Blog traffic: From 0 to 700.000 visitors, 8 lessons learned

I started how to make a blog and achieved the 200,000 visitors landmark within a year and the 700,000 milestone within two and a half years.

I spoke about how I got my blog from 0 to 700,000+ visitors. You can watch my presentation below and continue reading for my best 8 blog traffic tips:

8 blog traffic lessons learned

These are the best blog traffic tips that I would recommend bloggers when growing their blogs:

1. Commenting on bigger blogs can bring you initial traffic

My first visitor other than myself was someone clicking over from a comment I had left at ProBlogger. In those first days all my visitors came from comments I left on ShoeMoney, DailyBlogtips, Mashable, Chris Brogan and other relevant blogs.

For example on few days after I started my blog I left a comment on GetRichSlowly and that sent me 15 unique visitors first day, 20 the second day and 7 the third day which was huge back then!


2. StumbleUpon is a nice place to get the first spikes in traffic

I started looking for targeted people on StumbleUpon fairly soon after launching the blog. First time someone stumbled my post was soon after starting the blog and that sent me 19 unique visitors first day and 37 the second day and that was huge! Even to this day, Stumble is one of the top 4 sources of my blog traffic.


3. Use Twitter to get an audience and spread your links

I joined Twitter shortly after starting the blog and immediately started looking for people in my audience and got 55 unique visitors from there on the first day. It never stopped really, so Twitter along with Google is thebiggest source of my traffic.


4. Write a guest post for biggest blogs in your field

My guest post was published at ProBlogger and sent me 97 unique visitors on the first day and again 97 on the second day. Writing guest posts not only sends you traffic, it gives you authority, spreads your name to a targeted audience and also gives you a great value link for your search engine optimization.


5. Keywords are a must in the domain name

Looking at the traffic Google sends me, the 3 most popular keywords used to find my blog are very closely related to my blog domain name itself. If I went with MarkoSaric.com I would have had a much harder time getting ranked for these three keyword phrases.

How to make a blog
Make a blog
How to make my blog


6. Use big brands to attract attention to yourself

In some of my most popular posts I have used other brand names to attract attention to myself. It is a great strategy as these brands have many fans so it is much easier to attract them to click over to you, much easier to get them to comment and also much easier to get them to share the story with their friends.

8 things every blogger can learn by studying Perez Hilton
How Gary Vaynerchuk built a multi-million dollar empire around a video blog
13 blogging lessons learned from Stephen King’s On Writing

7. Write magnetic headlines

In RSS, on Twitter, in Google search results, we are bombarded with choices to click on wherever we are online. The only way to attract attention among tons of other blogs is to write remarkable article headlines. In my experience “how to” and “top list” headlines work the best, are very clickable and shareable.


8. Hitting Digg or Delicious is worth it – spikes and links

The spikes in my traffic are from the days when my articles went “viral”. For example my Twitter plugins article hit the front page of Digg for few minutes and sent me 2799 unique visitors on that day.

The next day my most downloaded WordPress plugins hit front page of Delicious and sent me 3602 unique visitors on that day. These events also bring you lots of links and that improves your blog SEO and increases your traffic in the long run.