I'll share with you how I started writing and generating traffic to my blog and increasing visits by 20 times in a year, simple strategies but that generate a lot of results.
This month it's been exactly a year since I started writing on my blog and I decided to tell a little about my experience, tactics and results. I imagine that many people must have the same doubts I had, and many that I still have. Starting to write is not an easy task, but rest assured, the worst part is the hardest and at the same time the easiest to achieve: Getting started.
When I started wanting to write my blog, I had many doubts and fears, fear of writing something wrong (both technically and grammatically), fear of what others would think and even doubt my ability and knowledge. But today, a year later, I see that all these fears were real and that the best way to deal and improve was precisely by writing.
You will only really delve into a subject if you know how to teach it; You're just going to start writing better, guess what? Writing; And so on… I still get hit to use a comma, I have the habit of using it a lot.
But let's get down to business, I'll tell you a little about what I did to get 20 times the traffic to my blog. I will try to be as honest as possible, in my search for tips and help, I ended up noticing that there are many charlatans wanting to sell the magic formula of SEO or strategies to improve their website, and many times I noticed that they were just hollow ideas.
traffic evolution
Well, the first thing you need to have is a tool to monitor your traffic and users, I opted for Google Analytics, it is the standard tool in the market, it has several important and useful metrics, and the best part: Free.
In March 2019 was when I decided to really focus and try to write on my blog for real, at that time I had something around 152 monthly visits, and now in March 2020, closing the month with a high of around 3400 visits. In sheer numbers it might not seem like a big deal, but if we stop to analyze it was a 22 times increase in monthly traffic, for me it was a pretty encouraging number. There were 90 articles published in this period, and now I'm going to tell you a little more about some decisions and strategies I've made so far.
Choose a theme or design that's perfect for you
I have my domain since 2015, and since then it has had some different purposes: Personal website, service portfolio (in my time dedicated to freelance), and now technology blog. As a developer I always liked to make my own websites, from the design to the whole Frontend part, and perhaps the most important decision I made was to buy a ready-made theme.
Developing a quality blog or website takes time, and when we do something for ourselves it seems like it's never perfect, that is, we're never done and that always made me put off my writing idea.
I chose WordPress with my content platform, it is widely used in the world and it has many plugins and themes available, I found my theme on the website https://themeforest.net/ , I did a lot of research and testing before buying this theme, because I wanted a theme that spoke to what I thought would be my target audience, but that also followed all good SEO and performance practices.
Find your target audience
If you've already chosen your theme or what your website will look like, you probably already have an idea of the persona you want to achieve with your material. It's very important for you to understand who you want to write for, but what was most important to me and I only found out after I started writing was who I was and what would be the strength of my blog. I ended up discovering what I actually already knew, I'm not an "influencer" and I don't want to be, I don't have much presence and reach on social media, that is, my articles should gain organic traffic space by search engines, my articles are not "shareable", so the chance of them going viral on social media is practically nil, and that's okay, now I know where I need to focus my efforts: SEO and long-term content.
Write calmly and generate quality content
This is the tip you will most likely find on the internet, but finding your target audience and developing quality content is what will really help you drive traffic to your blog. Drawing up a plan of articles and writing calmly will help you generate quality content, I currently use the Trello to organize all the ideas I have for articles and prioritize according to the difficulty of writing, I have been writing an average of 5 "easy" articles per month and 2 articles that will need more work, so I managed to maintain consistency by alternating content styles .
SEO – Study, Test and Track
you need to understand what it is IF THE and what are the strategies for your model. Don't think that SEO is a magic formula and don't fall for those who say it, it's a time-consuming, labor-intensive process and requires a lot of study, training and testing. There are several websites that specialize in this, I recommend that you gather as much information as possible and start applying and following the strategies.
Engagement – Talk to your audience
Encourage your audience to interact with you, in addition to being very rewarding and this increases your rate of return and can build loyalty in a reader. Invite at the end of your articles for your readers to comment, doubts and criticisms should always be welcome, leave your ego aside.
Time – be patient
In the beginning I was constantly opening up my Google Analytics to track traffic, and this ends up taking the focus off what really matters: Content. Keep track of your data but don't get caught up in it, this anxiety can end up in disappointment and demotivation.
Currently Google is my biggest traffic generator, something around 85% of all visits come through it, and I noticed that it takes an average of 2 months to rank well a quality article and generate traffic, so be patient, trust in your content and try to update as necessary.
Conclusion
I hope this text has helped those who are unsure how to start generating traffic to their blog, I'm no SEO specialist but I've studied a lot and seen results in some strategies, I know the text was not technical but leave your comment if Anyone have specific questions, any tips or even want to share their experience.
