Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Blog posts are delicate. If you screw up a single thing; they can be doomed. Most bloggers don’t properly set up their blog posts for long-term success. You need to set them up to stand the test of time.
You can’t just publish content, promote it via social media (now x.com) and guest blogging, and expect it to magically pull in traffic for years. 99% of blog posts are one-hit wonders. They receive thousands of visitors in their first few months of life. After that, it’s a slow decline to nothing.
You want to ensure your blog posts stand the test of time and receive long-term traffic. Passive traffic. Here’s how:
1. Check (Checked as of July, 2024) Google Trends
Google Trends is actually an excellent tool for bloggers. Google Trends allows you to see how popular a certain search term or subject is over time. Google Trends literally gives you years’ worth of data.
So you can see if the subject you’re writing about is growing in popularity or slowly dying. It’s important to check Google Trends for back history on any subject or keyword you’re targeting when writing a blog post.
You might not think the popularity trends are that important, but I can assure you they are. In fact, I used to build entire sites targeting keywords that were getting 4000+ searches/month at the time.
That was the rule for building the sites. Find a keyword that gets over 4000 searches/month and build a site targeting it. In just 6 months, 50% of the keywords I targeted lost 70%+ of their searches. Many stayed the same and few exploded.
2. Ensure Your Post Is Setup For SEO Success
This one is super important. If you don’t do this properly, you can kiss passive traffic goodbye. However, if you do want your blog posts to receive completely passive traffic month after month, follow these steps:
- Target One To Three Main Keywords In Each Blog Post
- Don’t Over Optimize Your Posts
- Go To The (Checked as of July, 2024) Google Keyword Tool And Search For Related Keywords (Look for a list of 5-10+ keywords that are related to your targets. You do this to ensure the subject is large enough to stand the test of time and won’t die out in the near future. A lot of keywords suddenly get thousands of searches/month for a couple of months. On top of checking Google Trends, you can search for related keywords to ensure what you’re writing about is popular)
3. Answer Long Term Questions
People will always have questions about what you’re writing about. There really isn’t a subject in the world that you can write about without getting a dozen questions from readers. Even if they don’t post their questions, they’ll be thinking them.
Instead of answering them as they come, answer common questions throughout your blog posts. It’s another popularity check. If you want your posts to stand the test of time, that’s all you have to do. Make sure the topics will be forever popular.
To find commonly asked questions related to a blog post topic, search forums and answer sites like Yahoo Answers (not working use Quora instead). Once you find a question that’s been repeatedly asked, incorporate it into the post you’re writing. Answer it thoroughly and optimize your post to rank for the question in the search engines.
Trust me, this really works. Repeat the process until you’ve incorporated 3-5 questions into your post. Again, this will just ensure long-term success in the search engines.
4. Posts Don’t Promote Themselves
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →Posts don’t promote themselves, they never have and they never will. If you want people to read your blog posts, you need to promote them.
Think of your blog post as an island in the middle of the ocean; that’s literally the best analogy there is. Your blog post is like an island in the middle of nowhere… So how do you get people to visit your island?
Simply build bridges. Bridges can be in the form of backlinks or social media. The key to setting up blog posts for long-term success is to first promote the crap out of them via social networks. Encourage social sharing, attempt to make your posts go “semi-viral”. If you write and publish epic content, readers will feel the need to share it.
In fact, they’ll feel obligated; it’s like when someone hands you money and you can’t take it or feel the need to give something back. If your blog posts are that good, people will want to help you out by sharing them. Next, you need to build links to your content to ensure search engine rankings. You probably won’t get any long-term social media traffic.
If you want your blog posts to receive passive visitors, make sure they rank well in the search engine, and I mean permanently.
5. Update Your Stuff
You know when you’re using Google, you plop in a generic search term, maybe a question, and half of the results are over 5 years old?
Well… I think Google is flawed like that. It’s a fact that most people don’t enjoy reading old information as much as they like reading newly published information. Even if the information is more or less the same, the fact that one piece was published in 2005 makes it appear utterly useless to users.
It’s also true that a lot of the results out there are completely obsolete. Stuff that was published in 2000, 2003, 2005, 2007 and even 2010 is now obsolete. So how do you stop your blog posts from becoming obsolete and non-desirable?
Simple; update them from time to time. Set a time every 3 months or so where you go through your blog posts and update any with obsolete information. Over the space of a few months, some information can go from being useful to useless. You don’t want any useless content on your blog!
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below. Also, opt-in to the email list on the right for more blogging tips, tricks, and secrets.
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Come do the work with people who show up
Not another course you finish alone and forget. A community that is there the next morning, and the one after that. Free, forever. About a minute to join, then come do the first challenge with us.
Join the community, free →
The claim that half the keywords he targeted lost most of their search volume within six months is a striking number, but it’s reported with no comparison group of keywords that weren’t specifically targeted for high volume. Search interest for almost any topic drifts over six months. Without knowing the baseline drift rate for keywords in general, it’s hard to tell how much of that decline is specific to picking high-volume terms versus just normal noise.
Raj, I share the hesitation, and I’d add a market concern too — Google Trends data gets noisy fast for smaller-language markets like Turkish, so I am not sure the six-month pattern he describes would even show up reliably here.
The section on making a post ‘go semi-viral’ through sharing quietly assumes everyone is comfortable being the person constantly pushing their own content into other people’s feeds and inboxes. Some of us built whatever audience we have entirely through the writing itself, without ever treating self-promotion as a performance we’re willing to put on. The quarterly-update advice is genuinely useful regardless of temperament, anyone can set a calendar reminder. The advice to lean on aggressive sharing to carry a post’s traffic long-term assumes a personality type the post never bothers to name as an assumption.