How To Get Your First 500 Visitors
How To Get Your First 500 Visitors
A Blogger friend of mine told me that his wish is to have unique readers per day on his personal blog by the end of the year. This is not an easy goal and keep in mind that most sites will never reach this audience.
Here are my Tips On how to attract your initial group of visitors so that you’re not just talking to yourself and set yourself on the way to 500 or more unique visitors per day.
On-Site Traffic Tips
- Domain Names
Keyword and targeted domain name has proven to me to work better than a random domain name or no domain name at all.
Think of keyword phrases people will type into google to find what you write about before buying your domain name.
Write Quality Content
Regularly produce valuable content that your target audience wants. be it entertaining., be it educational, be it text-based, be it videos – whatever makes your audience tick (i.e. makes them read it engage with it, share it ).
One quality blog post will mean so much more for your traffic than several unoriginal, reporting blog posts.
- Share Buttons
Allow your existing visitors to help you out and spread the word for you.
Include Twitter button, Facebook “Like” button or any other share button that is relevant to your audience on each of your blog posts
Don’t Just put 20 random share buttons on the bottom, be selective and think about where your target audience is. I focus on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. - Retain First Time Visitors
Have prominent subscription options as you want a good percentage of your first time visitors.
This is easiest if they bookmark your blog or subscribe to it in any possible way; email, RSS, Facebook page, Twitter stream. Consider giving them an incentive to subscribe on top of the quality content, free ebook or a podcast are some of the incentive options.
Off-Site Traffic Tips
- Actively Spread The Word
Writing quality articles is not enough as visitors do not come automatically. Go where your audience is and actively spread the word about your work.
Don’t spam but do push your blog indirectly by helping people out, solving their issues and being part of wider community discussion - Twitter Search
A tactic i have used very successfully in the early days of my blog was to search Twitter for relevant keywords and phrases.
I used to search for phrases like “start a blog” or “install WordPress” and then interact with all the real people that used those phrases.
I used to spend hours on this daily as it is great way of getting visitors and spreading the word about yourself. - Use Bigger Competitors
Commenting on relevant and high traffic blog posts is another tactics i had success with. Make sure the post you comment on is relevant to what you do, make sure the post has/will have a lot of visitors and try to be one of the early/top commentators - Join StumbleUpon
I joined StumbleUpon early on and got my first traffic spikes thanks to it so i remembered this option.
Join it, use it by recommending articles you read and get in touch with other users who “like” relevant content to those you write yourself .
When you have several contacts there, ping them and let them know about the latest psot you have written that they may find interesting. - Drip, Drip, Drip To 500 Visitors Daily
Remember that writing articles is just a part of your blogging job, promoting your work is just an important aspect of having a successful blog.
A good measurement is to spend half of your time writing and other half of your blogging time promoting articles
It is a drip, drip drip process so getting a new regular visitors or two everyday will become a good number 2-3-6 months down the line and will get you to the of 500 or more unique visitors a day.
