Anybody having one of those days where you go, “Oh, YES! I got five whole visitors to my blog today – I’m a superstar!”?
Not quite superstar.
Don’t worry, we’ve all been there and we’ve all had those days – the excitement and adrenalin when you hit up Google Analytics and see that you’ve got five whole new visits in the past 24 hours. The first day, you’re over the moon with excitement. The second day, you’re wondering why your traffic hasn’t increased, but you pass it off as nothing and you’re still over the moon.
By the end of the week, you’re tearing your hair out in frustration. Fast forward a month, and you’re just about ready to quit, convinced that this whole “blogging” thing is only for the pros.
In short – new bloggers often have a hard time getting traffic. A very hard time. That’s probably one of the things you didn’t know when you started blogging.
But wait – there’s hope!
Here’s The Truth – Traffic Isn’t As Hard As People Make It Out To Be
That’s just the plain truth.
Fact is, most people start out pouring all their time into SEO, backlink building, and the like. What they don’t realize is that what they’re working on are long-term traffic strategies. By the time their SEO work actually begins to show results, they are frustrated at not seeing any traffic and just about ready to throw the towel in.
Newbies need results to keep motivated. And they need them fast.
Fortunately, there’s a proven way to get those desired results quick – quicker than what most might think. Don’t believe the blogging “gurus” out there who say that traffic only comes after a year of hard work, because the truth is that you can get thousands of visitors to your blog within your very first week without even breaking a sweat.
Wanna know how?
Guest Post
Guest posting is undisputed as the quickest way to grow any new blog into a superstar in one month flat. In fact, guest posting is the only way to grow a new blog into a superstar in a few weeks.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, here’s how it works:
A popular blogger who has tens of thousands of readers is having trouble finding time to create fresh content for his blog regularly. He opens his blog up to guest posters who post to his blog in exchange for cash or a couple backlinks.
Seizing the opportunity, you send that popular blogger a guest post pitch telling him about how you want to submit a post on his site. He accepts your pitch and you spend a few hours working up the most amazing piece of content, and you submit the post for review, waiting with bated breath.
The popular blogger loves your content. He shares it to his 50,000 strong Twitter tribe, his 25,000 Facebook likes and to the 10,000 e-mails subscribed to his mailing list.
As a result, your guest post gets viewed by tens of thousands of pairs of eyeballs, and at least 10% (a conservative estimate) of those readers go so far as to click the link in your author bio and visit your blog.
Bam.
All of a sudden, you’re getting thousands of visitors to your blog, all because you took the few hours necessary to send in a guest post pitch and create a spanking-awesome blog post.
Why Guest Posting Works So Crazy Well
Besides the fact that you can “borrow” thousands of readers from a popular blog and channel them to your blog, guest posting provides quite a few other benefits unparalleled by any other growth hacking strategy.
First of all, you’re not just getting any ol’ traffic. You’re getting targeted traffic – the type of traffic that gets you conversions. They subscribe to your mailing list, comment on your posts, share them, and are overall engaged with your blog. Targeted traffic is the only traffic that will actually make you money.
Then, you’re also building your blog’s authority. Readers figure that if you were able to land a guest post on one of the popular pillow fighting blogs around, you sure must know pillow fighting inside out. They instantly brand you as a pillow fighting authority. Needless to say, this boosts the sales to your pillow fighting e-course like nobody’s business.
And don’t forget those high-quality, relevant backlinks to your site in that author bio. Not only do they serve to drive traffic, but they look pretty good to Google. Just one of those relevant backlinks on a high-traffic blog is worth much more than a few hundred spammy article directory links.
Lastly (and this is my favorite), you get to create a lasting relationship with a popular blogger. Associating your name with the biggest names in the industry does wonders to increase your popularity. What’s more, people put you on the same level as the industry experts. You know them, they know you – you’re officially an expert.
That popular blogger just might become a follower of your blog, and maybe even subscribe to your mailing list, share your posts to their tens of thousands of social media followers, and comment and interact with you on your blog.
Trust me – when that happens, everything starts to click.
Let’s Look At A Few Case Studies
Of course, generating traffic, building authority, creating backlinks, and making connections all sounds superb on paper, but you might be a little skeptical as to whether this actually works. To clear those doubts, let’s take a look at some examples of how guest posting has made it an impact in other bloggers’ traffic strategies.
Ryan Biddulph from Cash With A True Conscience recently documented the effect a guest post by him on ProBlogger had on his blog. The result? 14,000 page visits in just one day, plus a seven-fold increase in visitor-to-subscriber conversion rates. Remember how we talked about how building authority and reputation results skyrockets conversion rates?
Joseph Oni launched a 6-month guest blogging campaign and came pretty close to doubling his traffic in a few months (at this point, he was already at a thousand unique visitors a week at this point). The added SEO benefit from the high-quality, relevant backlinks also increased his organic (search engine) traffic by 342%.
Onibalusi Bamidele killed it with one guest post on Max Blog Press. He got 1,000 new visitors the very first day the post went live (before, he averaged 100 on a good day). But that’s not all – those visitors stuck around for 3 minutes 4 seconds per, had an incredibly low 40.74% bounce rate, and resulted in approximately 250 new subscribers to his list. Talk about targeted traffic.
Jon Cooper from Point Blank SEO submitted a post on his YouMoz blog (the community blog in Moz), which happened to be awesome enough to get promoted to the main blog (a rare occurrence). He got nearly 80 quality, relevant backlinks (the post was syndicated many times over), a 400 visitor spike in traffic the first day, and an extra 10-20 visitors per day for a few weeks after the post went live.
Don’t Just Sit There…
…and do nothing! Take action!
There’s traffic to be gotten. Subscribers to be subscribed. Conversions to be converted. There’s money to be banked – all with guest blogging.
Four benefits – traffic, authority, backlinks, and connections. Four case studies – lots of targeted traffic, hundreds of subscribers, lots of links, and dollar dollar bills y’all.
It’s time to take action and go out there, work up courage, and submit a pitch to a popular blog. Start with us.