How to Get 250,000+ Visits (My Best Growth Hacks)

My first 3 years blogging were awful.

This was due to the fact that:

• I blogged inconsistently. 
• My articles were not amazing.
• My traffic was lackluster.
• No one knew me or my site. 
• And my sales and AdSense revenue were close to 0. 

But now on my 7th year blogging, everything has changed. 

• I now own 9 blogs that I update almost daily. 
• My articles rank on the first few spots for highly trafficked keywords.
• My traffic on alejandrorioja.com alone is close to ~250,000 per month. 
• My tactics and my story have been covered by Forbes, Mashable, Inc, and 100+ other blogs and news sites.
• And my ad revenue is picking up fast.

Today, I’ll share with you my best tips to increase your traffic so that you too can get thousands of readers and leads per month. 

I’ll also share the system I have to blog effortlessly every day. (hint: I will show you where to hire your next writer and Growth Project Manager)

This is a big post, I recommend you bookmark it.

Take your time reading it, and work through the several tactics over several days and weeks (and possibly quarters). 

Related: Are you an ecommerce business? Read how I made $1M+ in sales with Flux Chargers so you can do it too. 

Let’s get to it ?

I divided this guide into 3 main blocks:

1. SEO and Content Marketing (released now!)
2. Social Media Marketing (released now!)
3. SEM and Paid Marketing (I’ll release it if this post gets 50,000 reads or 1000 shares) 

Btw, I listed all the tactics by ease of implementation and highest payout, i.e. the best tactics that you should do first are listed at the top of each block. 

If you consider yourself an experienced marketer and want to find more advanced techniques lookout for the fire emoji ?on the tactics. 

Let’s first cover…

Why growth is key for your business 

With so many things to focus on when running a business (improving your product, doing customer support, hiring) sometimes increasing website traffic via SEO or SEM might not be top of mind for you. 

I’d like to argue that Growth should be very top of mind because it allows you to see the real demand for your product, test out ideas quickly, get more engaged users and increase your business revenue. 

While there are many areas of growth, in this guide I’ll mostly focus on getting more traffic. 

However, not all traffic is made equal…

You should focus on more QUALITY traffic

Yes, getting more traffic volume is useful but if that traffic isn’t converting (signing up for your product, purchasing your service, clicking on your affiliate links), it won’t do you much good. 

Even worse, if you buy traffic bots you are just doing yourself a disservice. 

Aside from having a lower Alexa rank, the true benefit of having higher quality traffic is getting more people that can help you test different experiments that will eventually lead you to more sign ups and conversions. 

Several A/B tests are made possible with high quality traffic:

• content/layout tests (button colors, shapes, page layout, no sidebar)
• Value proposition (which features to talk about first, what gets people excited)
• Pricing (i.e. charge $99/mo or go for freemium)

Now that we are clear that we want the cleanest traffic for our data dashboards, let’s explore how to increase those Google Analytics numbers:

Here’s a great video that shares a few of the tactics I discussed (keep reading to find many more)

You can’t improve what you can’t measure, so the first step is set up some if not all of the following tools so that you can have a baseline of your stats: 

Free tools you should set up to measure your analytics

• (Must have) Google Analytics to measure your site stats
• (Must have) Google Search Console to see your organic performance
• (optional) Google Data Studio or Big Query to run data analysis or create better dashboards
• (optional) Hotjar to see how people are interacting with your site
• (optional) Mixpanel to better visualize your funnels (there’s a free trial) 
• (optional) Buffer to measure how your socials are doing
• (optional) Optimizely to A/B test your site

Alright, now that you are all set up, let’s start with my favorite channel to get more website traffic..

A) How to use SEO to drive free traffic

SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is one of my favorite ways to increase site traffic. 

I like it a lot because anyone can get started on it by simply writing.

It doesn’t require any significant monetary investments like Google Ads other than your time, so a small blogger can start getting traffic even with a $0 budget. 

The best part about SEO is that, unlike SEM, it is sustainable and much more of a long-term play. 

With SEM (Search Engine Marketing) the moment you stop paying for ads, your traffic goes to 0. 

With SEO, you can reliably drive traffic every single month. 

It’s an effort that pays for much longer (assuming you keep your articles updated), 

Another great thing about SEO is that your efforts compound over time. 

Writing a few articles help you increase your domain authority and that in turn brings you more traffic. 

Also, a blog post you wrote last month can be driving 1000 visits, and this month’s blog post can drive another 500, helping you increase your monthly visitors very quickly. 

Ok, so now that I made a case for SEO…. 

Let’s explore the actual tactics to rank and get more traffic. 

1.  Target long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are keywords with decent traffic volume (say 1000+) and relatively low difficulty (KD <20). (what is keyword difficulty?)

If you are just getting started, you should target long tail keywords because your blog won’t have the necessary authority to compete with the established players. 

Also notice how the conversion rate is much higher for long-tail searches.

Now, let’s say you just started an e-commerce site selling merch, specifically T-shirts.

Instead of trying to rank for “T-shirts” which is a hard keyword..

…you can aim for “vintage T-shirts” which has a 12,000 search volume and a difficulty of 7. (Difficulty goes from 0-100).

You’ll be much more likely to rank and might even get better conversions.

Wondering where I got the keyword difficulty?

Don’t worry, later in this post I’ll show you how to do great keyword research for your business and find all the keyword metrics you need.   

?You can find long tail keywords using:

• Long Tail Pro
• Or any SEO tool I covered here

? Related: Curious about what the highest paying keywords in the world are? Check this list. 

2. Post the best content ever written on your target keyword(s)

I’m not talking about good, neither great, but THE BEST CONTENT ever written for any particular keyword you intend to rank. 

While it’s easier to push 500-1000 words of content, trust me going above and beyond with 2000-3000 word guides will really pay off. 

A study done by SerpIQ confirms this

That’s why you won’t find any article on my site that isn’t detailed and thorough. 

When you came to this article, you wanted to learn exactly how to grow your traffic. I plan to give you that and more. This 7500+ word guide is proof of that. 

? To write the best content ever written on any keyword:

1. Google search your target keyword
2. Read the top 5-10 articles that appear
3. Take note of the style of sites that appear on the first page (are they listicles, infographics, long articles or short sales pages?)
4. Summarize and transcribe the best tips of each into a new blog post on your site and make sure you go in-depth (make sure you copy the style of post from step #3)
5. Make the article better and longer by adding new information, including media such as images and links to Youtube videos (note that you don’t necessarily need to produce the YT videos yourself, you can link to others!) 

Keep in mind that you should also have a healthy keyword density. If you want to learn more about ideal keyword density check out WDF*IDF.

How to publish 50+ articles per month, instead of 1-2

?If you want to scale this process, hire writers on Freeeup and follow the guide my friend Nick Jordan wrote on turning any writer into an SEO writer effortlessly. 

Summarizing Nick’s article: He hires writers and instead of giving each writer specific guidelines for each article, he created a very straightforward checklist that ensures the best success. Here’s his formula for articles:

He requests each writer to get at least:

• 3 sets of bullets
• 3 lists
• 2 tables
• 8+ h2s
• 5+ internal links
• 5+ external links

This seems to be working really well. If you want to outsource your content to Nick’s content company, let me know and I’ll get you a friend’s discount. Note he works mostly with B2B companies.  

3. Improve your CTR (Click Through Rate)

As you can see here, my site gets over 85% of its traffic from Search Engines. 

And a lot of that comes from several experiments and learnings I’ve gotten from trying to optimize my CTR. 

Your CTR is directly influenced by your meta title and description. 

Here are some serious data-driven guidelines to improve your CTR (data from this study):

1. Include your keyword in the title and description (ideally towards the start). 
2. Add a meta description to increase CTR by 5.8%
3. Add a question to your meta title to increase CTR by 14% 
4. Add emotion to increase CTR by 7% 
5. Add other words, such as: “How to”, “Checklist”, “2020”, “complete”, “7 tips to..”
6. My favorite: add emojis! 
7. Keep your meta title between 15-40 characters to increase CTR by 8.6%. Note that Google only cares about pixel length and the max allowed length is 555 pixels (~60 chars). [Note than a “Q” takes more pixel space than an “i”]. You can test your pixel length here. 

? Here’s a step-by-step exercise to improve your CTR by modifying your meta titles and description:

• Search your keyword and see what titles people are using. Try to come up with a better title than them. For instance, if you see people writing “20 gifts for grandma”, try “25 gifts for grandma”
  
• When applicable, add the year or season to your post “25 gifts for grandma this christmas”
  
• Add emotion “25 christmas gifts for grandma that will melt her heart”
  
• Add emojis “?25 christmas gifts for grandma that will melt her heart ”
  
• Write a great meta description “Become your grandma’s favorite grandson by picking one of these adorable christmas gifts. Options for all budgets” 
  
• Booom!

Lastly, your slugs (i.e. /christmas-gifts on abc.com/christmas-gifts) should follow these guidelines:

• Make it short and use your keyword (abc.com/your-keyword)
• Use lowercase, even for acronyms (use /what-is-yolo and not /what-is-YOLO)
• Use dashes instead of underscores (use /simple-recipes and not /simple_recipes)
• Don’t use whitespaces (use /seo-guide and not /seo%20%guide)

? Another way to find really good meta titles is to look into the paid Adwords ads copy and find inspiration there. You can use Spyfu to look at what your competitors are using or just google your keyword and see the paid results. 

This works well because most of Google’s business is based on Ad revenue (like Facebook’s) and they optimize the ads they show based on relevancy and quality, and since they mostly make money from people clicking on ads, they will surely show the ads that have great clicks. 

? Also, as this study on Search Engine Land shows, you can also improve your CTR by 400%+ if you win the featured snippet. (more on that later)

??Need to improve your metas and CTR at scale? Use tools like Rankscience or DistilledODN to run A/B tests of your metas and measure your performance.

4. Don’t just blog about keywords. Blog about “topics”. 

Any good blog post will rank for multiple keywords. 

Usually those keywords will be clustered around a certain topic. 

What you don’t want to do is pick only one keyword and miss out on similar keywords. 

For instance, let’s say your kw research lead you to the following 5 keywords:

?{cutest dogs, most beautiful dogs, toys for dogs, small dog toys, best dog breeds} ?

While you could attempt to write 5 different posts to target each keyword separately you will be better off by writing 3 articles with the following keywords in them because the keywords are so similar

1. {cutest dogs, most beautiful dogs}  

2. {toys for dogs, small dog toys}

3. {best dog breeds}

This is called keyword clustering. 

In a nutshell, the pairing logic works as follows: 

If two or more keywords share similar URLs on their google searches (let’s say at least 3 sites on the first 10 results), we group those keywords and consider them “similar”. 

Once you find similar keywords, you can type them on Ahrefs and go to their parent topic. 

?Here’s a longer guide that explains how to cluster your keywords. 

Once you got a list of a bunch of keywords you are looking to target, you can also use a tool like SpySERP to cluster your topics. 

With a bunch of content clusters you can start planning your content roadmap and…

5. Do Content Layering (aka middle-of-the-funnel content)

Content layering is very simple yet very powerful. 

It involves creating content that generates links, ranks well and layers directly on top of your key product/service landing page. 

Let’s say you sell domain names and hosting. 

While your “Register A Domain” landing page might not be able to compete with the GoDaddys and Bluehosts of the world given their insane DA (Domain Authority) and Adwords budget, you can still make a huge revenue improvement if you create content one step above that page in the buying process. 

For instance, you can create articles such as “how to find the right domain name” or “how to buy a domain”, which will get you people who are very close to registering a domain.  

Then in that slightly-easier-to-rank-article, you can include links to your landing page, thereby driving significant highly targeted traffic. 

Content layering helps because:

• You rank for easier keywords with high intent, and potentially earn backlinks, thereby increasing your authority
• It builds brand awareness and might improve your CTR as people will recognize your articles/brand next time they do a search
• You can build your product into those pages, helping you close more business. (For instance in the case of Hostinger, they can add a domain name checker tool on that blog post)

This technique works great for new ecommerce businesses, SaaS solutions and anyone else selling products where people might have specific questions right before purchasing. 

6. Repurpose your content for Medium and Linkedin

This one is super easy and has a great effort/reward ratio. Can be outsourced easily. 

All there’s here is essentially mildly rewriting your post and publishing it to Medium and Linkedin. 

Given that those 2 sites have really strong Domain Authority it is not uncommon for me to see that some of my posts do better on the SERPs. (Search Engine Result Pages) 

For instance my blog post on getting verified on Facebook that I repurposed for Linkedin has close to 180k views. 

On both platforms, what you can do is share 50-70% of the tips of your original article and then invite the readers to continue reading on your site.  

You can add a sentence like “To read the last 3 tips, check the original article published on my site [link]” or “for the latest version of this article, check this link”.

Here are some pro tips for Medium

Use Medium’s import tool to import each blog post to Medium and automatically set the right canonical tag. 

The steps to import an article to Medium are

1. Click on your profile picture in the top-right corner of the page and click Stories.
2. Click Import a story.
3. Paste the URL of the story you’d like to import into the field and click Import.
4. Click See your story.
5. Edit your post and click Publish to publish it on your profile. (Note that some of the anchor links usually are broken so you will need to go back and fix them) 

You can also sign up for Medium’s Partner Program and earn some decent revenue from the reads on your article. 

Curious how I do it? Check our my SEO & Marketing publication on Medium.

Here are some pro tips for Linkedin articles

On Linkedin encourage people to connect with you and drop a comment/like at the end of your articles. 

The benefit of this is that every time someone engages with your article, their entire network sees it on their News Feed, bringing you amazing 2nd and 3rd degree views you couldn’t otherwise get. 

This is how I announced this post a few days ago…

This got me ~12k views instead of my average of ~300 views. (a 40x improvement)

Additionally, you can tweet your LInkedin article to @LinkedinEditors with a compelling description so that you get featured on Linkedin Pulse and potentially reach millions of views as your article will be promoted to a large audience. 

? Need other Linkedin content hacks? Check my Linkedin viral guide on Huffington Post and this guide to get featured on Linkedin Pulse.  

7. Lower your bounce rate and increase time-on-site using “Open Loops”

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that visit one page and leave your site, rather than continuing visiting other pages. 

Time on site essentially tracks how much time someone has spent browsing your website. 

These 2 metrics are important to Google because they indicate whether or not the content you produced is helping the users. 

Publishing insanely good content will make your bounce rate lower and your Google rankings higher. 

To lower your bounce rate, you can:

• Hook your readers from the beginning (“My first 3 years blogging were awful”)
• Make your site responsive and fast (more on that later)
• Have a great site design that invites people to click around more (you can buy a beautiful website theme on Envato)

To improve your time on site:

• Publish great relevant content
• Write longer articles
• Use Open Loops (read below)

Let’s talk about to Open Loops

I know you are wondering what Open Loops are, so let me explain.

Open Loops are things (ideas, stories) that are left incomplete that your brain is rushing to finish or close. 

Netflix does this really well by showing you a climactic moment right at the end of an episode so that you are hooked to watch the next. 

You can do the same on your site. 

For instance notice how on this post, I try to not only hook you from the beginning with a promise “I’ll share with you my best tips to increase your traffic so that you too can get thousands of readers and leads per month” but also throughout the post I have connectors between each tip such as “that leads me to my next point..” or “as you’ll see later…”

Something else to keep your visitors longer on your site is to actually write compelling, long form articles. 

• Here’s how to write the best 2000+ word post. 
• If you are new to writing, I recommend reading some of these books. (My favorite is the Boron Letters)

Last great hack I’ve been using is loading my next article when someone hits the end of a post. 

This infinite loading keeps people on my site longer and bouncing less (which gives great SEO signals to Google) and also makes it more likely that they will share my article or close as a lead.

You can use the autoload next post WP plugin for that. 

8. Offer your site in other languages 

I’ve translated some of my most popular posts to over 12 languages including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic. 

On any given month, my translated posts drive about 10-15k visitors to my site.

This is because it’s so much easier to rank in anything other than English given the lesser competition (do keep in mind that ad revenue might also be smaller in other languages). 

✋ Stop worrying about SEO and have me do it for you

PS: Ready to work with the 0.01% of all SEOs worldwide? Click here.

If you were to translate your site to the top 12 economic languages, you will be able to reach 90% of all internet users (or 1.3B people). 

I know you are curious to know which languages those are, so here you go.

The top 12 internet languages (alphabetically)

1. Arabic / العربية (ar)‎
2. Chinese / 中文 (zh_CN)‎
3. English / English (en_US)‎
4. French / Français (fr_CA)‎
5. German / Deutsch (de_DE)‎
6. Hindi / “हिन्दी (hi_IN)‎
7. Italian / Italiano (it_IT)‎
8. Japanese / 日本語 (ja_JP)‎
9. Korean / 한국어 (ko_KR)‎
10. Portuguese / Português (pt_BR)‎
11. Russian / Русский (ru_RU)‎
12. Spanish / Español (es_ES)‎

If you are implementing this, I recommend creating separate folders such as abc.com/es/ and making sure you learn about the correct hreflang implementation. 

If you are just a content/affiliate blogger like me and have limited budget, I suggest using Polylang and Lingotek to get free machine translations of your posts. They are not perfect but they work well. Lingotek offers a connection to Microsoft Azure translation API, which I like. 

If you are a bigger company, you’ll probably be better off hiring actual professional translators. 

9. Guest Blog in other highly trafficked sites to build backlinks and get referral traffic

Akin to getting a shoutout on a big Instagram account (like the one for my site Mentioned @futuresharksmedia), blogging on large sites will not only drive some decent traffic but will also earn you a quality backlink.

For instance an article I wrote on the Huffington Post: “How to Find Your Niche” is driving a few hundred referral visits each month to my blog. 

Don’t know where to start guesting? Try my list of best guest post sites. 

Want to learn about my system to build 100s of links of DR60+ in just weeks? DM me if your budget per link is $200+.

If you don’t want to write a new post, here’s a list of sites that allow you to republish your article

• Entrepreneur
• Huffington Post
• The Next Web
• Lifehacker
• The Verge

? Here’s how you can slide into the DMs of editors at Forbes, Mashable and pitch your blog post idea.  

10. Allow other people to guest post on your site

Want to know how I was able to grow one of my sites (Future Sharks) to 50k visitors per month in less than a year? 

It happened when I realized that I was the bottleneck to creating content. 

I then decided to allow people to contribute to my site, thereby making it a contributor site and now there are over 1000 articles published on the page. 

Related: Want to sign up to contribute to FS? Here’s the link. While at it, also sign up to contribute to SoInfluential and Authority Daily (or any of my other sites)

A few things you need to keep in mind if you are allowing people to contribute:

• Only allow topics related to your niche
• No one should be allowed to post any spammy links 
• You should try to link internally to other related posts 
• You should conduct a content audit every so often 
• The content should be at a minimum of 1000 words

The easiest way to get started is to add a link that says “Contribute here” on your site menu. Then have people email you or message you with their topic pitch. 

Another way is to selectively reply to the countless of emails you are probably already receiving from content agencies or white hat link builders and see if their quality is any good. 

The last one is to sign up for websites that allow you to offer (paid) guest posting on your site, such as

• My favorite → Rankz.io
• Accessily
• No BS 
• Adsy

This way you can also start monetizing your sites!

11. Steal the best content from your competitors

Go to Ahrefs and type a competitor in my case, let’s say Siege Media. 

Then you can go to their organic keywords. By default it will be sorted by traffic. Add those keywords to your list. (and run the keyword clustering idea from tip #4 above)

You can also go to their Top Pages and see which pages are generating the most traffic, then analyze the keywords to those pages. 

That’s just a teaser. Want to know more about finding keywords? Here’s the complete guide to keyword research. 

12. Steal your competitor’s traffic sources

You can use Similar Web to find out where your competitor is getting traffic from. 

For instance, I see that Backlinko (one of my competitors) is getting a ton of traffic from BlackHatWorld and Ahrefs. I can start publishing my articles on BHW and aim to do a collab post on the Ahrefs blog. 

Can’t think of a competitor? Go to the competing domains on the left hand side of Ahrefs and see the keywords unique to your competitors. 

13. Refresh and update your content regularly

Have a blog post that’s not doing well despite you having poured hours into it?

Maybe it’s time for a refresh. 

If you are a full-time blogger, you shouldn’t have any blog posts that you haven’t updated in the last 12-18 months. Given how fast things change, even something you wrote 6 months ago might need a refresh. 

I’m constantly going back and updating my best content every 3-6 months, adding new strategies, removing ones that no longer work and adding new info. 

For instance, one of my best posts is a script to invite all your friends to like your page on Facebook. 

Facebook is constantly changing its layout and functionality so I need to keep it up-to-date as much as possible. 

You can use Answer The Public (free) or Buzzsumo’s Question Analyzer (paid) to find [new] questions that people are asking about your keywords. 

For instance, when I was writing this post, I typed “increase web traffic” into Answer The Public and found some keywords that I hadn’t thought of such as “for free, bot, strategies, etc”. I decided to add a few of those into this post. 

Lastly you can add the Last Modified WordPress plugin to show your visitors when your post was last refreshed so they know they are reading an updated version. 

14. Build Backlinks and dominate organic search

Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. 

Google’s algorithm looks at over 200 factors to decide how to rank your site. 

Content is #1. Backlinks are #2. (Rankbrain is #3)

Backlinks are a vote of confidence of other sites to yours, and are a key ranking factor. 

Need a quick estimate of how many backlinks you need to rank in the top 10? Use the keyword search functionality on Ahrefs to find out. 

Once you know how many links you need, you can build backlinks by:

• Guest posting on other sites
• Making such an amazing or novel post that people naturally link to it
• Inter-linking your blog post with other posts you’ve written in the past
• Using LinkProspector (here’s also a guide on how to do Link Prospecting)
• Reaching out to whoever is linking to your competitors and asking for a guest post (Type your competitor’s url into Ahrefs and go to backlinks overview to see who is linking to them)
• Distributing your content through Rankz and using Authority Land to do it at scale.

Want to build an easy backlink? Comment on this post with your site and a friendly message 🙂

15. Don’t lose your visitors due to technical difficulties

This includes making sure your site loads fast. 

Here are a few things you can do:

• Use a CDN (content delivery network). I like Cloudflare.
• Use browser caching. For WordPress, I like WP Fastest cache. 
• Minify your CSS/JS (use this tool)
• Implement AMP (you can use the official AMP Plugin)
• Make sure your site is mobile-first
• Make sure Google is crawling your site correctly (check for any errors on Search Console)
• Implement HTTPS (SSL). You can do it for free using Let’s Encrypt (not compatible with Godaddy)
• Optimize your images before uploading them to your site using ImageOptim. 

?Don’t have time to speed up your site or are not technically-savvy? Go on Fiverr and search for “website speed” or “wordpress speed” and hire someone. You can use this link to get 20% off. 

Are you already getting 10,000 views and showing ads? Sign up for Ezoic and not only increase your ad revenue but also speed up your site with their Site Accelerator. 

Want to find out if Google is indexing your non-https urls?

You can search site:example.com -inurl:https and find out if Google’s index is showing them. You can then remove those pages or enforce https on them. 

Want to find other technical issues? Use Screaming Frog. Here’s a great tutorial on how to use that tool. 

16. Make different types of content

Don’t just stick to plain old blog posts. 

Try infographics which will earn you shares, videos, ebooks and more. 

Credit: Siege.

SEO section wrap-up

SEO is a great way to drive traffic to your site.

Despite what you might have been led to believe, SEO is pretty straightforward.

You just need great content and backlinks.

If you have no budget for ads, get writing blog posts.

If you want to learn more about SEO, read these guides:

• What is SEO
• How to do SEO for beginners (highly recommended)
• ? SEO for PROs (highly recommended)
• How to do On-Page SEO
• How to do Off-Page SEO 

Now, let’s jump to the social media hacks below to see how status updates can help you drive traffic. 

B) Social Media Marketing Techniques to Increase Your Traffic 

Big shocker here but yes, you need to promote your site and articles on all the platforms. 

For higher engagement with your posts, make sure your update is not just the article link but a few teasers of what people can expect in the post, so that they click. 

For instance, I teased this post by making it password protected and got over 5k views on my status (compared to an average of 300 views).  

17. How to automate your social media posts

Need to do everything at scale? Use IFTTT or Zapier to automatically post to your social accounts whenever you publish a new post. 

You can also hire a VA on Freeeup or use tools like SproutSocial, Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule your content sharing. 

Lastly, if you don’t have much content to promote but still want to have a robust content calendar, you can sign up for Quuu and have curated articles shared with your network. 

Remember to always include a small ask at the end of your status post such as “like it if you found Y technique useful” or “share this with a friend that could benefit from X tip” or “comment which recipe you will be cooking this weekend”

Also add social sharing buttons to your blog. They will make people share your content much more often. 

Btw, while we are here… mind sharing this post? It would mean a lot to me if you did. Tag me so I get happy 🙂 

Post at the best times to get more social engagement

Here are some general guidelines as to when to post on each platform.

Oh, and by the way, feel free to share your article more than once. 

There’s a high chance most of your followers didn’t click on it or see it the first time you shared it.  

If you use SproutSocial, they have this feature called ViralPost that will attempt to post at the times that they have determined will get you the most engagement. 

Alright, time for the growth hacks on each platform…

18. Linkedin growth hacks to increase traffic

For the best exposure, make sure you connect with as many people in your niche as possible prior to promoting your articles. 

Also if you only publish high quality statuses people will start noticing, so don’t let your quality standards drop. For instance, my friend, Hamza Khawaja, has created a brand for himself of being the go-to person for college students seeking internship tips on Linkedin. 

Here are the guidelines for the best reach on a Linkedin post:

• Share 1-2 tips from your article and leave a few tips out that require people to go to your page. 
• Space your status one line at the time so that people scroll and spend more time reading it. 
• For the best reach, do not include the link in your post but rather include in it the first comment. 
• Ask people to comment something or tag a friend that can benefit from your post. Even better, ask them to use a particular hashtag like “#traffic” so that you start trending. This helps growth hack your exposure as every time someone comments on your post, that post gets promoted to their followers. 

Want to connect with me? Send me a connection request and tell me you found me on this article!

19. Instagram growth hacks

If you have more than 10k followers, do a swipe up story where you tease your article and encourage people to read more. 

Instagram pods are key here. A pod is essentially a group chat where everyone agrees to like, comment, share each others posts as soon as they are live. Many people build them on Telegram. 

The easiest way to get started is to get a handful of friends and create your own pod. 

Ideally everyone in the pod has a similar amount of followers so that no one feels like their are getting a bad deal. 

If your engagement is high in the first few minutes, Instagram might promote you to the Explore page where you will reach people who don’t already follow you. 

A study done by Agora Pulse on IG hashtags, showed that you should use all 30 hashtags if you want to increase your engagement. And yeah, you should put them in the post, rather than the first comment. 

Btw, you can automate your IG and Pinterest growth with a bot called Jarvee. 

Pro tip: Learn how to get verified on IG and verified on FB to increase the reach of your posts and legitimacy.  

20. Drive traffic through Pinterest pins

I grew one of my clients’ Pinterest to over 12k monthly viewers, all automated. 

I used Jarvee for this. 

I found some related boards and re-pinned their most pinned content. Since the content was already validated (people liked it), I knew my boards will also be enjoyed by other users. 

You can add your url to say 15% of all pins driving more traffic to your page for free. 

Pro tip: Here’s a script to get more followers on Pinterest. 

If you don’t want to use a bot, you can find services on Fiverr that will grow your Pinterest up to a 1M monthly views, just search for “pinterest”. 

21. Good ol’ Facebook posting for website traffic

Facebook pages are no longer that useful given the terrible organic reach. (I’ll cover FB paid strategies further down)

2 things I see working well these days are:

• Having a public personal profile (here’s mine) and befriending people in your niche who will enjoy your content
• Having a private group that people need to request to Join (e.g. Stacking Growth) where you only admit people who are interested in your content. 

In both of those cases, you want to curate an audience of readers and potential buyers that will engage with your posts. 

22. Don’t forget about Reddit / Steemit

You can also post on relevant subreddits or Steemit to get your post some serious new traffic. 

To find relevant subreddits, just head to Reddit.com and type a keyword such as “vegan”. You can then see different communities. 

Join a few, build up good karma by commenting without a link. 

Later, then post an original guide on reddit for instance “how to make jackfruit tacos” and then at the bottom link to your jackfruit article. 

Don’t have time to build up all that Karma? Hire someone on Fiverr with high karma to post for you for $5. 

You can use the plugin Steempress to automatically post to Steemit. 

23. Leverage Snapchat/Tiktok if you are trying to reach a younger audience

Learn how I got thousands of followers on Snap and do the same for your business. 

I don’t know much about TikTok other than the fact that’s blowing up. You should aim to be there now and establish your influence. 

You can copy some of the best vines or Tik Tok’s most viewed videos, remix them, add your own personal touch, and post them.

24. Use a “sharewall”

I totally just made up this word but it’s essentially a paywall that requires someone to share your post to access the content. 

You can lock certain parts of your blog post and only allow people to read them if they share your post. Here are a few plugins you can use to lock your content. 

You can put an ebook behind this “sharewall” or a very valuable tip.  

Warning: don’t lock up too much of your content or you will start missing out on your SEO optimization. 

Click to Tweet

People are lazy and don’t want to spend time thinking which one-liner from your post will make them sound smart on Twitter. 

Do the work for them and have a few key tips ready to be tweeted with a click. 

You can do this using ClickToTweet.com. 

25. Use QuuuPromote to blow your social shares out of the water ?

QuuuPromote shows your content to people who are looking to share curated articles to their network. 

If you start a promo, your article will be circulated around various people who are looking to share articles on their selected niches. 

In my opinion, it’s worth trying a test out for $40 and see how the shares improve. 

In a few days, I’ve gotten 50-150 shares. Not too shabby, although the click rate is quite low.

(I can only hope those are real accounts)

D) Other Growth Channels

If you are a brick and mortar store or provide local services, use Google My Business

Here you can sign up for Google My Business. 

The pro tip here is to have an Offer running at all times. Businesses with offers get more views and the “offers appear near the top of the Business Profile on Google Search and Maps.” 

For example a dating coach in Austin could list him or herself on Google My Business and set the service area to +20 miles. 

People who are located in ATX and are searching for “dating coach” will likely come across this coach and visit his or her website. 

The offer should be compelling enough for people to then close. An applicable offer here could be “free 15 min phone consultation” or “free date outfit audit”. Think of something that will make your prospects be interested in your business over the rest. 

You should also aim to have as close to 5 stars as possible. 

Also use Yelp to drive traffic

Similarly to your Google business page, you should aim to have your profile as complete as possible. 

In certain niches, running promotions on Yelp tend to pay off. Some good ones are lawyers, tax attorneys, dentists, and others. 

How to get more 5-stars on Yelp, Google and Trustpilot:

• If you are a restaurant, offer a free dessert or boba for any review (while you shouldn’t directly ask for 5 stars, people will tend to review you highly anyway)
• You can also email previous customers and ask for a review
• Include links to review your business on your website and social posts

Use Quora to drive super qualified leads

If you are an SEO tool, you should be answering Quora questions such as “What are the best SEO tools out there?”

On top of answering and building your personal brand, you will also earn great referral traffic. 

Pro tip: You can even find super easy keywords to rank by using Ahrefs to find all the keywords that quora.com is ranking for. 

Then you can find some of the juiciest keywords you could ever dream of. 

Since Quora isn’t a targeted site, you will likely outrank it with your niche site. 

Hijack the news and be the first to cover a topic

This is a great strategy Everipedia used. During their first years, they aimed to write articles faster than Wikipedia or any other news site when a major event or personality emerged. 

You can also use Google trends to find some interesting breakout stories.

For instance on Nov 2, 2019 the US was looking at several UFC fights. You can also use the category dropdown to filter based on your niche.

It’s not always useful but sometimes you can find a very good never seen before topic that you can cover. 

Use Google Analytics to analyze where your traffic is coming from 

Head to Google Analytics and click on Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. 

Here you will be able to see which channels are driving traffic to your site (Organic Search, Direct, Referral, Social, Other). 

Here you have a choice, either double down on your best channels or improve the ones that you’ve been neglecting. 

For instance, I can see that I’m driving the most traffic through organic search which means my SEO tips work. 

But, on the other hand, I haven’t done much promotion on social media, so I should start sharing there more. 

Analyze your competitors and steal their content strategies

See a blog doing something interesting? You should definitely study their tactics. 

For instance, the other day I saw Databox interviewing tons of thought leaders and creating a big listicle article. This is a great idea because every thought leader will share that article and drive tons of new website traffic. Not only that but also people will tend to link back to their site, getting them a ton of links. 

You bet I’ll be doing the same with my So Influential blog. 

Build and leverage your email list

On several of my sites, returning traffic is key. 

Here’s a good plugin to build an automated email notification every time you post an article (or every Sunday, etc). 

Another benefit of a list is that you will have some warm leads to sell your course or program to. 

Best tools for this are Mailchimp, Braze, Marketo.

Chatbots

Another great tip is to build a Facebook chatbot and broadcast your articles there. I suggest using Manychat for this. 

The benefit of a chatbot is that they have a 70%+ open rate and a 15%+ CTR. (insane!)

Web push subscribers

Notify your subscribers when a new post is up via Chrome notifications. 

Two tools that will help you accomplish that are Subscribers.com and PushAlert. 

Be on YouTube ?

Another great way to drive traffic to your site is to post content on Youtube. 

If you want to see which keywords on Google Searches are showing Youtube videos on the results page, here’s how you can do that. 

Head on to Ahrefs and use the keyword filters to “include = video”. 

Learn other Youtube traffic tips. 

Do targeted outreach and email your blog post out 

Find bloggers using AuthoritySpy and send them a link to your post sharing with you thought it would be useful to them. 

As long as you don’t come off as spammy and your article is super valuable to them, I don’t see why anyone will get mad. 

Use PR

This ties back into growing your personal brand. 

Need a mention quickly? Sign up for HARO and help reporters fill in the expert info they need to publish their articles today. 

Here are other tricks to get press for your company. 

Need a PR agency recommendation? DM me if your budget is $5k+. I know just the right firm. 

? Want to grow your brand and be featured on Future Sharks, So Influential, Authority Daily and CryptoTimes? DM me and we will make it happen. (Ask me about the bundle pricing).

The beauty of a site like Future Sharks is that it’s super easy to get on and it usually provides a springboard for the rest of your PR. (i.e. many people got their first press article on FS and then eventually went on to Forbes). 

Not only that, but getting on FutureShark’s homepage also gives you a ton of exposure to more than 50,000 readers. 

You can find out about the pricing here. 

Write amazing headlines to draw the reader in. 

Even the best blog post will go unread if you fail to spike the interest of the reader. Also juicy headlines will get you more social shares, thereby driving more traffic. 

Here are some great hacks to reverse engineers the best Buzzfeed headlines. 

Leverage influencers

Sometimes a tweet from a respected leader in an industry is all you need to go viral. 

Need to find the best influencers? Head to SoInfluential. 

Grow your brand

For instance, each month I’m able to drive about 1000 people who search for my name “Alejandro Rioja” to my site. 

If you are a company or an individual, you should be aiming to capture brand equity so that your prospective clients are searching you by your name. 

You can do this by getting quoted on other sites, being consistent with your publishing, and going on TV shows, speaking gigs and podcasts. 

A benefit of podcasts is that you can also get a backlink to your site. 

Same thing with speaking gigs. When I spoke at Ontraport’s Ontrapalooza event, I was able to get several mentions and traffic to my site. 

Need to get your product to catch on like fire? Use Viral Loops

Viral Loops will incentivize the user to share, tweet, or refer a friend to earn a higher spot in line. 

This is great for giveaways, limited time sneakers, conferences, etc. 

Alright time to close this post off. Here are the tools I swear by. 

Services and tools you need to use to grow your website business

1. Freeeup (absolutely amazing when it comes to finding ghost writers)
2. Fiverr (get your social media posts, infographics, emails, videos)
3. Canva (easily design your own blog covers and graphics)
4. One or more of these SEO tools, my favorites being:
   1. Google Analytics (essential)
   2. Google Search Console (essential)
   3. Ahrefs or SEMRush (pick one)
5. If you need paid growth
   1. Facebook Ads Manager (tutorial coming soon!)
   2. Google Adwords (let me know if you want a tutorial in the comments)
   3. Your particular niche lead generator (for example, if you are in the insurance niche, buy ads on Nerdwallet)
   4. Taboola, Outbrain

Conclusion 

Traffic is a matter of consistency, and a few growth hacks here and there.

Remember, keep at it, and you will see your traffic increase over time. 

The more content, the more potential shares and the more your traffic will compound. 

The techniques shared here work best when you combine a lot of them at the same time. 

Would love if you dropped a comment telling me which one of these strategies you plan on implementing next. Also if you know of any other hacks or tips to get more web traffic, please share it with the community in the comments 🙂

If you share this post, tag me and write 2-3 sentences about it. Every 50 shares, I’ll pick one person and do a free audit of their marketing funnel 🙂  

Liked this post? read all my other amazing marketing guides for free.
Also read my Flux story.