Posts like this tend to say the same things. Submit to Reddit. Do a little Facebook advertising. Submit to StumbleUpon. Reach out to social communities. Blah, blah blah, blah blah.
While these concepts aren’t bad on the surface, these strategies aren’t what drive real growth. Real growth comes from a strategy, one executed effectively and done repeatedly over a long timeline.
In today’s video, we discuss how to promote your blog to 1,000,000+ yearly visitors using the strategic process we’ve used time and time again to deliver these same results for our clients.
Video Transcription
Hi, I’m Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media. Today, I want to show you how to promote your blog to over one million yearly visits.
If you randomly came across this video, maybe through Google search, through YouTube search, or your friends sharing it, you might wonder who is this Ross guy, who is Siege Media, why should I trust them and their expertise to give me the guidebook to get a million visits per year?
Well in fact, our team of around 40 as of this moment, in the last year created content that, as of this second, has projected 15 million additional visits added on to what our clients did in the year previous.
Siege content added approximately ~1,250,000 monthly search visits to our clients in 2017 on top of the impact they had on other parts of our clients’ sites. This means clients who invested us in 2017 should see 15,000,000+ visits from that content in 2018. Quite a year!
— Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) January 3, 2018
So given that, and what you know about the many screenshots we just showed you of what we’ve made in terms of impact, there is a general guidebook that informs all of those.
So you see a lot of these posts if you’re doing a search for how to promote your blog, how do you promote your blog in a million different ways. Yes, there are different little rubrics to get a bit of traffic here and a bit of traffic there.
The reality is there is a general framework that works more consistently, and that beautiful framework is search, it’s SEO, it’s content marketing. And to do that consistently, there are some commonalities that you can leverage over and over again to hit those massive numbers.
It’s not by doing these random one-off promotional things that actually gets you that leverage. It is the rubric that does that.
1. Start with Low Difficulty/High Link Topics with Search Volume Over 1K
So the first step in that rubric to build a million visits per year is actually to start with low difficulty high link intent topics, and then leverage up from there. And then when you do that, also make sure you’re leveraging topics with search volume over 1,000.
What I mean by this is you do a search for say, “best infographics” using SEMrush or Ahrefs, or tools like that, and you get different metrics for the total search volume and also the topic size. With that, you’re leveraging a lot of those different topics and building a keyword universe for your business.
You’ll have the ability to kind of pick one, pick the next, pick the next one after that, and eventually ladder up to a huge keyword base, a huge search volume base that enables that massive growth that we saw in those previous screenshots.
How you do that is you actually start with lower difficulty topics and high link intent topics first. So there are tools like Moz’s keyword difficulty tool, SEMrush has a keyword difficulty tool, and Ahrefs. Your tool of choice can all aggregate data and quantify what makes the keyword difficult.
If you are a new business that hasn’t done this, and you’re wondering how to get to a million visits, you probably don’t know what that metric is for you. So you’ll want to start with the topics that have high search intent, and also low difficulty at the same time, because that will enable you to get the traffic and also the links over and over again especially to start in order to ladder up to the more difficult ones.
So we’re actually going to attach what I would call a KOB spreadsheet, an idea, a topic research spreadsheet that we built at Siege Media that you’re welcome to use.
It’s getting kind of old now, but the general framework of it is still very relevant. And you can see the process we use in the spreadsheet to give you difficulty, to give you opportunity size.
There are also trafficked value metrics in there as well that say, “Yes, I can monetize this and not just get useless million visits. I can get valuable million visits from this process.” So when you start that process and see, “Hey, it’s low difficulty, it’s high opportunity, and there are links to those concepts” by looking at Moz, by pulling up those searches and seeing, are they top three, do they have 20 plus links each?
You start with those topics, you promote them, you do a great job on them, and you ladder up to the more difficult ones- that’s how you get to the process of building that kind of search traffic.
2. Always Pick a Distribution Strategy: Mentioned, Cold Outreach, or Search
The second tip of building this kind of traffic base, is to actually to pick a promotion strategy every time out.
As a content marketing agency, we’re frequently doing cold outreach. But for every new business without a strategy, to me, the real three tenants to leverage every single time as a business from a distribution perspective, and to always have them is, one, search.
So you can promote your blog without doing search in order to get more search traffic. Obviously, that’s the number one that we talked about in step one. The two is mentioned outreach. And what I mean by mentioned outreach is, say you did the “50 Best SEO Tools,” you would then reach out to all 50 of those tool providers, and there’s a strong probability they would either share that content or link to it. That’s essentially ego bait.
And the final is cold outreach. Cold outreach is that valuable process of generating links that can generate search traffic and, of course, distribution as well.
So those three things combined should always be behind every single piece of content you put out.
And if you have that distribution strategy, which is often a problem for those blogs that die out, that just say, “I’m going to publish and hopefully people will love this, but I won’t actually have any kind of thought process about how to distribute it other than sharing through social networks that don’t have any following at all.” Naturally, those blogs die by the wayside and no one ever gets the momentum that they really want.
So use those three core things when thinking about distribution for any posts you have and you’ll be well on your way to a million visits.
3. Leverage the Sharable “Skyscraper” Technique
The next step in this process to get that big number is to actually leverage the shareable “Skyscraper” technique. So if you’ve followed these videos at all or you follow SEO at all, you’re probably aware of the “Skyscraper” technique by Brian Dean and Backlinko.
Really smart guy, one worth following. Essentially the functionality of that is to build something that’s better than anything else that’s out there, and do that time and time again for each keyword or topic.
What I would add to that, and especially as it ties in to cold outreach, is to build a shareable asset in every post you build. That can be an infographic, sometimes that can be medium to long images, maybe it’s some embeddable video, maybe it’s an embeddable gif, all of those can, in whole, be shareable in some way for every single post.
And it’s that linkability that will enable you to get the leverage from a domain authority perspective to eventually ladder up to those higher difficulty topics.
So make sure from that thought process, if I was doing a blog strategy, I’d be using one of those three distribution strategies and make sure to ladder up from lower to higher difficulty terms, and I would always have shareable assets any time I’m going to promote a piece of content that I think has a market out there.
4. Slowly Level up to Non-Promotables and More Difficult Topics
Finally, my last tip in this whole holistic process is to slowly level up. We talked about getting links, in doing outreach, getting to more and more difficult terms.
Once you’ve started ranking for some of those lower difficulty ones in the KOB research spreadsheet, now it’s your time to take a swing at content marketing as a term. Maybe it’s your time to take a swing at how to increase website traffic, which is probably more competitive as a term.
And those things holistically will eventually get you to the point where you are now able to create anything, and as long as it’s good enough, you’ll rank. And that’s that kind of process that done time and time again will get you to one million visits.
So hopefully, this will get you on the path to doing that yourself. If you liked the video, please give it a thumbs up, subscribe, and let us know what you thought. Thanks for watching.
