When launching a new website or blog, getting traffic growth going is the hardest part. Going from 0 to 1, so to speak, is difficult. This is the subject of this article. How to go from 0 to 1,000 users a month on a new website or blog. Before we do that, let’s take a brief step back and talk about why we’re even approaching this subject on this site.
Why are we talking about getting traffic to a new website? Isn’t this site about finance? Yep. I’m a firm believer in building income streams, and I’m really dissatisfied with how this topic is covered on most sites that attempt to talk about things such as “how to make money online” or “how to start a blog” or “how to make money online.” The reasoning behind the advice is sound. It’s true that building up a niche following online can be very profitable and a really nice boost to income. Even a simple website generating $1,000/month can be a really nice financial boost for a lot of people. That $1,000/month can pay for your kids college, or fund you and your spouses’ IRAs. So, from time to time, we’re going to talk about this, and we’re going to aim to provide some real actionable advice.
Why most advice on how to build initial web traffic sucks
If you read an article on how to get to 1,000 users of traffic on a website, you’re going to undoubtedly read something like the following: launch your site, write every day, comment on other articles and be active in related forums. Unfortunately, this is horrible advice. It might work, but in the vast majority of cases, it’s not going to work. Plus it’s just generic advice that doesn’t really provide much value. Instead, I’m going to share exactly what I did to get to 1,000 monthly users on this site.
This site is relatively new and just hit 1,000 monthly users. Let’s look at exactly what I did to achieve that.
How I went from 0 to 1,000 users on this website
I’m not going to get into starting a website, setting up WordPress and all that. You can find tutorials on that elsewhere. This assumes you’ve setup a website.
Here’s my overall timeline for going from 0 to 1,000 users:
- Launched the site in December 2018.
- Between December 2018 and June 2019, the goal was to produce as many in-depth articles targeting specific SEO keywords as possible to jumpstart organic search traffic.
- Between June 2019 and October 2019, I was busy with my main businesses, so I literally did nothing for the site.
- Traffic grew from 0 users in late 2018 to 284 in June 2019, to 496 in July 2019, to 887 in August 2019, to 1,000 in September 2019. This is steady growth that has nothing to do with a random spike in traffic, which is important because we’re building sustainable traffic. Ignore traffic spikes, you can’t build a business around them.
So, let’s look at some takeaways and other details about this timeline, then we’ll get into the details of the content production that is key to this strategy.
When launching the site, you’ll want to make sure you setup Google Analytics, get your site into Google Webmaster tools, and make sure you have a sitemap indexed in your Google Webmaster account for the site. This just ensures that when you’re creating content, you’re making sure Google indexes it appropriately. This is mostly important in the early stages of building the site.
As stated above, I didn’t even work on this site for 4-5 months in 2019 because I was busy with other projects. But the traffic kept growing as the previously written content continued to rise in various Google rankings and drive more and more traffic. This is a good sign and is key to this strategy. The reality is that building a site around organic search traffic is a strong strategy because it’s cumulative and resilient. It’s cumulative in the sense that you can keep building traffic on top of traffic, and it’s resilient in the sense that it’s pretty consistent and reliable on a month-to-month basis (your organic search traffic under normal circumstances won’t disappear overnight). Now, you’re still relying on a third party (Google) for your traffic, so any long-term strategy should attempt to build your own direct relationship with users and traffic over time.
So, let’s get into content production. Did I just write about anything during that content production phase between December 2018 and June 2019? Absolutely not. Writing just for the sake of writing is a terrible strategy for building initial traffic for a website. Instead, almost all of the articles were built around the SEO technique of writing a single, long-form and in-depth piece focused on a single keyword. I used various SEO tools to find keywords that had decent levels of search volume and relatively low difficulty scores with respect to rising in the rankings for that keyword. Then I wrote a long piece on that subject. By long, I mean anywhere from 2,500 to 4,500 words and ideally on the longer end of that spectrum.
This strategy works. I haven’t hit any home runs in the sense of getting to no. 1 in Google for a huge keyword yet, but just the steady climb into page 1 for some various keywords has helped get more and more traffic going on this site. Now imagine scaling this effort up more and more. What’s possible? I’m glad you asked…
Future goals
So we crossed the 1,000 users/month threshold. The next milestones that I’m shooting for are as follows:
- 100 users a day (or roughly 3,000 users per month)
- 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
You can build a nice business around that kind of traffic. It’s late in 2019, and I’ve already passed the goal for monthly traffic for 2019, though I’m far behind the content goals I had. My goal was to get to around 100 published articles by end of year, and right now I’m only at about 40. So, I’ll adjust that and try to get to 50 by end of year. That will require 10 more pieces or so in the next 10 weeks. That’s do-able.
We’ll do another check-in when this website hits the next milestone (or maybe if something else notable occurs).