How To Get Your First 10,000 Visitors
Some people email me if they can guest post too. Some make it, some don´t.
Hendry Lee made the cut. He sent in an interesting post on how to get your first 10,000 visitors to your site, one of the main problems most people starting out will experience.
If you want to send me a great guest post, feel free to do so at guestpost@, followed by the name of this domain. I will review your contribution and if I like it, your post will be scheduled. There still are 2 spots available.
Here´s Hendry Lee´s contribution. Enjoy!
How to Get the First 10,000 Visitors to Your Blog or Web Site
Getting your content on the Web becomes very easy nowadays, thanks to the blogging technology.
Building a successful blog or site, however, requires more than just typing and clicking on the “Publish” button. It takes knowledge and skills to create a successful blog.
The good thing is, none of these are rocket science. Blogging can be very rewarding because you can work from the comfort of your own home, or anywhere you want, get involved with the topic that you like and still make a good living from it.
Note: In this post, I’m going to use the word blog but you can apply the same tactics to web sites because blogs just are another type of web site.
One of the biggest challenges for every beginning blogger is to get traffic to the level that is significant enough to make money or grow a business.
A rocket uses most of the energy during the launch, but once it’s moving, the inertia becomes an asset to keep the rocket moving. This is comparable to starting a blog. When you get started, every visitor matters a lot.
It takes a lot of effort to make your blog visible, not to mention that you need to build credibility and establish your expert status.
Once you start getting steady and growing traffic, your loyal audience will eventually help you propel your blog to the next level. Every new post results in a few more backlinks to your blog. If you keep the pace by updating the blog with more good quality content, it can only grow because you get more readers and keep existing ones.
Before that happens, a lot of work needs to be done. For bloggers who wonder why they can’t seem to get their blog off the ground, I’d say this is to be expected. The problem is, if you don’t focus on doing the right things, you can actually be the one who pull the blog down.
Please don’t underestimate the effectiveness of these 10 blog promotion tactics. Perhaps you are already familiar with some of them, but a slight change in your approach can often bring meaningful improvement to the result.
With that said, let’s get started in our journey to the first 10,000 visitors.
1. Setup your tools
Technology is there to help you become more productive. Most likely, you have been using some of these tools:
- A web browser – My personal favorite is Mozilla Firefox and Flock.
- News reader – Subscribe to RSS feeds from related blogs.
- Google Alerts – Setup to monitor terms related to your niche or brand.
2. Load your blog with great content
Content is the reason people visit and come back to your blog. Spend time to create really good articles on your blog. You want the readers to be impressed with the information you have on your site.
3. Comment on other blogs
If you decide to contribute to other blog in the comments area, make sure you leave something that adds value to the post. This is how you drive traffic back to your blog because impressed readers would want to know more about you.
Leaving blog comments is also a way to make the blogger recognizes you. With great information on your site, some visitors may become subscribers and link to your content.
Tips: Finding dofollow blogs and participate in the discussions build inbound links to your blog. That strengthens your search engine positions.
For bloggers who you’d want to build relationship with, consider adding their RSS feeds to your news readers so you can keep getting updated content from them.
4. Become an expert in discussion boards
Forums are a place where people who share the same interest hang out online. You can find public forums in your niche and participate actively. Don’t begin your first post with blatant promotion.
You need to build your credibility and name in the forum by helping others. Discussion boards usually have a signature section where you can display URLs to your product or web site. Forum regulars are more likely to click on your link if you’ve built a strong profile in the community.
5. Take advantage of online publishing sites
Squidoo and Hubpages immediately come to my mind. Those sites allow you to create pages on the area of your expertise. In Squidoo, you can load RSS feed from your blog using one of the modules.
Both of them let you link to external pages, so you can get referral traffic and backlinks at the same time.
6. Article marketing
You can re-purpose your blog content into articles for syndication in article directories. This is an easy way to get traffic and inbound links with anchor text of your choice. This strategy is very powerful yet doable for bloggers, because if you are blogging, you are already producing content regularly.
Many web site and ezine publishers also use articles from directories. Guest blogging and other methods of getting your content on other people’s sites are also considered a form of article marketing.
7. Use the power of social media
Many people claim that social media is the best thing since sliced bread. Probably an exaggeration, but there should be a reason behind it.
In November 2007, more visitors came to this blog from StumbleUpon than from Google. My personal experience showed that only with a few thumbs up (or votes in Digg) can brought several hundreds of social media visitors to my site almost overnight.
My blog post, 10 Blog Post Title Templates That Work Like Gangbusters, got 771 visitors from Stumble Upon in one day with only one review and 16 thumbs up.
While social media users have a short attention span, they will subscribe to RSS feed if you have an effective plan.
Once you reach the 10,000 visitors mark, you already have the skills to drive more blog traffic. With the inbound links, you may start getting organic search engine traffic traffic as well.
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Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome technology challenges in starting and growing their blogs. Get daily tips, techniques and strategies by visiting his blog at Blog Building University.
So….
what´s your experience getting your first 10,000 visitors?
Post your comments below.
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My plan to get some link love and google rankings has been to release a plugin for a popular CMS system (www.e107.org) and ensure that it includes some links back to my site. Wordpress theme builders are known for exploiting this method successfully. Alas I’m no designer, but can code my way out of a paper bag!
I am starting to see some incoming links pop up in the backlink tracking tools but we’ll have to wait and see. No major impact on traffic yet but to be honest I’m enjoying coding this particular site too much to concentrate on content and I think until that changes this site isn’t going to get off the ground. But I’m not sure I want it too until I have it setup just right (the benefit of hobby sites with no share holders to please)! Still, it’s never too early to start building link love!
I also plan to blog the story behind the site, and I like the idea of tracking the first 10,000 (followed by 100,000 etc) visits. Should be an interesting journey to follow!
Cheers.
I like that idea, Winston. Rather than competing in the same pond, you actually jump into another pond with more fish but less competitions.
I’m personally interested to know how you go with it.
Hey, thanks for the site. I like the concept. My question is with the CMS. Is e107 really better than Drupal? I have heard different things saying Drupal is the way to go. What do you think? Thanks for the cool blog. I’ll keep checking back.
Providing something for nothing is always a good bet. Maybe game, piece of software, Wordpress theme, or online convesion tool or testers, or maybe a personality test. All will potentially pull in those visitors – as will a competition, pictures of naked girls or kittens.
All great tips that really work, Article Marketing is also a fantastic way to get powerful one-way links in your link building strategies.
Thanks,
JR
I have heard over and over again about the traffic drawing power of stumbleupon, but I have yet to see it on my websites.
Informative post.
The rocket analogy really hit home with me for some reason. I’d guess that a huge number of people give up before they even hit 10,000 visitors because they aren’t seeing immediate gratification for their efforts. But if they had just hanged in there a little longer…
Bri
I like the rocket analogy, however I get a little cheesed off when people promote the ‘leave comments on dofollow blogs only’.
Either a post is worth commenting on or not. The ‘follow’ status should be irrelevant.
Visitors for the sake of numbers does not equate to success. Slow and steady growth with organic search growth leads to better long term success.
les
Shaun Carter, you got to have interesting content for stumbling. In this way, you can then draw interested visitors. And one common mistake is that most people love to stumble their own website and never stumble others. You must have a mix of both to achieve the effect.
Those are some great points of advice – they really will help you. Networking with others seems to be the most useful for me.
Already I came across some points stated above but I carelessly didn’t follow for my blog. But today something is pushing me to follow. May be because of the number 10,000 (visitors). Ok let me try. Thank you Hendry Lee . U open my eyes…
Interesting & useful article. Tried the DIGG thing after reading an article elsewhere about the success it can bring, but it didn’t work. I use social network bookmark buttons on my site but don’t see any significant traffic back. Forums work well, as once you’ve got your site name out there, so long as you have good content, people will pick up on it & start to post links back to your site themselves. Jon
Hey great and helpful Post, You don’t have to know everything. You’ll always know more than some others to whom you can be an expert!
Good point about the use of Google Alerts. I’m fairly new to it, but I’ve found it very useful so far to keep me up to date on what others are posting about my niche and news stories. It’s also an excellent reminder in your inbox to write more content.
Relative to #2, I’ve been reading some posts lately that express regret at having invested so much time building content when only a few posts on their blog represent almost 90% of their organic traffic. In my own experience, I have sites I update regularly and some which have languished a month without content update but still see growth. I’m still very new at all of this but it would be nice if I could understand why this is and be able to replicate results. It seems that, sometimes, content really isn’t king.
regarding #6 – I’ve had 4 articles published and distributed through Article Marketer. All about 1 week ago. I’ve yet to see any notable traffic increase to any of the 4 sites to which I linked in the about the author field. Wondering if you have any insight into how long it takes before you begin to notice any notable “results” from such an effort or if you think I should submit way more before I can expect results.
interesting, your experience with stumbleupon. i receive minimal traffic from there, but i’d read previously that it, as opposed to some of the other social bookmarking sites, tends to provide more sustained traffic.
it’s cool that the site brought in quite a spike in yours. gives me a little more hope in stumbleupon as a means for generating traffic.
Directory submission very work now to get first 10,000 visitor that come from Google
I can’t stress enough the need for original content. Google loves it, your readers will appreciate it, and I’m sure I can offer a golf clap in your general direction. It kills me a little inside each day I pull up search results and see half of the first page results using the same content with different graphic candy wrapping around it. Sigh…
Nice article, its really really hard to got 1000 visitors a week when we start new blogging. but visitors will come automaticly when we are popular
These are great tips for getting that very valuable first 10,000. I’m especially pleased to see that you mentioned article marketing. Too many bloggers and webmasters overlook the real power of getting links and click-throughs from well written and well distributed articles. Thanks for sharing!
-Jason
This is truly a great blog. You are very talented and you have lots of great information. This blog post has taught me a lot and I have to bookmark it for further looking at. My name is me meka and I will be back to subcribe to your feed.
in my experiencing, offering a freebie is the best way to gain visitors. beats none, try it!
Terence
Great post!
One question on the Squidoo and Hubpages part, aren’t backlinks from Squidoo classified as no-follow links?
Even if its true I guess you could still get some click through if your lens is popular.
Its great and helpful Post, You don’t have to know everything. You’ll always know more than some others to whom you can be an expert.
Good content is best way to drive traffic from Search Engine.
This really is an interesting article. I have just begun writing my own web master blog and getting is traffic is one of the hardest things I have to do.
I am especially interested in article marketing as it looks promising for my type of blog.
I believe social networking sites is the most effective way to gain traffic
Very well put and going by the rocket analogy, there are a whole lot of strategies and tactics that are involved before hitting th 10,000 mark and beyond.
It’s all boils to being passionate, believing in oneself and focus and making calculated achievable goals just as the engineers and all those workers that contribute towards making sure the rocket works fine.
It’s possible but it takes effort.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, good content is definitely the best way to attract visitors. However, things like directory submissions and SEO friendly Wordpress plugins are a necessity.
The price of directory submissions has fallen so low due to the massive influx of Indian outsourcing, it’s pretty much impossible to succeed without paying for thousands of directory submissions. Luckily, that can cost less than $100 if you know the right places to find them.
Plugins like Global Translator and Google XML Sitemaps Generator can help your blog reach the rest of the world and be indexed by Google better.
Then again, I’ve yet to reach 10,000 visitors. I’m past that on page views, but still working on the visitors part
These tips are pretty much all basic. But, they might help those that have not been in this business for that long. Anyway, good post Hendrey.
I have seen most of these tips before. But, the article marketing thing will just get your web page banned because of dup. content.
side bar linking. I sometimes will add sidebar links to a blog and use those links to visit other bloggers in the same niche. The result is that those with stats programs (in the niches I choose many do not have even the basics) will notice that my site is sending some traffic and will come to look. You can significantly increase the power of this by writing about others and linking to them.
(BTW your spam block has some funny ideas…)
You have mentioned text / copy / articles as good content , as the only traffic pullers .
Whereas pictures , media files such as video and podcast mp3s etc can be as good content as well for bringing in quality traffic .
Thanks before. but are this method compatible with all blog software?
Nomad
I’d agree most with building a reputation in forums relevant to your niche and having your signature link promote your blog AND using social media sites like stumble upon especially if your site has something truly unique or interesting to offer.
Good post. I think the most powerful marketing tool on the internet is a blog. I started one of my blogs in May and I already have some links on the first page of Google. Using the tips in the post to get backlinks to your blog would be my suggestion.
Taking advantage of free blog hosts like Blogger and Wardress is another good way of getting backlinks. You can create related network of small blogs on these free blog hosts and put there one way links to your main site.
Very informative.If you have a blog, then you really need to write excellent content regularly (daily), social marketing and commenting on relevant blogs.The visitors will come, not instantly, but they will be there.
I have problems on how to create really good articles for my blog
Dide
Research is important if you are blogging about a topic that you are not too familiar with.
If you are to attract traffic from social media, for instance, you will get more votes (thumbs up in SU) if you write great content and structure it properly.
Hope that helps.
Excellent post. I just create my first blog and was looking at least for some basic information how to promote my blog. I think good content is the key to success, look at comment section. Thanks