15 years ago, we started out in internet marketing. Since then, we have added more than 100 blogs and increased their organic visitors to 100K and above per month.
The growth of the businesses we started or were engaged in expanding as well as the development of our own personal brand have all benefited greatly from doing this. And I’m not the only one.
B2B businesses that prioritize blogging as a strategic tool have a 13 times better return on investment than those that don’t.
Of course, just having a blog and sometimes posting to it won’t cut it.
You’re up against over 31.7 million other blogs, so thinking strategically is necessary to succeed. Aim high if you want to use a blog effectively, whether that means building your personal or professional brand or monetizing it for passive money.
Big with 100K monthly visits.
It’s difficult to gain that type of following. It demands effort. a great deal of effort. Really successful bloggers would have invested a significant amount of their free time in developing them, and they almost certainly had to make numerous compromises along the way.
However, the benefits may be enormous after all of the efforts starts to pay off and everything starts to come together.
Does that seem like something you can fully commit to and something you want to accomplish?
Okay, let’s get started. I’ll lead you through a 16-step method for starting from zero to develop your blog to 100,000 organic visitors per month (or more).
Increase from 0 to 10K Visitors
The hardest aspect of starting a blog is frequently getting it off the ground by establishing an initial following of a few hundred, followed by a few thousand regular readers. Expect it will take longer to get from 0 to 10 monthly visits than it will to move from 10 to 50 or 50 to 100.
We’ll discuss how to position yourself for both immediate and long-term success in this part. I’m going to discuss in particular:
- selecting (or reducing) your specialization
- Identifying your target market
- How to select relevant subjects for your blog articles
- The standard of writing you ought to strive towards
- How to make your blog entries as visible in the search results as possible
- Building ties with influencers by including industry influencers in your content
- improving the readability of postings
So let’s start from step one. How to …
1. Choose (or Narrow) Your Niche
Pick (or Narrow) Your Specialty Choosing (or narrowing) your niche can have a significant impact on how simple (or difficult) it is to develop a blog with 100,000+ subscribers.
Describe a niche.
In his article on how to start a blog, Ryan Robinson expressed it best:
“A niche is not merely a certain issue. It’s your strategy, the target market you want to reach, and the manner in which you’ll communicate with them and establish your authority.
The Perfect Niche
The ideal niche is one with little blogger competition and enough customer interest to guarantee that 100K prospective followers truly exist.
Neil Patel advises that before starting a blog, you should choose a subject that interests and excites both you and those who share your interests. Pick a topic that truly interests you so that you can plunge into producing effective content.
Increasing Concentration
If you have a blog currently or are getting ready to start one, it is a good idea to somewhat restrict your specialty.
Having a blog that has a narrow focus makes it simpler to establish yourself as an authority in your field and attract readers.
The ‘jack of all crafts, master of none’ principle is at play here. Even while there is a place for persons with a variety of abilities, specialists are typically seen as those who are the best in a single area.
The Blog Starter’s Scott Chow advises against choosing your core topic only on the basis of profitability. Instead, choose a subject that you find fascinating, occupies your thoughts, and makes you irritate your pals. You’ll never run out of topics if you do it this way.
There is, of course, a limit.
If you specialize too much, you risk running out of topics to write about as well as reducing the number of your prospective audience.
Hiten Shah, Sean Ellis, and Brian Dean are excellent instances of this tactic in action. They have all achieved success in part because they have concentrated on becoming acknowledged as authorities in a certain field of marketing (link building, growth hacking, and product development, respectively).
Have you seen something novel and intriguing that piques your interest? When a new trend you’ve seen coincides with your own areas of interest, you have a fantastic chance to make money.
Recent Trends
Getting on board with a new trend provides you with an advantage in swiftly growing a following. If you’re one of the first to specialize in a trend, discipline, or movement, it will be simpler for you to rank in the search results and stand out to both influencers and customers.
You need to closely monitor small business news in your sector if you want to have a chance of succeeding with this method.
It also helps to be able to spot trends that are likely to last rather than just passing fads.
Identify Your Target Market
This is a crucial stage in assisting you in producing the correct content—material that connects with the demographic you want to target and who you anticipate consuming your content.
You can start this process by posing inquiries to yourself like these:
- Who is the target audience for this blog? intermediate, advanced, or beginner?
- What are the roles and professions of your target audience?
- Which role models are the most inclined to emulate?
- What subtopics do you envision yourself covering within your area of expertise?
- What are you able to teach them?
- Which blogs do you think are comparable to your own? Who is pursuing them?
Your ultimate objective should be to compile all of this information into a set of personas that you can use as a resource when looking for and selecting content ideas.
Why are these personalities significant? They assist you in generating your content and ensuring that it tackles issues and provides solutions for the readers or audiences it is intended for.
If you’re in the business of selling goods or services, consumers are 48% more likely to choose vendors that offer tailored marketing materials that speak to their particular business concerns.
Keep in mind that it’s not about you while coming up with ideas for your content.
Select Your Post Topics With Care
Instead of only writing about issues you want to write about, your content strategy should concentrate on themes your audience cares about. If you select themes based on what your target audience is interested in and needs to know, you’ll grow your audience more quickly.
Make sure your contributions are truly helpful and not simply a way to stroke your ego.
We’ll go over several content research tools and discuss various approaches to determining the demand for content before you produce it.
Tools for Content Research
Answer the Public Answer the Public uses autosuggest data from search engines to illustrate what terms people look up in connection to a specific keyword.
Simply type in a term, click “Get Questions,” and you’ll be given a list of possible blog subject suggestions that are all based on queries people are really typing into search engines and seeking information about.
Quora
The question-and-answer website Quora is a treasure trove of potential blog topics. To find your niche, use the page’s search box at the top (or a word or short phrase related to it). You will be given relevant questions that site users have asked, which you can use to inspire blog entries that offer clarification or background data.
Additionally, you may sign up for “feeds” to receive frequent email notifications about newly added or popular questions in the topic (or categories) of your choice.
Although the layout is more geared toward debates than strictly question-and-answer threads, Reddit is nevertheless a treasure trove of blog subject ideas.
You need to follow subreddits if you want to make the most of the platform (groups or communities focusing on specific topics). Use the search box on the right side of the site to identify subreddits in your niche; however, not every result will be worthwhile for subscribing to.
Be careful to look at these before selecting whether subreddits are worthwhile:
how many users are subscribers?
How active it is (to determine this, check the relevant subreddit and see how frequently posts are made there).
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a content research tool that may assist with activities like discovering influencers to market your content to and determining which themes and content kinds work best in a specific area.
As a result, it’s fantastic for providing content ideas.
Simply type a topic into the search box, and Buzzsumo will display popular material that relates to your query.
The findings can inspire a fresh idea for you, or you might discover something you can “recreate” but better (as a side note, I’m not proposing you steal anyone’s work; rather, I’m saying you leverage their concept and produce a related but fresher version). (For additional information on how to achieve this, see my post on 10X content.)
Your Clientele
Why not consult your audience? They are the best people to know what kind of material they want to see.
Okay, so in order for something to be effective, you need an audience. If you’re just getting started, you might have to wait until you’ve amassed a modest following before you can benefit much from this strategy.
But if there is an audience, make advantage of them. They’ll appreciate that their suggestions are being considered, and there’s nothing better than getting feedback straight from your audience on how you can help them and produce engaging material that they’ll really read.
You may develop customer surveys with the aid of programs like Qualaroo that display when specific events take place. If someone visits a blog article but leaves within a predetermined amount of time, you may, for example, have a single-question survey display with the possible question, “What didn’t you enjoy about this blog post?”
An alternative is to have a survey appear at the conclusion of each post. It may ask them what they would want to see next and provide them with some topic suggestions.
Bonus advice: Before you begin creating a piece of content, consider to who you will advertise it. Don’t make it if you are unable to respond to this.
Create long-form content (that is superior to what is already available on the subject).
Long-form content often outperforms short-form content in terms of both how highly it ranks in search results and its ROI.
Yet what exactly falls under long-form content?
Sadly, there is no clear-cut answer to that issue; the answer you receive will vary depending on who you ask. Long-form content generally has between 1,200 and 2,000 words, but effective long-form articles may be anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 words, according to Ramona Sukhraj of Impact.
Let’s assume for the sake of simplicity that 1,000 words minimum is the target word count for the majority of your blog entries. Although there is nothing wrong with crafting shorter pieces if you can explain what you need to in fewer words, this word count milestone is often viewed as adequate to do a topic justice.
Why is word count important? After all, if your message is being understood, shouldn’t that be sufficient?
More words facilitate the work of search engines. They aid in establishing the page’s topics; generally speaking, lengthier material is more in-depth and offers the user more thorough responses. In other words, it’s the kind of information that people enjoy reading and that search engines want to direct their readers to.
5. Optimize Your Posts for Search
To ensure that your content continues to draw readers long after you click publish, it is crucial to have your blog entries rank on the first page of the SERPs.
You may use a variety of both fundamental and more sophisticated SEO strategies to assist get your content to the top three spots or perhaps the first page of the SERPs.
In reality, just approximately 2% of clicks go to the pages in positions 9 and 10 in Google’s search results. Ranking on Google takes time and doesn’t happen instantly. Less than 2% of the top 10 Google results are older than 12 months.
But after you reach rank 3, the typical click-through rate rises to roughly 12%. If you can land that coveted top slot, your click-through rate will be close to 30%.
What can you do, then, to assist your content go up the search results list?
The two things we discussed earlier are relevant again in this situation.
Writing blog posts about subjects that readers are genuinely searching for will help increase organic visitors, and lengthier posts tend to perform better in search engine results.
Beyond this, there is still a tonne you can do to improve your content and increase organic visitors to your blog as well as visibility in the organic SERPs.
Keyword Research
The search volumes for long-tail terms are frequently so low that they don’t show up in widely used keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner.
This does not, however, imply that you should discount the value they could offer.
It might not be worthwhile to optimize a blog article for just one long-tail keyword, but including several long-tail keywords can result in a significant increase in organic visitors.
In addition to being far more targeted than their short-tail counterparts, long-tail phrases also have much greater conversion rates.
Put this in its proper context.
Put this in its proper context.
Just because you appear in search results for “men’s shoes” doesn’t indicate that searchers will stay on your site or that you offer what they want.
In contrast, a long-tail search word would be “What shoes should guys wear for a wedding.”
Is that particular term being looked up by numerous people? Most likely not. But if you create a blog post that responds to this query, everyone who stumbles onto it should be able to find what they’re searching for and will subsequently be more likely to convert.
Benefits of Ranking in organic visitors
- Credibility and Belief
The two most important factors in organic search engine ranking are credibility and trust. As a result of Google placing just the top ten most relevant and updated websites, people frequently interpret greater organic search rankings as a mark of reliability and trust. - Increased Click-Through Rate
Higher click-through rates are typically a result of perceived trustworthiness and trust. In order to get top-funnel search phrases that may not immediately indicate search intent, organic search is the best place to start if you have a lengthier purchase cycle.
- Accessibility
Using paid search, you may gain immediate notoriety. Running sponsored advertising, though, may get expensive over time. Additionally, compared to organic search, the exposure gained by paid search is sometimes fleeting. Organic search continues to be increasingly efficient over time. - Competitor Advantage
When used correctly, an organic search may provide you with an unmatched edge over your rivals, especially those that rely on sponsored search. Your site pushes your rivals farther down the list the higher it ranks on search engine results pages (and the longer it stays there).
5. Sustainability
Organic search is perpetual, as opposed to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. Although it takes time to rank in the top 10 of a search, the effects are typically long-lasting. Naturally, you’ll require routine maintenance to keep your search ranking.
Challenges to Producing Content That Will Rank Organically
The core of organic search marketing is content. The hardest aspect, though, is really producing the material that can rank naturally. When trying to fulfill the need for unique and pertinent content, digital marketers confront a number of difficulties. The top five problems for content marketers, according to a recent ClearVoice poll, were time, content quality, content development, content scalability, and idea generation.
Time: Marketers frequently struggle with content production due to a lack of time, particularly in smaller teams. Regularly producing high-quality content requires effective time management and enough resources.
Content Quality: Producing high-quality content only occasionally is simple, but maintaining that standard consistently is difficult. You must provide content that is replete with pertinent statistics, references, and reliable sources. It’s a difficult assignment, to put it mildly.
Material Creation: It’s quite challenging to consistently produce content that draws website organic visitors, engages readers, and reflects a distinctive viewpoint. It requires understanding the interests of your target audience and producing material appropriately, which may be highly time-consuming.
Scaling up material is never simple, whether it be for distribution or creation. The majority of marketers lack the internal assets, personnel, and planning expertise required to scale out their content.
Developing Ideas: It can be challenging to come up with fresh content concepts each day. Of course, you may give your already published content a new twist. But, there are only so many ways to do it. Despite these difficulties, we were nevertheless able to produce a blog article with the subject “A Comprehensive Guide for Buying the Best Leather” that received 10,000 organic hits in only three months without any advertising.
Pick a focus keyword and then focus on a certain topic.
The phrase “Focus Keyword” has undoubtedly been used a thousand times by now. But how precisely do you focus on a subject? The ideal keyword is where it all starts. Since improving organic search ranking is your goal, you must identify the best organic keyword or focus keyword with a large search volume and develop a topic in line with it.
You shouldn’t always go for the most well-liked keywords while choosing them. Do not choose a keyword merely because it receives a lot of searches. Use a keyword that is more precise instead because it will probably help your organic ranking.
Check the Number of Web Pages and Blog Posts That Rank for the Keyword
Checking the number of blog posts or web pages that are listed for your target keyword should be your initial step. The quantity of blog entries often reveals the user intent for a certain term. With more blog entries, readers are more likely to be interested in comprehensive information based on the term rather than merely browsing for goods or services.
Using Ahrefs Link Explorer, we looked up information for the term “Types of Leather” in the screenshot below. As you can see, blog articles make up the majority of the top-ranking material. This indicates that individuals enjoy reading about various leather varieties. In other words, if you create blog entries that are better than what is presently available, you have a possibility of ranking content for this term naturally.
Let’s look at another instance when we searched for the term “web design.” There aren’t many internet manuals or blog postings in this scenario. However, there are a lot of courses and lesson sites available. People who use this search phrase are obviously more interested in signing up for a web design course than they are in learning more about it online.
As an alternative, you may examine Ahrefs Term Explorer’s SERP Position History to see if the current content for a keyword is ranking consistently. A constant line suggests that users find the SERP content to be pertinent and educational. However, a shaky line indicates that the SERP’s content is subpar and unimportant. If the SERP line for your term is consistent, you may build high-quality content around it.
Check the Keyword’s organic visitors Decline
Because organic visitors are reading the low-ranked posts as well, it is important to take into account as organic visitors for the keyword “Types of Leather” slowly decline. Therefore, even if your content doesn’t appear in the top 10, it might eventually generate a lot of organic visitors.
Only the top search results for your core phrase often garner site visitors when organic visitors are sharply declining. That’s a really big ask, especially for a little marketing team with little time and money. It is preferable to hunt for a different term because it is nearly impossible to succeed in such fierce competition.
Learn how many websites with high authority rank for the keyword.
It is very hard to remove a high-authority website from the first 10 search results while promoting a site with a lower authority. It is best to adjust your focus keyword if you see a large number of authoritative sites. We chose to move through with it because there were hardly any authority sites for our core keyword.
The next step is to investigate the current material after choosing a focus keyword that suits your needs.
Investigate the Available Content
The basis of your content production process will be set by a thorough review of the current material. You will learn more about your target market’s demographics and specific wants from this. Additionally, you’ll discover what services your rivals are providing. Therefore, research makes it simpler to identify a user-centred impression that is different from that of your rivals.
Make sure you conduct the following research:
1. Titles
You should definitely start by analyzing the title. Learn what kinds of titles are being utilized and which ones have drawn the most organic visitors. List-based articles, “How-to” manuals, and titles that begin with a number, such as “X methods to,” tend to catch readers’ attention right away. Posts with lists are more likely to receive 100 or even 1000 shares. Posts with headlines that include the words “You” or “Your” do well too.
2. URLs
Examine the URLs since the structure of the URLs affects SEO. Find out the length of each URL as well as how they used the focus keyword in the URL. Keyword-rich URLs are more likely to appear in the top 10 search results.
3. Subjects Addressed
List the subjects discussed in each blog article after thoroughly reading it. Find out if they overlooked anything or don’t have the numbers or trending information. Your blog article will be built around this data.
4. Keywords
The blog entries will also contain a number of additional keywords in addition to the primary target keyword. Search for as many supplementary keywords as you can. Make sure to look at their placement and frequency throughout the material.
5. Backlinks
Finding out how many backlinks the top 10 blog entries have generated is the final step. Keep in mind that only high-quality backlinks are what you are seeking.
Create the heading
We made the decision to begin the content creation when the study was finished. The headline of the blog article has to be insightful, pertinent, and appealing while also including our focus keywords. As a result, we chose the title that follows.
A Complete Guide to Buying the Best Leather, Leather Insights
However, since the Meta title is what appears in Google search results, we wanted to add additional concentrated keywords to it. “Buy Leather” and “Types of Leather” were our main keywords. Therefore, we choose to utilize a slightly alternative Meta title as seen below while still considering SEO.
How to Identify Different Types of Leather & Leather Quality: Leather Buying Guide
Meta Description
The post preview that appears in the SERPs is summarised in the meta description. Your Click-Through Rate can increase with an engaging meta description that is keyword-optimized. Although Google claims that there isn’t a set length for the meta description, the suggested range is between 50 and 300 characters. Anything above 300 has a lower chance of appearing in a snippet. We choose to go forward with the next meta description.
“Want to purchase the best leather? With this leather guide, go beyond the usual discussion of full grain, top grain, and bonded leather.
As you can see, we made an effort to use as many supporting keywords as we could without sacrificing the effectiveness of the description.
Image Alt Tags
We refrained from cluttering keyword-filled image alt tags. Instead, we utilized more precise terminology to explain what the photographs are to Google.
Create the Content
We examined the information that was already there and found that each one was lacking. For instance, some blog entries featured several images but didn’t offer a thorough analysis of particular subjects. Other times, the supporting data and studies were out of date. Therefore, we made the decision to write a piece that would include images and all the pertinent and current information. After all, that is the most effective method for increasing organic visitors.
Utilizing Recent Statistics and Research Data
One excellent technique to increase the authority of your content is to use pertinent statistics and figures. Readers can better grasp a topic’s scope and size by using figures and statistics. They may also dramatically affect the intended audience.
But more crucially, including links to pertinent statistics and data is a means to signal to search engines that your content is current and hence fresh. All of these elements ultimately aided in raising our search ranking.
Due to the fact that the article was published in December 2017, we used data from early 2017 and 2016. In most cases, it is preferable to stay away from quoting anything more than two years old.
Keep It Relevant and Informative
Google won’t take into account your blog post for its top results pages if it lacks original and educational information, especially if there is already an abundance of high-quality content. No matter how well-documented a subject is, new knowledge can always be discovered. There are typically two methods for producing distinctive and educational material.
Share Facts Mentioned in Posts That Aren’t Top-Ranking But Are Used in Lower-Ranking Content
Examine each post to find all the material that has been covered while looking at the existing content. List any pertinent ideas or subjects that you discover that were left out of the top-ranking material in an Excel or Word document. Along with the points previously mentioned in the material that ranks at the top, you may include these in your own content.
Give a Detailed View of a Topic That Has Already Been Covered
As an alternative, you may expand on the same ideas that have already been covered by your rivals in the current material. It could be necessary to delve a bit more and search the subject using alternative keywords. But someday you will find fresh knowledge.
In this instance, it was evident that two subjects, polyurethane leather, and polyvinyl chloride leather, were not sufficiently covered in some of the contents that were presently ranked. Most of them only glanced over these two subjects. So, in order to give a more in-depth look at these two, we went ahead and did a
Use instructive visuals
Utilizing photographs and other visual components that are pertinent to the topic of your blog post not only improves its aesthetic appeal but also raises the likelihood that it will rank higher organically. Additionally, it is simpler to recall visual information. Three days after hearing information, people are only likely to recall 10% of it.
However, when the same information is accompanied by a pertinent visual, people can still remember about 65% of it three days later.
Visuals can be used to convey facts or statistics or to explain a topic or process in one of two ways: (a) or (b). We created a pyramid graph to show the global supply of hides, and a brief infographic to show the size of the leather market globally.