I have a very simple blog traffic formula and it consists of 2 components. Learn what these are and how to leverage both to bring visitors to your site and grow your income.

Tune into the episode or read the transcript below:

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Show Notes:

• My simple blog traffic formula
• Optimizing a blog post for search engines
• SEO tasks for bloggers
• What Pinterest can do for your blogging business
• How to get traffic from Pinterest to your blog

Transcript

Now that I’m back to mostly blogging and growing the traffic of the website, I decided to also share a bit about it on the podcast.

I have a very simple blog traffic formula and many other people swear by it too. There are 2 components and they can help you get both long term and short term traffic, improve your blog’s reputation, grow its income, and diversify your traffic so you don’t rely on one platform or on algorithm updates.

This is mainly for bloggers as we’re talking about written content. And the 2 parts of that formula are organic traffic from Google and Pinterest. They are a killer combination and both are things you can learn from scratch and see progress with.

The first can take much longer though, both to learn and to see results from. While the second can happen much faster.

Let me talk about each a bit more.

Organic traffic depends on SEO, or search engine optimization.

That means you write articles on your blog and optimize them for search engines so they can rank high any time someone searches for a keyword or phrase related to the topic you covered. This leads to clicks on those articles and if you did your job well, people will actually read the whole thing, and ideally check some other things on your website and sign up to your newsletter.

From then on, you can start forming a relationship with them, educating them more on the topic, giving value for free, and eventually make an offer they can’t resist, such as a digital product or a way to work 1:1 with you.

What I just described is the customer journey, one version of it at least. It’s the journey from the moment someone hears about you, which in this case is by stumbling upon your article, to the moment they know, like and trust you enough to become a customer.

How to rank in search engines is quite a big topic and should be studied a lot. I teach that in my course Blog to Biz System.

Optimizing a blog post is one part of it and it’s about picking a keyword and creating the best and most well-optimized article Google has seen on the topic. The keyword should have just enough monthly searches not to be too competitive and popular but also to be in demand, meaning that enough people search for it so it makes sense for you to put the effort into creating the content.

Optimization is about more than just including the keyword in the title, in a subtitle, throughout the text, in the meta description and in the image.

It’s also about researching related keywords and keyword phrases and adding them in the article, adding internal links from other blog posts, making the post skimmable, providing actual value with it so people don’t just close the page once they land on it (that will only increase your bounce rate and that’s a negative sign for Google so it won’t keep ranking your piece high). There are many other factors involved.

I use the WordPress plugin Yoast SEO, which is the #1 search engine optimization plugin, and it does most of the work for you. It helps you include the keyword enough times and put it in the right places, as well as follow the best practices of Google.

Something I’m doing a lot lately is finding old articles that haven’t ranked well or at all and giving them another chance.

I do that by optimizing them, republishing them, adding new images and other elements, pinning them so they can rank on Pinterest too and treating them as fresh content. That makes Google crawl the page all over again and maybe rank it higher.

If you have evergreen content and a lot of it, make sure you do this often so your old blog posts don’t just sit in your archives but can be brought to life and get the attention they deserve from search engines.

SEO tasks for bloggers

Your activities as a blogger to drive consistent organic traffic to your site thanks to SEO include: 

• researching keywords; 
• writing new articles for a keyword;
• optimizing them;
• updating old content;
• tracking the performance of optimized posts over time to see how they are doing;
• and learning more about SEO.

The other component of the ideal blog traffic formula is Pinterest.

If you’re wondering why Pinterest, you might not know what it can do for your content.

It’s a search engine on its own, which makes it much more valuable than any other social channel, and you can see success with it early on. Even a few days after starting a new website and publishing your first article.

You simply create a Pin graphic for a blog post, optimize it, add it to Pinterest and to your most relevant board. Keep doing that for all your content and even create multiple Pins for a single blog post, different images that you can share over time, and wait for some of them to go viral. This can lead to sudden spikes in traffic but also to regular traffic.

People use Pinterest as a place to search for content and as long as you can get your images to rank for a particular topic and nail the design of the Pin, you’ll get page views on your website.

Some niches do better than others there but you can simply use the search field to look for content ideas and to see if a topic performs well.

Getting traffic from Pinterest

Your activities as a blogger to get traffic from Pinterest to your site include:

• researching popular topics on Pinterest;
• creating Pin graphics in Canva;
• testing different design for them;
• adding at least one inside every blog post and sharing it;
• creating more than 1 Pin for every post to increase its chances of ranking;
• writing blog posts specifically for Pinterest – that means covering topics that do well there even if they aren’t really in demand outside of the platform. Pinners have a different behaviour and it’s worth creating content for them. Luckily, your blog posts don’t even need to be long to do well there. You can create mini articles that answer just one question people have, and still the Pin can rank well and bring visitors to it.

If you want some help with Pinterest and to create your own simple strategy for pinning, you can sign up for the new masterclass I’m releasing this month – Pinterest Boost.

It will help you get a better understanding of how Pinterest works, how to make Pins go viral, and what practices to avoid as well as what to do instead to get not only Pinterest views but actual blog traffic.

Pinterest is one of my hot topics these weeks as I’m growing my presence there now. I saw a massive increase in views on the platform since I started pinning regularly again and in the masterclass, I show you how to do that easily, and manually – no need for automation tools.

Together with the training, you’ll also get 35 Pinterest Canva templates so you can create great graphics in seconds, no need to think of your own design. 

If you’re a student of my courses Blog to Biz System or Bold Business School, you’ll get free access to the masterclass. An email will be sent out once the training goes live so there’s nothing you need to do.

And I also just released a new freebie that you might like. I’ve interviewed many professional bloggers over the years and most of them are killing it on Pinterest. We’re talking about millions of views monthly, which brings a ton of traffic to their website and they’ve monetized that traffic strategically.

Many of those bloggers are self-made millionaires, they all started from nothing and simply found what works best through trial and error. Now we can all learn from them.

So I gathered their best Pinterest tips into one eBook that you can download and check out.

So that’s what I wanted to share with you today. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.