How I Hit 10K Page Views on My Blog

If you’re reading this, chances are that you’re yet to hit the big 10,000 page views. After self-hosting my blog in 2018, I wrote sporadically in 2019 but decided to go all-in January 2020.

At the time, I had about 110 blog posts and 3,026 page views.

Here is a breakdown of my stats in 2020:

January: 3,026 page views.

February: 3,778 page views.

March: 11,312 page views.

You can see that my stats increased by 182% in March which is quite a big jump.

A Little Background on My Blog

It’s a lifestyle blog that has fashion, book reviews, scholarship and travel advice for students, writing and blogging advice for writers, with a sprinkle of spirituality and self-help. I chose the lifestyle niche as I didn’t want to tie myself to a particular topic. I’ve always maintained that I am a multifaceted individual and so are my readers.

However, I would advise anyone with a lifestyle blog to narrow down on each topic. For example, in my travel category, I focus on Stipendium Hangaricum scholarship tips and the advice we wish we had when my brother was applying for the scholarship.

For my writing and blogging category, I write articles on things that I have learned along the way, to help other bloggers. This has worked for my blog and has increased my returning visitors in the quarter by 5%.

What I Did Differently

I marketed my blog like crazy. I still market my blog, even in this social distancing period. Before deciding to go all ham in my marketing, I was getting around 32 Facebook users and 47 Pinterest users in my month. I’m now getting 1,395 users from Facebook and 128 users from Pinterest.

I didn’t focus on paid Facebook advertising because, in my experience, Facebook advertising reaches a state of diminishing returns where you have to spend more to achieve the results you used to achieve in the beginning. You also have to keep advertising to feed the algorithm and make sure your page remains visible.

In addition to this, I have basic knowledge of Facebook advertising so I decided to play to my strengths, which are Pinterest and Facebook groups.

For example, one post in a Facebook group brought me about 300 users each spending three pages per session. To get the same number with Facebook advertising, I’d have to boost the post only to have the traffic die down after the period is over unless I boost again. With Facebook groups, traffic trickles in days after you posted. The lesson here is to hang out where your readers are.

On Pinterest

It gets better and better. One pin can bring you traffic months after you posted it. Moreover, having a high number of monthly viewers helps in getting your pins in front of people. Although this is a vanity metric, it’s still important. You can use monthly unique viewers to calculate the conversion rate on your pins.

For example, I reckon that with my monthly viewers, I should be getting a higher number of link clicks. This suggests that there’s something I need to work on when it comes to my pins.

Darryl Brooks has a great article on how you can optimize your Pinterest page. You can use his advice to optimize your page for success.

Another platform that you might want to look into is Twitter. It doesn’t bring in a lot of traffic, but traffic from Twitter has higher pages per session. While one person from Facebook can read about three pages, a person from Twitter reads about eight pages. This is quite understandable as Twitter is a microblogging platform, thus the users are natural readers.

It’s important to understand how each platform is built in order to derive more from it. For example, unless you have 10K followers on Instagram or you have a fashion blog, I wouldn’t recommend using it in your traffic strategy.

Instagram is designed to keep you on the app. For those with 10K followers, they can market their posts and articles on Instagram Stories. These stories expire after 24 hours.

My advice is, focus on what’s working and then quadruple your efforts. If you’re a newbie blogger, ditch the idea of becoming “Instagram famous” as this might cause you time in the long-run. Focus on being helpful, finding the people with the questions to the answers your site has, serving your articles, rinse and repeat.

This advice works whether you have a great relationship with social media or not. I, for one, have a love-hate relationship with social media. I have gone to extreme measures in the past like deleting the apps. If you find social media affecting your mental health, work on your health first. Social media can wait.

I hope you hit your current traffic goal and I wish you good health.

This article first appeared in Better Marketing. Enjoyed this article? Like, share and check out my course on how to create a week's or a month's worth of social media content. It comes with a content calendar, social media tips and instructions on how to create a content calendar as well as tracking your campaigns.