving me (in advance) for leaving a link yesterday!!! Won’t happen again.

    Reply

    • ESI says

      Ha! I didn’t even see it (the family was out yesterday traveling).

      Most newer bloggers don’t realize that’s a thing and when I’ve told them almost all are very kind and apologetic (like you.)

      That’s what this series is about — passing on knowledge — so it’s great when someone accepts it, learns, and becomes a better blogger. 馃檪

      Reply

      • The Physician Philosopher says

        Well us newbies certainly appreciate you being understanding!
        I’ve run into a few of these snags that make total sense after the fact, but just didn’t cross my mind at the time while I tried to drive traffic.

        Thanks for teaching us!

        TPP

        Reply

      • Jack The Dreamer says

        Hi ESI,

        Thank you so much for this post! Just one question though, if you write about personal finance, doesn鈥檛 it make sense to actual read other blogs that aren鈥檛 personal finance and comment on those to drive traffic to your PF blog?

        I ask because a part of me feels like the pool is inward looking of PF bloggers comment and post to other PF bloggers and the traffic is inward and we鈥檙e all just making ad revenue off each other? Lol.

        Reply

        • ESI says

          You can certainly comment on other blogs and it won’t hurt and may help. That said, only a percentage of people reading those blogs are interested in personal finance. In addition, if the topic is food, let’s say, your comment isn’t going to be money related, so how do you show your money expertise?

          You know that people reading PF blogs are interested in the topic. And while it may appear that only other PF bloggers are reading (because that’s who comments), there actually may be thousands of other “real people” who read, are interested in money, and yet don’t comment.

          Reply

  2. Amy @ LifeZemplified says

    This is a great basic approach and not lame at all in my opinion. Will it work overnight? Nope, but you’ve already told us that. 馃檪

    I’d strongly encourage any blogger reading this to not gloss over the power of #3. Developing relationships with other bloggers has tremendous benefits. Be a giver. Always. And you’ll find yourself receiving in return and connecting with some really great new friends.

    Reply

  6. Chris @ Duke of Dollars says

    Awesome tips ESI!

    I wanted to give a few insights on how we really increased the speed on our blog, which is on WordPress!

    First, we bought a more expensive, dedicated server from dreamhost. It is specifically designed for WordPress (service is called DreamPress), and automatically scales for your blog. This is important to keep the performance of your site top notch.

    Second, caching – you can utilize cloudflare for free. It caches your blog and then uses their global servers to serve your content. For example, say you have a reader in Cali, then when they access your site it will use the cloudflare server in Cali (or close). If another reader is NYC, instead of having the packets of your website travel through the world wide web from the Cali server to NYC, they have servers in NYC to serve your content to the second reader. This makes it much faster!

    Third, Smush plugin – this does what ESI is speaking on above with compressing your images. Every image you upload in WordPress it can automatically compress them for you, making them faster on your site!

    Lastly, minifying your CSS / JS / HTML files. Some themes let you do this automatically, Cloudflare also does it for you, but you can use other caching plugins as well. This reduces the sizes of your files, so when people come to your site – it loads faster 馃檪

    Hope that helps!

    Reply

      • Jack says

        Hi Chris, for the cloudflare, was it a free plugin you can find in WordPress?

        Also on caching, I tried hummingbird until the WordPress help said that it was the reason my site was crashing all the time. So we got rid of that. I use the smush plugin. Which minifying plugin do you use?

        Thank you!
        Jack

        Reply

        • Chris @ Duke of Dollars says

          Hey Jack,

          Cloudflare is a service you sign up through their site. I’m not going to link it here since we are on ESI’s site, but you can google “Cloudflare” and it’ll pop right up on the top of the search results.

          The cache plugin we used to use was W3 Total cache. It let you set up minification, but it was an intense caching plugin so I’d recommend looking into the guides first. It was known to sometimes make resources load in incorrect order.

          We stopped using this because our hosting has Varnish Cache installed and they recommend not using other plugins on top of it. They said cloudflare + Varnish cache (which is installed on the server) would be enough and any plugins could cause issues.

          After seeing the results, we couldn’t disagree :).

          Reply

  7. Miguel (The Rich Miser) says

    In my limited experience of 11 months of blogging, I’ve learned that you reap what you sow. Traffic doesn’t come overnight, unless you’re lucky with a feature on a big site or a celebrity mention or something like that (and even then, you’ll usually get a huge spike that disappears in a matter of days).

    What I’ve learned, though, is that planting the right seeds (like those on this article) pays off over time. Soon enough, traffic becomes a rising curve, and it’s an awesome feeling 馃檪

    Reply

  8. caren says

    I am 100% with you on the SEO strategy. Social media has become very hit or miss with changing algorithms, plus it can be a hungry beast to feed. Google juice is staying power – much like Pinterest is (or was). Personally, I’m ready to step away from social media (almost) entirely. I think the best ideas, connections, and inspiration come from blogs.

    Reply

  9. Troy @ Bull Markets says

    I think a free incentive isn’t as valuable as it used to be. Nowadays so many bloggers are offering “download my FREE guide to…” that it makes it less valuable than it used to be. People aren’t really amazed by free content anymore.

    Reply

    • ESI says

      I’m not sure whether it’s as valuable as it used to be or not, but I can say it is valuable today.

      Just compare the percent of people who subscribe without one to the percent who subscribe with one and you’ll find that out very quickly.

      Of course the giveaway can’t just be anything. It has to be something the readers wants and values.

      Reply

  10. Tuppenny says

    I am still at the complete newbie stage (still have coming soon on my website as I don’t feel ready to ‘go live’) so this has been super helpful. I am currently reading up on SEO but had not been aware of all the different facets of Google or the resources you shared there.
    This is what makes your “How to start a blog” series so different from other series/courses. You give the detail and so many links to start our research off whereas some other bloggers stick with 5 easy steps, which always seem to include Bluehost and content is king, job done.
    I appreciate that you don’t sugar coat the process, you just give me a ton of homework every time you post the next part of this series!
    Looking forward to part 2 of this post.
    Many thanks

    Reply

  12. Jack @ Jack The Dreamer says

    Hey guys, I checked into the whole “have google crawl through your webpages” thing to make sure it’s all indexed and stuff and just wanted to report that there are two different crawls. One is called “fetch as google” and the other is “fetch and render.”

    ESI, please excuse me for putting this link here but I thought it would be helpful to others who are crawling their blogs.

    https://www.semrush.com/blog/googles-fetch-and-render-why-its-important/

    You want to also fetch and render to see how google is seeing your page and if there are any bugs you need to fix. Hope this helps 馃檪

    Reply

  13. Ms. FI-ology says

    Your site is a success in my opinion and therefore I am so grateful for these posts. Thanks, ESI!

    It is lovely to read the most important thing is to write great content. I am bursting at the seams to write, but alas and alack, I am taking my time to make sure I get my site set up for success.

    Okay, as I understand it my focus needs to be in this order: 1.) Write awesome stuff, 2.) promote x4, 3.) basic SEO. I am a little nervous about the marketing but when you said helping other bloggers is part of that, I realized this will be fun…

    It appears that google analytics is free. Is that correct?

    Reply

    • Jack @ Jack The Dreamer says

      Hi Ms. FI-ology,

      If I may butt in, what might help as well is if you use Sovrn for your ads instead of just WordPress’s wordads and Google’s Adsense. I switched over to Sovrn and started making more ad revenue right away. Of course, ESI might use something else besides Sovrn.

      ESI, what ad companies do you use, if you don’t mind me asking? And yeah, I started interacting with other FI bloggers and tweeters more and FI and PF journey is now much more fun lol.

      Reply

    • ESI says

      Yes, Google Analytics is free.

      As for your content suggestions, I’ll say:

      1. Yes, focus on great content.

      2. Post as often as possible. the biggest mistake I see new bloggers make is posting once a week. It’s hard to grow traffic doing that.

      Reply

        • ESI says

          That’s a great question.

          When I was working it was hit and miss — maybe 30 minutes a day. The one exception was I spent a lot of time creating a free ebook and setting up a system to allow people to subscribe via email. That has been pure gold and allowed me to relax a bit in later months.

          That said, since I retired it’s more like an hour+ per day (sometimes a couple hours or more). But this includes everything: networking (on the Rockstar Finance forums), social media, guest posts, etc.

          There’s also a point where you reach critical mass (50k pageviews or more per month) and a lot of the marketing takes care of itself.

          Reply

      • Ms. FI-ology says

        ESI, you are reading my mind! I was thinking I’d post once a week. I suppose if I’m going to do this, I need to go big or go home.

        Do you think it can work to have one set day of the week for one article and then another floating day per week for a second? Or better to pick two set days a week to publish? If I were a betting woman, I’d bet you’ll say the latter.

        Reply

        • ESI says

          I would go with the latter.

          The key is to set an expectation for your readers and “Monday and Thursday” is easier to communicate than “Monday and one floating day.”

          Reply

  14. Sumon Ballav says

    ESI, you are reading my mind! I was thinking I鈥檇 post once a week. I suppose if I鈥檓 going to do this, I need to go big or go home.

    Do you think it can work to have one set day of the week for one article and then another floating day per week for a second? Or better to pick two set days a week to publish? If I were a betting woman, I鈥檇 bet you鈥檒l say the latter.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.