I recently started working on a second blog (you can read the backstory here) and my goal was to hit 25,000 sessions in a 30 day period, to qualify for a premium ad network. I was able to do it within about 6 weeks of taking over the site, which was even faster than I expected! The site was previously getting about 2,000 sessions each month, meaning it was quite a jump to hit 25,000. So how did I do it?
Blog traffic in 2023 looks a lot different than when I first started blogging in 2010. Back in the day, you could just comment on other people’s blogs, and it would generate traffic to your site. You didn’t need high-quality images or detailed blog posts to land on the first page of Google. There was much less competition but also less income potential. These days, the blogging world is competitive and the old tactics don’t work anymore. So what does work?
New Content
I re-launched the site with about 12 new blog posts and recipes. The site has a lot of old content that needs to be refreshed so I’m working my way through that. But I wanted to have fresh content on the site so that new visitors would see where the site is headed.
Webstories
I created 64 webstories in a 30-day period. Yes, that’s 2-3 stories every day. I don’t plan to continue that pace but it was a good way to give my site a boost of traffic. Webstories typically provide a short term burst of traffic and then they die down, but I’ve had a few consistently bring in a bit of traffic, even weeks after being posted.
I shared a lot of my recipes in Facebook groups that were right for my niche. The more specific the group, like “gluten free desserts” performed much better than something generic like “tasty recipes” so I recommend looking for groups that are very specific to your content. I tested out dozens of groups and kept track of what I was sharing in which group (so I didn’t accidentally share the same thing twice) and I looked at how things performed to see if it was worth sharing in the group again.
I also tried a lot of things that didn’t work, but I’ll save that for a separate post. If you’re working on growing your pageviews in 2023, I recommend trying Facebook group and Webstories!
