As we’ve documented previously, getting your initial traffic going on a new website or blog is the toughest part. Most people struggle to get any real traction in increasing traffic. Following up on our previous post in which we discussed how to go from 0 to 1,000 users a month on your blog, we’re going to discuss how to get to 100 users a day (roughly 3,000 users per month). 100 users per day is the next milestone I outlined in the plan for this site, so let’s discuss it further.
First, let’s reiterate that the reason we’re talking about this is because I’m a firm believer in building income streams and a website with automatic traffic can be a great tool for building another income stream. While there are tons of garbage guides online teaching you things like “how to make money online” or “how to make money blogging,” the goal here is to provide a real, transparent look into building website traffic and a blog-based business from scratch. Heck, if you can get a website generating even $1,000 per month with only a few hours of work going into it on a regular basis, who would say no to that? Ok, with that said, let’s continue.
How I went from 0 to 100 users a day on this website
Of course there are some mechanic stuff you need to sort out like actually starting a website, setting up wordpress, a domain, etc. That isn’t covered here (you can find plenty of information on this all over the web). Let’s look at the timeline of how we went from 0 to 100 users a day on this website:
- December 2018: Website launched
- Between December 2018 and June 2019, I published about 35 articles with the goal of targeting specific SEO keywords. I did not just write random blog posts. The goal for each piece is to rank well in search engines and drive traffic. Some worked well, some didn’t. As of June 2019, I was doing about 284 users per month or maybe just under 10 per day.
- Between June 2019 and October 2019, very little new content was done as I was busy with a different business. Interestingly, the traffic grew during this time (SEO work takes time to kick in). Traffic hit the 1,000 users per month mark in September of 2019.
- Between October 2019 and May 2020, I’ve published about 30 articles or so and traffic has continued to grow. In March 2020, I hit over 3400 users per month which eclipsed the 100 users a day mark for the first time. Most importantly, this has been steady increases based on organic search traffic rather than random referral spikes or other non-sustainable methods for getting traffic.
So there’s the timeline. This can give you some indication of how long it might take to get a certain level of web traffic, although it’s definitely possible to go quicker as I only allocate random, extra time towards this site (this is not my main business).
When building the website, you’ll want to make sure you have things such as Google Analytics setup as well as setting up Google Webmaster Tools (now called Google Search Console). Monitoring the penetration into Google search results for various keywords you’re targeting is important. These are early setup things you’ll want to make sure you do when launching a site.
I’m almost entirely focused here on building the traffic around organic search traffic. The reason is that organic search traffic is cumulative (it builds upon itself over time) and is quite resilient (though you do hear stories of google algorithm tweaks wiping out website traffic from time to time).
One thing I did differently so far in 2020 compared to 2019 is I paid a contract writer for a handful of articles. I’ve found that getting anything decent is not cheap… at least $100 per article. And even a $100 article is often just so-so especially when you’re writing about complex subjects. While the site is now generating a little income, around $75 per month via Google Adsense, I can funnel this money back into content production. Ideally, the revenue increases and I can self fund maybe $400-500 in content production each month and keep this flywheel going.
Future goals
As we stated during our last update, here are the goals we have outlined:
1,000 users per monthAccomplished as of September 2019100 users a day (or roughly 3,000 users per month)Accomplished as of March 2020- 500 users a day (or roughly 15,000 users per month)
- 1,000 users a day (or roughly 30,000 users per month)
- 100,000 users a month
Getting to 100,000 users a month can lead to a decent business. Based on simple advertising metrics, it could likely be at least $2500 per month in revenue. But this is kind of the floor in terms of the potential of the business. Converting this audience into a more engaged audience that buys various products can lead to much, much more revenue. It’s too early to get into details of that, but that’s certainly something that will be addressed once the audience size is larger.
We’ll do another check-in when this website hits the next goal as outlined above.