One of the biggest milestones for any new website is reaching 10,000 visitors per month. If you can achieve this level of traffic, you’re already more successful than the vast majority of bloggers. At this stage, you can also start making a small but reliable monthly income from your site. This guide outlines, in an honest and realistic way, how to grow your website to 10,000 visitors per month.
How Long Will it Take to Reach 10,000 Visitors Per Month?
The road to 10,000 monthly visitors will be slow and bumpy. Building a website is a real grind. You’ll likely have some setbacks along the way. If you can stick with it through the rough times and continue slowly improving, you should see your first 10k visitor month 1-3 years after launch.
Table of Contents- How to Grow a Website to 10,000 Visitors Per Month
- Choosing a Niche
- Creating a List of Article Ideas
- Keyword Research
- Content Production
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Social Media and Marketing
- Backlinks, Outreach, and Guest Posting
- Upgrades and Investing in Your Website
- Analyzing Traffic
- Tips and Things to Avoid
Setting Yourself Up For Success: How to Choose a Niche With Potential
(If you’ve already chosen your niche and set up your site, skip this section)
Starting off in the wrong niche will slow your growth and put you at an unnecessary disadvantage. This section outlines a few things to consider before actually starting your website to give yourself the best chance of success.
1. Brainstorm niche ideas
Start by thinking about your interests. Choose a topic that you are passionate about and won’t get tired of researching. Remember, you’re going to be writing hundreds of thousands of words about your topic so it has to interest you. You should also be knowledgeable about your topic. This will help you write higher quality content from experience.
2. Make sure your niche has traffic potential
Use a search volume tool to determine the number of monthly searches of the topic you plan to write about. Play around with different combinations of keyword and their synonyms.
If you find that only 100 people search your topic per month, you’ll have a hard time getting 10,000 visitors per month unless you broaden your niche. If your topic has millions of monthly searches, try to narrow it down a bit as competition will likely be high.
You may also want to research how your topic trends over time. Google Trends can help you with this. Check whether your topic is seasonal or decreasing in popularity. You can also check where in the world your topic is popular.
3. Determine if your niche is profitable
Most likely, your goal isn’t just to bring 10,000 visitors to your site. Your real goal is to make money.
To determine whether or not your niche has the potential to earn a profit consider the products and services related to your niche that you could sell to your visitors. look at your established competitor’s sites to see what they are selling. Look at the affiliate links and ads that they run on their sites. Find some affiliate programs offering products that you could sell and see what kind of commission they offer. Consider whether or not you can run adds.
Some of the most profitable niches include personal finance, food, travel, marketing, lifestyle, and mommy blogging.
4. Analyze your competition
Google search the main keywords of your niche and look at the content that your competition is putting out. Your goal is to determine if you could outrank them by creating a better, more current, or more detailed piece of content. Look at the type of content, the quality, and the way it is organized.
For more info, check out this great guide about analyzing competition from Search Engine Journal.
5. Determine your angle
Some niches are incredibly saturated and highly competitive. By creating a unique angle for your blog, you can more easily carve out a space for yourself in your chosen niche. The most effective way to achieve this is to identify a void in your chosen niche and fill it. Another approach is to let your personality shine through. For some more help finding your angle in a crowded niche, check out this great guide from bloggingwizard.com.
Tip: You aren’t limited to one niche. Multi niche websites can be successful as well. When you’re first starting out, try to focus on one topic. This will make building authority easier. For example, this blog started out about living in Tijuana. Now I write about cycling, travel, hiking, and more.
For more help choosing a niche, check out my guide to the pros and cons of single niche and multi niche blogging.
Choose a Good Domain Name
In this guide, I won’t go into the actual website set up process. There are loads of guides that can help you out with that. What I will talk about is choosing a good domain. Your domain name should ideally meet the following criteria:
- Short- 4 words or less is ideal.
- It should pass the ‘radio test’- This means someone can write your domain name down after hearing it.
- .com- This is the gold standard top level domain (TLD). Country specific domains can work well for country-specific websites.
- Not too specific- Don’t choose a domain that will be obsolete or dated in the future. Try to find a domain that will allow you to pivot and expand your niche if you choose.
- Avoid copying other bloggers in your niche- Try to choose an original domain.
- Simple- Avoid odd spelling, numbers, slang, uncommon characters, etc.
- Professional- Avoid using offensive or controversial terms.
- Marketable- Your domain is your brand. You want it to sound appealing.
Know Your Target Audience
If you plan to eventually monetize your site, you’ll want your traffic to be as targeted as possible. After all, it doesn’t really matter how many visitors you get if nobody buys anything or clicks on any ads. For example, you could bring a million teenage boys to a mommy blog and not earn a penny. They don’t want to buy strollers or car seats.
Consider the demographics of your audience such as their:
- Age
- Location
- Profession
- Race
- Level of income
- Level of education
- Religious beliefs
- Nationality
- Personality traits
This information will help you when deciding what kind of content to produce.
One more important thing to learn about your target audience is their internet habits. Where does your target market hang out? Facebook? Reddit? Twitter? Is there a particular forum they frequent? Research to find their community. This will help you when marketing your blog.
Create a List of Potential Article Ideas
After choosing a niche with good growth potential and setting up your site, it’s time to start planning out your content.
Before you start writing, try to come up with 20-50 solid potential article ideas and list them in a spreadsheet. Many new bloggers fear that they will run out of things to write about. This step ensures that you don’t encounter that problem.
I have found that the most effective way to do this is to come up with a few basic article styles or formats and a bunch of subcategories of your niche. Mix and match the article styles with subcategories of your niche to easily build an extensive list of article ideas
For example, if you’re starting a fitness blog, a basic article style might be:
‘the best exercises for your _______.’
Fill in the blank with a body part or muscle group like forearms, lats, abs, neck, calves, etc. This basic style will give you at least 15 article ideas.
Another article style might be:
‘how to exercise your _________.’
Again, fill in the blank with your different muscle groups and you have 15 more articles.
Of course, this example is probably very competitive but you get the idea. Come up with a couple more article styles and you’ll have enough ideas to keep you writing until you develop Carpal tunnel.
A few more ideas to help you come up with article ideas include:
- Make a list of different article styles or formats- For example a few popular blog articles include: ‘how to ____’ or ‘the best _____’ or ‘the complete guide to ______’ or ‘______ Vs_______.’ Fill in the blank with keywords related to your niche. These types of articles work for almost any niche.
- Google search your niche and related topics- Read the article titles of the top 3 results and look through the articles. Search different keywords related to your niche for more ideas.
- Look through your competition’s blogs- See what they’re writing about. Read their most popular articles. Maybe you could write a similar article with more detail or from a different perspective. Look at their blog’s categories to help you find subcategories for your niche.
- Look on Amazon- Search some keywords related to your niche and look at the most popular books. Read the reviews of the top books to see what people liked and disliked. Look at positive and negative reviews. You’re looking for common trends in reviews. If you see an idea that a particular topic keeps coming up, you may have found an article idea.
- Look on Quora- This is a question and answer forum. Look up keywords related to your niche to see what kinds of questions people are asking. For example, if you run a finance blog, you might search ‘finance.’ One of the top results was ‘ What are the ten most important things about personal finance that someone without a finance background must know?’ This is a great article idea.
- Look on Reddit- Find some subreddits that are related to your niche. Read the top posts and read the comments. Look for trends. Is there a particular question or type of post that keeps popping up? Is there a particular type of content that is particularly popular? This can lead to an article idea.
- Rack your brain for article ideas- Try to come up with some unique article ideas. Think about things that you know how to do that you can teach others. Think about the unique experiences that you’ve had that others might be interested in reading about.
Write down any article ideas that you have, even if it seems like a bad idea. In step 3 below, you may find a hidden gem of a keyword.
Ideally, your articles should be evergreen, meaning that they don’t lose relevance over time. These types of articles can keep bringing traffic to your site for years to come.
Tip: Use a notepad or keep a note in your phone to write down potential article ideas as you think of them. Whenever I have an idea, I add it to the list on my phone immediately. I used to worry about running out of things to write about. Now, I have over 100 article ideas and the list just keeps on growing.
Use Keyword Research to Choose Your Best Article Ideas, Find Related Terms, Analyze Search Volume, and Competition
In order to grow your traffic to 10,000 visitors per month, you’ll need to write articles that people are actually looking for and want to read. This involves keyword research.
To avoid wasting time, you’ll want to analyze every article idea before you start writing. If you jump in blindly and write whatever comes to mind, you’ll end up writing articles that either have no chance of ranking or have nobody interested in reading them. Take the following steps find keywords that you can rank for that will bring traffic to your site.
Step 1: Prioritize your Article Ideas
Now that you have 20-50 article ideas, we want to pick out the best ones that have the greatest SEO potential to bring in traffic. Start by dividing your articles up into two categories:
- Short, easy, or fun articles- These will be 1,000-2,000 words.
- Long, in-depth articles- These will be 2,000-10,000+ words.
To help you do this, think about how much you have to say about each article idea. What would your subheadings be? How detailed and in-depth are the articles that you’re competing with?
A Note About Word Count
Word count itself isn’t really an important ranking factor for SEO. You should avoid adding useless information or irrelevant anecdotes to make an article longer just to achieve a higher word count. This won’t help your article rank higher. With this being said, word count is an important consideration while writing.
For example, if the article that you’re competing with is 5,000 words long, you’ll have trouble writing an article with better, more detailed information with 2,000 words. Most likely, your article will need to be as long or longer than the competition to outrank them.
Step 2: Compare the Keyword Search Volume and Competition of Article Ideas
For this step, we’ re going to take our long and in-depth article ideas and find out how much traffic potential they have. We are also going to find out how hard it will be to rank for each article in the search engines. Basically, we’re going to find the average search volume and competition for each of our top article ideas.
To do this, you’ll need to use a keyword research tool. A number of tools are available. Some are free and some cost money. I recommend you start with Google’s free tool, Keyword Planner.
When you sign up to use this tool, the website makes it seem like you have to pay to use it. You don’t. Check out this guide to Keyword Planer from ahrefs.com to help you get started.
All keyword research tools give you similar information. Save your money and start with a free one like Keyword Planner. I have tried a couple of paid tools and find them overpriced for what utility they offer. I also suspect that the info they provide isn’t all that accurate. For our purposes, we want to focus on the average monthly search volume and competition.
Average monthly search volume
This is the number of people making a particular exact match keyword search per month. To find this number, open up your keyword research tool and type in one of your article ideas.
Ideally, we want to find keywords that receive 1,000 or more searches per month. These article ideas receive enough traffic that they are are worth pursuing.
For example, if you’re writing a fitness blog, maybe one of your article ideas is ‘the best exercises for your neck’. When I search this in Keyword Planner, I see that this specific term gets 0-10 searches per month on average. That’s not great.
Now try typing in any variations that you can think of that people might search. To do this, simply switch the words around and use any synonyms you can think of. In our example, maybe we simplify our search to ‘best neck exercises’.
When I type this into Keyword Planner, I see that these keywords get 100-1000+ searches per month on average. This is much better! As you research each of your top article ideas, take note of the average monthly search volume in your article idea list.
Keyword Suggestions
As you research, the keyword research tool will suggest similar keywords as well. Some of these may receive more monthly searches. In our example, a few keyword suggestions include ‘best neck stretches’ and ‘best exercise for neck pain’.
These two suggestions alone give me dozens more article ideas to research and eventually write. For example, I could write ‘best _____ stretches’ and ‘best exercise for _______ pain’ articles. Fill in the blank with a body part or muscle group and I have a new article.
If I want to take the time, I could type all of these article ideas into my keyword research tool to see which ones get the highest number of average monthly searches. Play around with these keywords until you find a combination with an acceptable average monthly search volume (around 1,000 per month or more).
Tip: Remember, the average search volume is only for your exact keyword. Around 80% of searches are unique, long-tail keyword searches. Chances are, you’ll receive most of your traffic from searches that don’t exactly match your keywords.
For example, if you run a travel blog and wrote an article titled ‘the best things to do in cape town’, you may also rank for ‘cape town attractions’ and ‘places to visit in cape town’. An article that is ranked in the #1 position for a term that gets only 100 exact match searches per month could very well see 1,000 visits or more per month.
Keyword Competition
This metric tells you how difficult it will be to rank for your chosen keywords. High competition means that there are already a lot of established, high authority sites trying to rank for the same keywords. You’ll see this in very broad keywords like ‘travel’ or ‘health’.
At this point, we want to avoid writing any articles that target high competition keywords. The reason is that it will be too difficult to rank with a new blog without any authority. Basically, we’re looking for the low hanging fruit to target.
How to Determine Competition
Some keyword tools, like Google’s Keyword Planner, only show competition for ads. This info doesn’t help us because we’re not running ads. Disregard this competition info. In this case, you’ll have to determine keyword competition by yourself.
To do this, simply run a google search for your keywords. Look at the websites that rank on the first page. If they are all big, well-established websites, competition is high.
In this case, you’ll have a hard time ranking anywhere near the top with your new site. Set that article idea aside for now and move on to the next one on your list. You can save any high competition article ideas to write about later after your site develops some authority.
If you find a set of keywords that return a result with smaller sites mixed in with bigger sites, you may have found a good article idea. In this case, you have a good chance of ranking if you can put together a piece of content that is better than the articles listed in SERPs (search engine results page).
If you see social media links, that is a good sign. Another good sign is if you see online stores like Amazon or eBay. These are usually pretty easy to outrank because they are generally pretty thin content.
Another helpful keyword competition tool is the Moz Toolbar. As you look through Google Search results, the toolbar can show you a number of useful metrics including links and a page authority score.
Step 3: Pick Your Top Article Ideas With the Most Potential to Bring in Traffic
After analyzing the keywords, traffic potential, and competition of each of your article ideas, it’s time to pick out the best and begin writing. Try to pick an article that has the easiest competition with over 1,000 searches per month. Hopefully, you have 5-10 solid article ideas at this time.
In theory, you can grow your blog to 10,000 visitors per month with just 10 solid, detailed, and well-written articles. That’s only around 33 views per article per day, after all.
Realistically, that’s not going to happen for a new blogger. In reality, you’ll probably need to write 50-100 posts before you hit the 10,000 visitors per month mark.
The reason is that your first articles likely won’t be any good. Even if you’re a good writer, it takes practice to learn how to write a quality blog post. Blogging is its own unique style of writing.
Another thing to remember is that blog articles tend to follow the 80/20 rule. That is, 80% of your traffic comes from 20% of your posts. Most of your articles will fall flat and won’t rank or bring in much traffic.
In blogging, you just have to throw enough mud at the wall and eventually, some will stick. By carefully choosing keywords with the best chance of ranking and most potential for traffic, you can greatly increase your chances of success.
Even after two years of writing every day, I still have posts that fall flat and never rank. When this happens, I go back to some of my first posts to see how much I’ve improved over the years. Some of my first posts are just awful.
A Quick Note About Backlinks
One more ranking factor to consider is the number and quality of backlinks of your competitor’s articles. If all of the articles that you’re trying to outrank have hundreds of quality backlinks, you’ll have a hard time outranking them. This can disqualify one of your article ideas.
This free backlink checker can help you. The Moz toolbar that I mentioned above can also help with this. I’ll talk more in-depth about backlinks in a later section of this guide.
Content Production: Tips for Writing Blog Posts
At this point, it’s finally time to start writing. I can’t really tell you how to write. Everyone has a different process. In this section, I’ll list some tips to help make your writing process more productive. I’ll also share some tips to make your writing better.
- Focus on one idea in your article- While writing, think about what someone might search for when doing a Google search. They’re probably trying to find the answer to a question or learn something about a topic. Try to write the best, most detailed article you can. Stay away from writing about anything unrelated or irrelevant.
- Link to relevant articles from big, authority sites- These are called external links. These add value to your article and help your readers find more info on what they are searching for. These links will also come in handy when you’re building backlinks. More on that later.
- Write something useful- Your article needs to provide some value to the reader. It needs to teach them something or help them solve a problem they’re having. If it’s useless, they’ll just leave the page without sharing or commenting.
- Try to make your article between 2500-4000 words- This is the ideal length. Longer articles are fine if you have a lot to say. For example, some of my articles are over 10,000 words. Don’t stuff your articles with additional information if it’s unnecessary. If an article falls short, try to add more detail and information. Don’t just stuff in useless fluff.
- Let your personality shine through a little bit- This will help your readers get to know you. If your readers like your personality, they’ll be more likely to follow you on social media and return to your site.
- Give yourself a writing goal- Set a daily word count for yourself. Many famous authors do this. Personally, I try to write 1,000 words or usable content every day.
- Use good on-page SEO- Write short sentences and paragraphs. Use subheadings. Add bold or italicized text to highlight important parts. Use numbered lists or bullet points. A blog post should be easy to skim. It’s not a novel or newspaper article. Most people won’t read the whole thing. To help you with on-page SEO, use a plugin like Yoast. I’ll talk more about SEO in the following section.
- Use photos and videos- These should add to your article and help you present information. Avoid unnecessary photos or videos that don’t add to your articles.
- Link to your other articles whenever possible- These links are called internal links. Reference past related articles that you’ve written. Readers may find them useful.
- Don’t stuff your keyword in unnecessarily- As long as you stay on topic, the search engine algorithms will know what you’re talking about. You should use your keywords in your title and in the first paragraph and periodically throughout the piece. Use them in subheadings as well. Don’t go out of your way to stuff keywords everywhere. This is an obsolete SEO tactic.
- Choose a good title- Try to choose an interesting headline that evokes some kind of emotion. Avoid boring headlines. Make sure your keywords are in the title.
- Create valuable assets- Keep in mind that you’re goal is to monetize your content eventually. Write articles that will allow you to insert ads and affiliate links in the future.
- Tell stories- Insert short personal anecdotes into your writing. This will help your readers get to know you and form a connection. It’s also a good way to provide a real world example of what you’re talking about. Be sure to keep these relevant and brief.
When you’re just getting started, you should spend at least 80% of your time writing and creating content. After all, if you bring readers to your site and there is nothing for them to read, they’ll just leave.
Remember, your first several articles will probably be garbage. That’s fine. Just keep producing content regularly and you’ll slowly and steadily improve over time.
After my first year of blogging, I remember looking back at my first articles with embarrassment. After my second year of blogging, I looked back at my year-old articles with embarrassment. That’s fine. It means I’m improving.
How to Grow Traffic with SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Chances are, most of your traffic will be organic. This is traffic that comes from search engines. Mostly Google. You build this traffic through practicing SEO or search engine optimization.
I like to think about SEO as a competition. In this competition, Google’s search algorithm sets the rules. Your content competes against all other content on the same topic. If you win, you are rewarded with traffic.
While writing your articles and designing your site, you need to keep SEO in mind. You should optimize all of your articles for the keywords that you’re trying to rank for. Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly how Google’s search algorithm ranks articles. We do know some of the factors that are considered.
Some important SEO factors include:
- Site speed- This is one of the most important ranking factors and is completely in your control. Make your site as responsive as possible on both mobile and desktop. To test your website’s speed, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights. To help speed up your site, optimize your images for size. Install a cache and CDN plugin. Choose a lightweight theme. It’s better to have fast, minimalist site than a slow site with a bunch of pretty animations.
- Backlinks- Another major ranking factor. The better backlinks your article has, the higher it will rank. When it comes to backlinks, you want quality over quantity. More on backlinks in a later section.
- Mobile-friendliness- These days, Google uses a ‘mobile first’ approach when ranking websites. This means that they pay more attention to your mobile site than your desktop site. The reason is that more people access the internet through mobile than desktop. For example, 60% of my traffic comes from mobile. To rank higher, make sure your mobile site is responsive and easy to navigate.
- On-page SEO- Make sure your articles are optimized for your chosen keywords. Your posts should be easy to read and use subheadings. Use your keywords throughout the article but don’t overuse or stuff them for no reason. For help with on-page SEO, I recommend you use an SEO plugin like Yoast.
- Social shares- An article with a large amount of social shares may rank higher.
- Comments- I recommend you allow comments. An article with a large number of comments may rank higher. Commenters also provide some useful information for your readers that you may not have included in your article.
- Domain authority- If you have an article that ranks high on a particular topic, another article on the same topic may rank higher because you have some authority on the topic. This is the reason that it is important to choose a niche.
SEO is always changing. In fact, Google updates their search engine algorithms daily to provide the best results to users. As long as you write quality content and optimize your site and articles properly, you shouldn’t worry too much about SEO. Traffic will come and go but should trend up over time.
At some point, you will experience a substantial organic traffic decline due to a search engine algorithm update. In this case, the best course of action is to wait it out for a couple of weeks until it stabilizes. Continue everything as normal. Usually, your traffic will return over time.
Promoting Your Website with Social Media and Email Marketing
After publishing your first article, it’s time to start marketing it. You want to get people reading what you’ve written. This will help your article rank and can lead to backlinks. For this section, I’ll assume you have no social media following or email list.
To get started, set up accounts with all of the major social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora