3 Lazy Steps I took to Increase my Blog Traffic Over Night

Within the past fortnight or so, I’ve seen a massive increase in my blog traffic – in fact, it practically spiked over night. I’m actually pretty surprised how much of a difference a few small changes in my blogging routine has made, and I’m excited to share them with you in the hopes they help you too. If you’re trying and failing to grow your traffic at the moment, I know exactly how you feel. It’s exhausting to work on a blog and feel like it’s not going anywhere. I get it. Maybe I can help.

First of all, I just want to let you know that I’m not on massive amounts of traffic. I never have been. At the same time, though, I’m lazy and I don’t invest as much time as I should into my blog. I work on it about 8 hours a week, which really isn’t a lot compared to most bloggers. I have so many other things on my plate that blogging does have to take a back seat, and that combined with my lack of motivation definitely leads to a bit of a dodgy publishing schedule. However, the recent upturn in my traffic has inspired me to work a little bit harder at it, and I’m pleased to share with you how it’s been going and how I’ve managed it. If the story of me and my blog sounds a bit too familiar to you, then give these few steps a go to increase your traffic in the laziest way possible!

This post contains affiliate links, meaning that I will earn a small amount of profit if you choose to purchase something through my link. It will come at no extra cost to you, though, and means that I can continue to work on my blog.

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1. I Started to Properly Follow Advice

I will admit I’m a bit of a rule-bender, and I don’t like to do what I’m told. This is probably a huge detriment when it comes to blogging, because if people who are more experienced than you are offering advice then you should sure as hell follow it. For me, blogging was all about writing up a post on something I’m interested in, sharing a bit of wisdom along the way, posting it, promoting it, and going to bed. I wasn’t really so into the whole, you know, planning part.

I’m a member of Dare to Conquer, and I have been for months now. I’m ashamed to say, though, that I haven’t been using it to it’s full advantage. That site has tonnes and tonnes of information on it in the form of courses and tasks, as well as a whole community of other bloggers who will instantly help with any issue I encounter. Does that mean I properly utilise these resources? No. Of course I don’t, because I’m an unorganised and messy person who thinks “Oh my God, it’s a Sunday morning and I’m meant to have a blog post up in 4 hours and I don’t even know what to write about,”.

Recently, I’ve tried to put more time aside to actually plan what I’m going to do with my blog that week, and I’ve been slowly making my way through a couple of the DTC courses. I’m still not living through my blog, but I’m managing to focus on it a little bit more. Following the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) advice, the Skyscraper technique and the Pinterest Course I’ve managed to increase my blog’s traffic through both search engines and Pinterest.

I’m not going to try and push you to purchase DTC, because it’s a huge decision and it took me at least a couple of years to choose to do it myself. I would recommend that you sign up for Scrivs’ (the DTC owner) free 12 day Blogging Bootcamp, though, and join his email list, as he actually sends out lots of really useful information. I did want to publish this blog post this week, though, as DTC is down from it’s usual price of $1000 to $547, and when I purchased my membership it was also whilst it was at a reduced price. I feel like it’s important to let readers know about these things so that they don’t miss out on a deal or spend more money than they actually had to.

The advice I’ve followed recently is to actually look through Pinterest to see which pins and blog posts have received the most re-pins, and then write these down. I then do some keyword research on Ubersuggest and write down as many frequently searched keywords relating to that topic as I can. Only then do I actually get around to writing the post, which is basically a better version of what the original blogger wrote with my own personal spin on it. I think that this has really increased my traffic, as I followed this technique for my previous three posts, and they’ve seen more traffic in a week than older posts have seen in a few months.

2. I Re-Vamped my Pinterest Designs

This is a bit of a weird one, and it probably wouldn’t have made as much impact without the first step, but it’s definitely done something. I looked through other pins that I felt were a lot more professional looking than my own cutesy, thrown-together-last-minute designs, and took note of the font style they were using, as well as the colour scheme. Most bloggers use Canva to design their pins, so all of their resources are available to you too. You don’t want to straight up copy a pin design, obviously, but using it to inspire your own work is fine.

Here’s an example of an old pin of mine:

And here’s an example of a new one:

I basically stopped making pins that look like they’re for a blog I run as a hobby, and started designing them to look like actual editorial pieces in magazines. I made the font a lot clearer and more professional, the colours a lot less garish and childish, and let the photograph stand out a lot more. I still love and continue to re-pin my old pins, but these new ones are seeing much more interaction. Practically every day now I’m getting “Your Pin is a Hit!” emails from Pinterest, when two weeks ago I had never received one in my life. It just goes to show: people do judge books by their covers.

Side note: I kind of fell off the bandwagon with my Pinterest strategy, and my Monthly Unique Viewers significantly dropped. I’ve managed to get it back up again within the past month or so. If you’ve had the same problem, or you’ve set up a new Pinterest and are trying to grow it, then definitely check out my post about increasing your traffic with Pinterest.

3. I Became Properly Consistent with my Publishing Schedule

I’ve tried numerous times to set up a consistent publishing schedule, but each and every time they’ve just fallen through. Life gets in the way and before I know it, I have 10 minutes to get a post written to keep my blog relatively active. It’s not helpful to leave a blog lying dormant for any amount of time, especially as for SEO purposes it needs to have lots of information on it and be updated regularly.

I tend to write and publish on Sundays, and I’ve been managing to do it at 2pm most weeks. What I’ll do if I have plans the following weekend, is make sure to write something up in the week, no matter how small it is, and then schedule it to publish on Sunday. Whilst I normally make at least two pins (with my own pictures) to promote a new blog post, when I’m trying to make time for my blog during the week I might just throw together one random pin with a photograph from Unsplash. One such example of my doing this is my ‘23 Cruelty-Free Toothpaste Brands‘ post. This post is so simple, it’s literally just a list of links to different products, but it was still an amount of keywords and information being added to my blog. It was also a new pin that was about something relevant to my niche, and one that I knew saw a decent amount of re-pins and traffic for other bloggers. Not to mention, I don’t think I’ve come across a cruelty-free toothpaste list with that many brands on it on anyone else’s blog. The skyscraper technique was out in full force, folks.

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That’s it. Really. That’s all I did.

I’ve seen my traffic increase by about 300% from making these three small, easy changes, and hopefully you will, too. I’m going to post this on a Monday – off of the schedule I just preached about – because I know this is the week a couple of blogging courses open their doors, hence Scrivs has put DTC on sale. If you’re here reading this then chances are you’re wondering what you should invest in this week to start up a new blog, or maybe to bring life to your old one. Best of luck in your decision making, I hope it all works out great! As the featured image says: you’ve got this.

Thanks for reading,

Eve

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