How I Increased My Organic Traffic By 500% In 10 Months (And Doubled Them In A Year)

Blogging is one of the most powerful modern marketing medium out there. The only problem is — you cannot expect overnight success. Why? Because it’s a marathon and not just a sprint! So, always go term!

“I’ve worked in marketing since 1987 and nothing I have used, studied or witnessed, comes close to the marketing power of an effective blog. Period.” — Jim Connolly

When I compiled the blog marketing resources I mentioned that I do not have a blog promotion strategy. Still, I wanted to share my blogging strategy with you and realized that it’s better to publish  a new blog post.

So, that’s how I come up with this topic and it’s all about how I increased my organic traffic from 250 to 1,500 to 3,000 without spending a penny.

Don’t Miss: 7 Blogging Years. 7 Blogging Lessons. 7 Blogging Tips.

Here’s My Blogging Journey

When I first started blogging at Minterest, back in 2007, I didn’t have a content strategy and I chose random topics — like tech tips and news, affiliate reviews, marketing tips and news, how-to’s, etc.

So, obviously most of the blog posts were mediocre and literally the blog became “yet another WordPress blog”. But, the good thing was — it averaged around 250-300 organic visits a day with little or no effort at all until 2011.

Later in 2012, I decided to revamp the blog and started publishing in-depth content. So, I chose topics that are related, in one way or the other, backed by keyword research and competitor analysis.

Then, I noticed that the organic traffic began to increase at a much higher rate than ever before.

In just 10 months, I was able to increase the organic traffic from 250 to over 1500 a day without much off-page work.

The traffic, however, didn’t sustain as the blog was hit by an unknown Google Panda update, back in November 2012, and I almost lost 80% of the organic traffic. However, I didn’t care much and continued focusing on content creation itself.

So, over the 12 months, I published more in-depth blog posts and it was the time I came across this blog post by Google:

Low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

As part of a new content strategy (and also because of Google’s recommendation), I deleted almost 90% of the blog posts that I had published in 2007-2011.

The good thing — it didn’t affect the traffic in any way, as those blog posts were sending little or no traffic at all. I realized, those blog posts were the reason for the algorithmic penalty by Google.

Also, to be on the safer side, I moved my blog from minterest.com to minterest.org by using a 301 redirect. I had two reasons for doing so — First, the domain minterest.com was over 7 years old at that time. That’s a good thing, right?

Well, it’s true but the problem was… when I started Minterest, back in 2007, I also religiously followed the traditional SEO tactics, like directory submissions, as it was not considered spammy in any way at that time (but now it is!).

So, I assumed that the bad links could hurt someday unless I managed to disavow it. Since finding and disavowing toxic links (they were really old) take a lot of time, I decided to change my domain name.

Second, I thought I could use the .com domain for another purpose, someday. As I was changing the whole website architecture, I decided to change my design as well and switched to Genesis WordPress Framework by StudioPress.

Once again, I changed almost all the things “On-Page” and optimized everything as much as I could. The result? The organic traffic started picking up, and in just 6 months the blog traffic recovered 100% of the lost traffic and it hit the pre-Panda organic traffic levels of over 1,500 visits a day.

I didn’t stop.

Except that this time, instead of creating fresh content, I focused on improving the quality of existing blog posts plus other on-page factors like interlinking, page speed optimization, fixing broken links, duplicate content & overly optimized pages, sitemap optimization, etc.

As a result, I doubled the organic traffic once again in 10 months to over 3,000 visits a day.

Lesson Learned: There’s One Surefire Way To Double Your Traffic

This is my 230th blog post. So, can you guess what does it take to double the organic traffic from here on? That’s right! 230 more blog posts or even less. Or, the other definite way would be paid promotion.

Increasing the number of blog posts produced is one surefire way to increase the organic traffic of any blog. As you increase the number of blog posts, the number of keywords you are targeting also increases at a much higher rate, and it naturally attracts more organic traffic.

The number of blog posts required to double the traffic entirely depends upon your industry, topics, audience, current rankings, etc.

For instance, if you have a quality blog that’s already enjoying high ranking for competitive keywords, then increasing the total number of blog posts by just 50% could be enough to double the traffic and if you increased the total number of blog posts by 100% then it can triple, or even quadruple, the traffic (unless Google slaps your blog with a penalty ;)).

It works even better when you target long tail keywords. Such keywords are much easier to rank and usually attract better-quality traffic.

Don’t Miss: How To Write A Perfectly Optimized Blog Post

One thing that you should take care of is the quality of blog posts. When you increase the quantity of blog posts published per week/month, it shouldn’t affect the quality of your blog in any way.

When the quantity and quality of your blog posts go up, your organic traffic starts rising. You can also improve the whole website architecture by interlinking the existing blog posts in a way that enhances the user experience. Eventually, it should also boost the ranking of all your high-quality blog posts.

Bonus: 25 Random Facts About My Blogging Journey

As you might have already noticed, this blog post was not a tutorial or a list of surefire tips to increase your blog traffic. But, I believe that it gave you some insights into the importance of a content strategy and its potential.

Here is a list of some random facts about my blogging journey that I believe will offer supplemental information about my blogging strategy:

1. I never published a blog post just because I wanted to make my blog active.
2. In fact, I only have 229 blog posts as of today. It also means that I was not even able to average one blog post per week if I count the total number of blog posts from 2007.
3. But, I managed to average one blog post a week over the past 4 years as everything that was published before was deleted.
4. I never asked for a Retweet or a Facebook Like, even from friends or family.
5. I never reached out another blogger for a backlink.
6. In fact, as an introverted blogger I can’t remember the last time I pinged another blogger via email.
7. I haven’t started email marketing, yet. :(
8. I never accepted a guest post and I never will. But I might try reverse guest blogging someday.
9. I never guest blogged either.
10. Mine is still a single-authored blog as my attempts to find a perfect co-author failed couple of times. But now I’m happy about it.
11. I usually select a topic based on the recently published blog posts — to fill a content gap.
12. Or, it’s most likely based on the resources that I have collected in my Evernote.
13. When I select a topic or get a topic idea I usually start with Google Keyword Planner to make sure that there is demand for that topic (or for the targeted keyword).
14. It’s to make sure that the blog post is timeless and can consistently generate traffic over the next few months/years.
15. That’s the reason why I do not publish news posts or topics that will soon be outdated.
16. I also try to make sure that I can interlink all my blog posts in one way or the other.
17. I link a lot to other web pages from my blog posts and it actually increased the bounce rate of this blog quite significantly. It was under 70% back in 2009 and now it’s over 80%.
18. I tried Fiverr.com couple of times to outsource web 2.0 submission. Obviously, it didn’t work and I learned that we can’t expect quality SEO services for $5.
19. I used to accept paid links, back in 2007-08, when no-follow tags were unknown to me.
20. But, I never accepted paid links or paid posts ever since I changed my content strategy back in 2011-12.
21. I take at least 12-15 hours to complete a blog post (and sometimes longer than that) depending upon the topic and word count.
22. When I started blogging, I was curious about affiliate marketing and tried different strategies and techniques. I soon learned that a solid affiliate campaign can bring thousands of dollars in a few days.
23. There was a time when I tried daily blogging but realized it doesn’t matter.
24. I would say 365 blog posts or even less is all you need to become a super-blogger. Just make sure that they are all timeless and it will keep you busy all the time.
25. I believe in — Write Today; Monetize Tomorrow!

If you find that any of the above point lacks clarity or you need additional information about it, then let me know via a comment below and I will happy to help you.

Don’t Give Up. Ever. Happy Blogging! :)

Image Credit: Flickr