Four years ago, I created a blog about freelancing in my local language. Now it has 80 000 monthly visitors and 2 million page views for the last two years.
What have I done to reach these goals, and what should you do to grow your blog and monetize it quickly?
Write profitable and viral posts first
Don’t write essays and complex articles if you want to grow your blog fast. Use the most profitable and best for organic search and going viral topics. Usually, these posts are about:
- how to do anything (“How to Shoot a Viral TikTok”);
- lists of helpful tools and apps (“15 Tools to Write Faster”);
- lists of ideas (“25 Ideas for Your Jewelry Pinterest”);
- inspiration lists (“30 Mouthwatering Food Blogs”);
- tutorials (“How to Use HubSpot for Your Email Marketing”).
Use these ideas to create your own list of posts that will be interesting for your readers (or contact me if you want me to make this list for you). After you start writing and publishing, you’ll see that these types of posts are going organically viral much faster than analytics and simple pieces of advice.
Optimize your texts
Use plugins and tools to optimize your posts to appear higher on Google. Creating a high converting title, optimized headlines, and using proper keywords throughout your article are essential.
Use SEMRush or Serpstat to find suitable keywords and analyze your competitors. Find out what keywords your competitors use, what posts are most viral, and what topics you can expand better than them.
Also, use the All-in-One SEO plugin to optimize the post. It shows you how well your article is optimized and advises what to do to optimize it even better (suitable for WordPress sites).
Grow your social media accounts
I started growing my Telegram channel, and at first, I got more than half of my views from it. I published small tips and hacks and posted links to bigger posts on my site. Like, “if you want to know more, check this article.”
It is an excellent way to catch your followers’ interest: once they get some usefulness from you, they already know that you produce quality content and will be glad to read the full post with your thoughts and advice.
You can use Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and even Reddit or Quora accounts to grow your audience. Be sure that there is an audience you need. For example, beauty blogs work great on Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok, and maybe not so good on Facebook and Reddit.
I used Telegram because it is popular in my local market, and there is an audience of IT specialists I needed. For my next project about online courses, I choose Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Don’t forget about YouTube–it is also an excellent way to promote your blog, but it takes more time to create content for it.
Grow your mailing list
From the beginning of my blog’s existence, I added signup forms to the footer of all the posts, but people didn’t subscribe to my mailing list. Why? Because they didn’t know what I would send them.
Later, I created a free course, “How to become a freelancer in 7 days,” as a lead magnet and made a pop-up with an invitation to get this course for free. People started subscribing, and now I have more than 8000 people on my mailing list. I send them links to the new articles, sell my courses and services and promote affiliate products (I will write about my affiliate income in my following articles).
Though email marketing seems not so profitable at first sight, it makes me about 30% of sales. If people open your email despite the enormous amount of spam in their inbox, they are really interested in your content. Use it to grow your views and sales.
Use guest posting and delegate writing
I started networking and found editors and bloggers who write on similar topics but are not competitors to my blog. So I invited them to write posts for me, and I wrote posts for their blogs. We placed the links to our blogs in these articles and exchanged the audience.
It helps you grow your blog faster, get a new quality audience and get free content from professionals without any expenses (even of your time, because usually bloggers already write well).
Also, don’t write everything yourself–it will be much faster and has better quality if you delegate it to professional writers. You can hire them on Fiverr, or it is even better to hire a virtual assistant who will also help you with SEO, emails, meetings, and other small tasks that waste your time. Focus on tasks that you are better at, and delegate the rest. I recommend finding VAs on Time Etc. They have US-based assistants, so they will write in better English than writers from other countries since they are natives and know some local aspects of language use. It is crucial if you work in the US market.
Why do I delegate? Because I have almost 70 content ideas as of now (and every day, I come up with new ones), and if I write it all by myself, I will do it forever. If I delegate some texts to the assistants, I will have all of these 70 texts in a few weeks or less instead of three months.
Monetize your blog
Don’t use only Google Adsense as a standard way of monetizing your blog. First, you can check other ad programs: Propeller Ads, MediaNet, Amazon Ads, Mediavine, and many others.
Second, sell your own products: books, courses, services, tools and templates, apps, and everything you can sell online. Your audience already trusts you and is ready to buy something from you, don’t hesitate to offer them something useful for them.
Also, use affiliate programs. I use ShareASale, Fiverr, Dreamhost, and Admitad programs. Find tools and products your audience will be interested in, and search for the link “Affiliates” on the footer of these products’ sites. Then sign up for their program and place the links on your blog posts and social media accounts. Read the rules: sometimes, you have no right to publish an affiliate link on your social media and can use only your site’s blog.
Diversify your income streams and earn more. Follow my blog to know more tips about creating and promoting blogs and courses.
If you need a strategy and a list of ideas for your project, contact me, and I will build the right strategy for growing and monetizing your blog.
