Everyone wants 1,000s pageviews per day on their blog, and only a handful will ever reach that goal.
Frustration mounts when a goal seem unattainable. This is why content marketing leaves so many people feeling inadequate. You focus on the goal. You want to find a clear path to gaining an edge. You aspire to greatness but don’t see it yet.
When you execute a content marketing strategy, you are on the right track. You have to be active. You have to adapt. This requires reading and learning to conquer the content marketing beast.
First, let’s look at the most important task in content marketing that you have to do regularly. You have to nail it on the head for every one of these tasks to aspire for 1,000 pageviews daily.
Content Marketing Basics Needed for 1,000 Pageviews
- Blogging Often: At least two or three times weekly. Use these tips and tricks to write great blogs faster. Blogging often brings your audience a level of consistency. This consistency is what builds a trust in your website. Trust is the new currency of the internet.
- Guest Blogging Monthly: An outstanding post that covers a topic in-depth will help get you featured on other high traffic resources. Find blogs in your niche and contact them. Submit a post and talk them. Show them you know their audience as you cater to the same audience on your site. You don’t have to be promotional in your material. Just provide solid information.
- Building a Social Following: Make use of tools and data to find influencers that focus on your niche so you can engage with them and gain followers. Finding the right person often leads to a strong partnership. You can help this effort by staying consistent and focusing on one or two people and building a real relationship with them. Look for a long-term plan of growth versus a short-term growth outlook.
- Utilizing Copywriting Techniques: Find ways to write better content with wording, phrases, and tested swipe files. Other writers have blazed a path already. Learn to utilize their recipes for success. Gaining interest and attention from your audience is 90% of earning that first click to your website. Focus on headlines and scannable points.
- Have Great Sales Funnels with Captivating Lead Captures: Lead magnets that evoke emotion are the beginning of your conversion optimized funnel. Your audience must trust you enough to enter their email address. Then you must provide credible offers that lead them to a purchase point. The decision to buy or not will now depend on how well you do leading to that point.
- Master the Use of Images: Utilizing graphs, charts, infographics, and witty quotes to engage your audience is a must. Visual content is expected and is often as easy as taking content you built and formed it into illustrative points. Take the bullet points and make a Slideshare or infographic.
- Long Articles that Cover Subjects in Depth: Sometimes 4,000 words with pictures and a complete walk through on a subject is what is needed. Don’t just make long content for the purpose of having long content. Make sure your content covers a subject in-depth and helps the audience find their way to the answer.
- Use a Headline Analyzer (like CoScheduler’s) with High Scores: Tools and Swipe Files to use every ounce of power in those 72-80 characters. Titles and headlines are one of the biggest factors to gaining a first-time reader. Once they are at your site you can then begin building trust. First, you have to get them to your post. That is why your headlines are so important. That is their first impression of you. You wear nice clothes for a reason. First impressions matter.
- Quality and Quantity of Post Build-Up: Quantity of content gets you nowhere without quality content. One quality post or page is not going to push you to a consistent 1,000 page views. You will need in-depth content and plenty of it. If you are just starting, then you may want to focus on each post getting a certain number of views daily. Then, figure out how many posts you need if every post gets the same number of daily views.
These nine items are the basics. You will need to master these basics at a moderate to expert level, then you can start looking for 1,000 page views.
As you can see, there are a number of important tasks you have to do well. Let’s break down some other major reasons sites often do not get to 1,000 pageviews.
What is Holding You Back From Reaching 1,000 Pageviews?
First, Look at the Possibility of Hitting Your Goal
Looking at the stats on World O Meters, over 2 million blogs have been written today alone. On WordPress, more than 540 million pages are viewed daily – and that is just on their sites. Not everyone’s blog will reach the 1,000 pageviews per day mark.
That is not because they are not capable or that their niche is too small. It only means they are going to quit before reaching this pinnacle of success.
This is because they are not willing to put in the time and attention needed to reach that goal.
Critical Website Optimization Oversights That are Holding You Back From 1,000 Pageviews
Focus on Your Audience and Understand Their Pain Points
Focus on gaining a personal relationship by understanding their feelings, wants, and needs. You can speak directly to your audience’s pain once you resonate with their emotions. Your audience is human. Do not forget that and fall victim to treating them like nothing more than email addresses.
Look for ways to helping your audience understand your content by breaking it down into simpler chunks of information. Find questions that interest your audience and make them want to engage your site. Questions are great icebreakers for comments and interaction.
You need to understand their aspirations and look for ways to become influential to them. Try helping them stay motivated or cast vision for them around your focus areas.
When Selling a Product, Consider if it is a Luxury or a Pain Killer
Painkillers are sought after. You will need to uncover a way to make it a pain killer in their mind if it is a luxury.
How can you craft your information to make it a pain killer?
Meet your customers’ needs and go beyond. Set and meet expectations by allowing them to ask questions. Learn to survey with questions. Find out how engaged your audience is at each stage of the sales process. Find ways to engage your customer beyond the point of sale. Find ways to interact with them during the nurturing campaign that happens on lost deals as well.
When you interact with your audience at this level, you begin to uncover the motives and language they are using. This is when you can start to speak to them at a deeper level. A level where you can uncover their pains. Then you craft your product to evoke emotion around the pain they are facing.
This pain is the solution for you. You solve problems. Showcase those problems as huge painful experiences. Then show the problem solved because of your product or service. Craft all of that around testimonials.
Find Mentors and Engage Them
It is more important to have accountability when you are working alone and have someone who pushes you to your highest level of accomplishment. Find who will do that for you and form an alliance. If you don’t have a person in mind, then join a marketing or website group and find others who are having the same struggles.
The website I Will Teach You To Be Rich covers a lot of the above. It is a great resource to look at for inspirational purposes as well as accountability. When feeling uninspired go and read some of the websites great posts such as my 3 favorite anti-laziness tactics. This can alone tackle your pain points and mentor struggles. Having a resource that you turn to for guidance is invaluable.
Outreach and Distribution of Every Post You Make is Crucial to Success
You need to reach out to other websites and showcase your knowledge to their readers. When you guest blog or let others guest blog on your site you gain readers, attention, and links for search engine optimization. You will need to write more to accomplish this.
The hard work of outreach is well worth it. Knowing your demographic and what they are reading is going to help you succeed. Creation of content is 30% of your job as a website owner.
Understand your time management to accomplish that ratio. Promotion and distribution of that content is 60% of your job. That means if you only work ten hours a week on your site then it will be difficult to see results. Try outsourcing, but only after you have a dialed in structure with reporting on results.
Focus on contact and writing great posts for your audience. This will make reaching out easier when you have an article to pitch in the initial email.
Are You Approaching the Mood or Nuance Wrong With Your Audience?
Find the right voice and your blog will explode as long as you have the traffic. Gain traffic from outreach and distribution. Gain engagement from personality and mood enhancements. Try metaphors. Look at other blogs and social media in your space and mimic what you see working. Finding the right voice and personality may be holding you back so look for writers and coaches who can help.
Your audience is reading your website. They want to not only learn the information but more importantly, they want to have an emotional connection while reading it.
Not being personable enough? Personality is more important than facts. You must be engaging. Do not leave honesty behind but focus on engagement through personality.
Need a Spike in Attention?
Try being a little bit controversial. Controversy will give people a reason to read. This is a great way to get someone to visit your site for the first time.
You have seen the articles that have that catchy controversial headline. That is gaining a reader for that post. That is important especially in an over saturated space online. Find your voice and own it. Don’t be afraid to mix it up.
Don’t Promote in Your Writing – Promotional Material is a Major Turn Off
Promoters get paid to get someone to an event. They are not the feature of the event. Your post is the event. Educate and support your audience. Education can start at any point in the customer life cycle. Remember from the first nine content marketing basics above that you need a persona you can visualize. Pinpoint the placement in the life cycle of your audience that your content is for. This will help you stay focused on who you are writing for.
Do not sell in your content as this is another form of promotion. Landing pages are different, but the reader had to click to get there. That is the major point. They chose to learn more when they clicked on the link.
Find a Great Forum. Get Active.
Great forums are still around. This is a safe place for people to find you mentioning your post. Loyal customers can see your response to a question and they gain trust. Traffic results when you reference your post where you just covered the answer to the question given. You can use boardreader to find the perfect few forums to take part in. Schedule time where you go into the forum and contribute as well as comment.
Don’t think promotion. Again, your job is to have the answer and let them find it.
Take part on forums daily if you see results. If you are in a forum and active daily then you will become a “regular” and become accepted faster. Look for details on what others are asking. While you are in the forum you will notice questions from people who should read your site. Take note. Act as if that question is a keyword and go after it. Write posts that answer questions in detail. Find logical threads of conversations and put them together as a resource.
The goal in forum diving is to focus on the audience and find out what are they thinking. Read to back to earlier questions, this will help you gain perspective for that buying persona we spoke about earlier.
Understand Your Audience’s Pain Points
Do you see others who are able to adapt and gain perspective so much easier than you? That is because they have walked in their audiences shoes enough to empathize. Learn how to do that. People love to talk about themselves. You need to make sure you are listening. Forums, again, are a great place to hear from your target audience. Just make sure you aren’t too busy promoting your post to listen.
While you are on the forum, you will be able to practice your writing style and meet some incredible people. And remember – always answer the pain first.
When you identify a new pain point then add it to a silo or segment it into a new one. Segmentation is a must. Segment each pain point into a new spot in the life cycle of your buyer persona. Find emotional words that the audience uses about the pain. While you are reading your audiences’ posts, you will start to notice words they use. Those are emotions. Use them to convey your message better.
Social Media Focus is a Must
You have to connect with your users on a personal level. Take the pain points you discovered and begin to implement them in your social media campaign. Select the right social media for your brand, audience, and promotions. Learn to own this social media surrounding the pain points that customers experience. Use that one network and become a rock star. Which platform you choose will depend on your audience and their demographics. Find out what site your current customers log into the most and live there with them.
Don’t forget about video. YouTube has an internal search engine that can help you gain traffic and exposure as well. YouTube Creator Studio has awesome educational videos. The search engine is not the same as Google, so do keyword research here as well.
Optimize Using SEO Silos on Your Website
Silos are called content hubs by some. Think of these as major categories that do not inner link with one another. This method is to help computers understand what your content is about. Silos are majorly effective and help smaller sites outrank much larger websites with fewer backlinks.
Look for major categories that you can own. Get the technical silo portion set up correctly. The non-technical reasoning behind the silo will help you understand your audience better. Optimize your silo around audience pain points and questions. Start with three major pain points and cover them thoroughly. Then build from there.
Structure your post to fit in the right silo. This is often harder than it sounds. Make sure you don’t mix questions and answers, instead, answer one question per post or your will lose your silo power. Have content on each silo for your audience. Don’t talk in generality. Learn to focus on one person that you are targeting and talking to. This will help you understand the emotions inside of the pain points.
Show Your Branding and Face
Don’t hide from your audience. Add your face on the top of every page and post. At minimum, create a staff page. Your audience wants to know the people behind the website. Your face earns trust and puts a person to the brand. Real people want to connect with real people, and your face helps them feel that they know you.
Does Your Website Offer Clear Solutions to Pain Points?
Look at the language you took notice of in the forums, and put it to use. Using similar language helps gain trust as much as helps in conversions. State question in plain view like in a menu, and put the top three questions you answer in the side menu.
This will provide your audience with and easy path to the answers they need. This is also why SEO silos are so important. Offer visual quick hints that you have the answer. People use slide share and other visual content platforms for this. Take each silo and a simple google slide template and build out the answers. Embed the slide shares as a post in your silo for that question.
Are the Right Articles, Post, and Lead Magnets Showing at the Right Time on Your Site?
This is part of the life cycle of your audience and customers. What shows above the fold? Make sure you can see a menu, a face, and a way to find out more about who makes the content. These items all gain trust when your audience lands on your site.
Colors matter, so make sure you reference a color chart. Have a great menu and place it in optimal places. Image use is also important. Your images often capture scanners and help turn them into readers.
Your site must load fast, and this isn’t just for search engines. People hate waiting. Make sure you size your images for your site and pages and make sure they show properly on each device.
Do your offers connect on the page they show on? Lead magnets work if they are pointed to the reader and their emotions.
Use Community Websites to Drive Targeted Engaging Traffic
1,000 pageviews depend on a steady dose of traffic. Read how Benji Hyam added a ton of traffic using community websites. Community websites help readers realize you put something new out. Treat community websites much like a forum and become very active. They are also great places to find and interact with other website owners in your niche. You can pick up guest blogging opportunities there as well.
Use Reddit daily and make an editorial calendar to release info at certain times. You want to post a link to your article at the height of high traffic for that subreddit. Play with the timing. Use LinkedIn and don’t spam. Making groups on Facebook and LinkedIn are perfect if you gain engagement. Don’t push or sell. Just answer questions to engage readers. Use Google Plus for engagement. This is just another version of the above two with some slight differences. Explore the differences and see if they fit better or worst for your audience.
Find others that match your audience and engage with them. Think of it as networking in real life. You don’t want fake profiles and sketchy looking artwork. You are the sum of your friends. Especially online. ~ Will Robins
You are the sum of your friends. Especially online. ~ Will Robins
Email Your Post to Others
Utilize finding other people to interact with online to grow your audience. Email out your post as part of a series to new subscribers. Make the sequence part of your offers. As you publish them, you should invite a list of website owners to interact. You should interact with their site as well to gain influence and influencers. But, be sure to be tactful when doing this.
Make a list of people and set your automation to invite them to comment and share. Adding website owners to your automation is tricky. You obviously can email those who subscribe. Utilize tools to find other websites that are in your niche. Then set up that list as a distribution list in your automation. Always send an informal email introducing yourself and the fact that you want to send them articles from your site first. This is so that they can unsubscribe. Send them once a month at most.
Now just form a few of those lists and you are off to the races. This is part of that 70% time management equation talked about earlier.
You will want to email anyone with the questions you answered so find them. Use Quora and other resources to identify places that you post your answer. These question and answer links add up over time. The traffic may be small but it is consistent. Remember those pain points? Find the questions about them for pure gold on Quora.
Are Ads Killing Your Engagement With Your Readers?
They don’t want to see ads everywhere especially if they are not in line with your content. Are you showing ads that don’t resonate with your target audience? This is often a result of trying to monetize your website and not finding specific advertisers to your audience. Adsense is great but not always the best. When your advertisements make sense to the website viewer, then they are awesome. When they feel more like pushy spam sites, then they are terrible.
Are you taking premium space to make money that should be used to enhance your site? This is often the case when placing large header ads that are not targeted. Great content can not fix a bad first impression.
Show off Any Wins, but Remain Tactful
You can brag but make it more about being humble than being a hero. Your humility will shine. Your ability to show off that you are trusted is great. Boasting about it can become a turn-off. Make sure you have social sharing widgets at the top of pages or in a floating bar. This proves you exist and shows others that have shared the article before.
Featured in is prominent on the pages but not huge and in the header. This showcases that you are trusted more than you are the hero of the day while maintaining humility.
Showcase the Major Problem You Solve
Have one link that captures the major mission statement of your existence online. Look at the earlier mention of Ramit Sethi from his website. He has the perfect balance. He displays a photo of himself along with trust validation points. Then he showcases the major differences and problems he helps solve.
Show your about me link in your profile especially on your website. People want to see you and that you are real. State your purpose (mission statement) and take time making it concise and clear. Showcase your link and then your mission statement. Do that in that order. The profile will gain more engagement that way.
You do the same without realizing it. You want to know who someone is first. Then you want to know what they do. Then if it relates to you and you trust them, you see what their site or link is about. Utilize that sequence to your advantage.
Look at Connection Tools to Help You Connect with Others in Your Space
There are a ton of content marketing tools. Find ones that match what you are trying to do and use them. Really use them. There are great tools for finding niche bloggers and guest post opportunities. You would be amazed at how few people offer to write for blogs that have powerful search engine metrics such as one of my websites, Feedster. There are a few request a month. Amazing that more do not take time to find the opportunities that are available.
Remember that timing is everything. Finding the right person at the right time is half of the battle.
There are also tools to help you grow your social media following and engagement. These are great if you first have amazing content and understand the pain points of your audience.
Check Your Link Profile. Diversity is Great, but Spam is Just Spam.
Your website may have more spam than you realize, so don’t disregard looking monthly at your backlinks. A few rules to follow are not to buy backlinks. Links should come from earned or natural links. [pullquote] If it cost five dollars to rank first on Google then we would all be there. Think about it. [/pullquote]
Do not use re-blogging tools or blog carnivals. These are often are built to sell new blogs on how easy guest post are going to be. They get overwhelmed with low-quality blogs. High-quality tactful content can gain links with ease if hard work is put in. Outreach and consistency are the keys to a great link profile.
Do Real Keyword Research
Don’t just assume you know the words your audience will use. Dig into every question and answer site and do your own keyword research. Find the questions asked and center around them as the keywords. Guest post will generate great backlinks if you focus on answering questions that are asked by the audience of that site.
Your audience’s pain points are closely related to their emotions, which can be fodder for great engagement. Utilize that on every site you post on and you will get invited back.
[pullquote]Pain points utilization is exactly how I was able to start writing for .[/pullquote]
Write Epic Long Content
Start with a question, such as how to get 1,000 pageviews daily. Then bullet point out content, and go in and inject humor and personality around your major points. This style of writing helps you write engaging content faster.
Long form content also ranks better in the search engines. Then, take that long piece of material and carve up portions to engage people on social media. Utilize it in your automation and emails. Reference it in another post.
You can gain more readers trust when you have a thorough site with long content surrounding their major pain points. That is what is needed to get to 1,000 page views.
Focus Most Importantly on Obtaining Assets
Assets are audience interactions such as a list sign ups. This is more important than new content. Don’t get into Napoleon Mode where you only want more and don’t humbly serve what you have.
Grow your audience reach and entertain them constantly. Focus on your relationships and nurture them with great content and personality. Make more of your best content and make more money by giving away more. The more you give your audience then the more you will receive.
Your audience will grow to appreciate you. Stay consistent and learn from each interaction.
Getting to 1,000 Pageviews is Tough Work, but Worth It
Getting to 1,000 pageviews a day is on nearly every website owner’s mind. It is a superficial mark that we all want so badly. It also gives us a boost in confidence to see the numbers, but it also means you have a thriving website. Just remember, your audience trusts you, so do not betray them when you monetize.
Bonus Tip: Outwork Your Competition. Work Harder and Smarter Than They Are Willing to Work.
What are some other tools, resources, tips, and tactics you have used to grow your site? Which of these tips are you doing great with already? Let me know in the comments.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Will Robins
In-post Photo #1: Gustavo Frazao/Shutterstock.com
In-post Photo #2: bogdanhoda/Shutterstock.com