How to Help Your New Blog Gain Traction Faster

Last Updated on September 26, 2022 by 26 Comments

How to Help Your New Blog Gain Traction Faster
Blog / Editorial / How to Help Your New Blog Gain Traction Faster

A lot of people will tell you it’s easy to become rich blogging. Post a few articles now and then, and watch the money roll in from affiliate offers, advertising, and selling your own private courses. It sounds like a dream come true, so it should come as no surprise that making money blogging is a lot more complicated than these people make it seem.

To be fair, you can earn a good income from blogging. However, gaining blog traction takes a lot of work. In this article, we’ll talk about why it’s so hard to gain blog traction. Then we’ll show you some examples of websites that took a while to get off the ground.

Let’s talk about blogging!

What Do We Mean By Gaining Traction With Your Blog?

When you launch a new blog, it’ll likely have little visibility except from maybe you and your friends. That’s normal, as it takes a while until word gets around. For most blogs, the bulk of their visitors come from search engines – otherwise known as ‘organic traffic’.

Before you start seeing decent organic traffic (or gaining blog traction), some things need to happen:

  1. Search engines need to crawl your website.
  2. You have to write and publish content targeting traffic with specific keywords.
  3. Repeat step two until you have a decent library of content.
  4. Start getting backlinks from other reputable sites.

Keep in mind – this is an oversimplification of the process of getting a blog off the ground. To succeed, you’ll also need to do things such as cultivate a social media presence, engage your users, and more. However, the underlying fact remains that gaining blog traction takes a while, which brings us to the next section.

Why Does It Take Time for a Blog to Gain Traction?

If you’ve previously worked on a new blog, you’ll know it can initially seem like slow going. Traffic can be nonexistent, and you won’t be getting comments on your posts. Many people get frustrated and end up abandoning their projects at this point.

While there are a lot of people who talk about a ‘sandbox’ that Google uses to prevent new websites from showing up in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), its existence is denied. In fact, many experts agree that new sites are simply lacking in the required authority to compete.

Simply put, the algorithms search engines use take into account a number of criteria. We don’t know what they are specifically, since those algorithms are trade secrets. However, we have a rough idea of the factors that can prevent your blog from gaining traction:

  • Not enough content. If you only have a handful of posts up, search engines won’t have enough information to understand when your content is relevant.
  • A lack of analytics. There are a lot of signals search engines use to evaluate your pages. For example, users bouncing from your site at an alarming rate is a bad sign, as well as if you’re not getting any clicks.
  • What niche you’re targeting. Some niches are harder to crack into than others due to a high level of competition. If you’re targeting a niche with many big players, you’re going to need a lot of patience.
  • You don’t have enough backlinks. As we mentioned earlier, you need backlinks from reputable sites if you want search engines to take your blog seriously.

Building up all this data and signals takes time. In most cases, your blog just needs to outgrow its awkward teenage phase, where it still hasn’t decided what it wants to be or taken the necessary steps to get there. You can move on from here, but it takes work.

How You Can Gain Blog Traction Faster (By Studying the Competition)

For this section, we’re going to take a quick look at two blogs from different niches and discuss how long it took them to gain blog traction. We’ll also talk about how you can learn from them to try and speed up the process for your own blog.

However, we’re not promoting these sites or their products in any way. They’re simply examples to study of two very different approaches to blogging and monetization.

The Frugal Millionaire

Let’s start with a popular blog called The Frugal Millionaire. This particular website focuses on how to make money blogging (which is a very popular niche):

The Frugal Millionaire homepage.

Nowadays, The Frugal Millionaire brings in over $2,000 per month for its owner, according to their income reports. From the launch in August 2014, however, it took eight months until it reached the $100 per month milestone. In April 2015, The Frugal Millionaire bought in $102 via Google AdSense.

If we check out the blog’s archives, we can see they published over 50 blog posts during that period, which is pretty good, and most of them got several comments. In other words, the blog got traction rather quickly thanks to a high publishing rate. However, monetizing via Google AdSense alone is not the best way to bring in a decent income.

The main takeaway is that if you keep publishing content consistently, your blog should gain traction faster. This, of course, assumes that you’re using quality keywords and your writing is good (which of course it is!). You also don’t want to rely on ads alone as a monetization method, since the income is volatile.

Happy Nifty Life

Moving on, let’s take a look at a small lifestyle blog called Happy Nifty Life, where the author writes about everything from blogging to money management and dieting tips:

The Happy Nifty Life homepage.

Usually, we’d recommend you stick to a single niche to offer focus and clarity. However, this blog caught our attention because of its detailed (albeit sporadic) income reports and its owner’s aggressive monetization strategy.

If you look closely, you’ll notice the blog doesn’t publish new content too often, and it’s only been around since early 2017. However, at the moment of this writing, Happy Nifty Life is pulling in almost $2,000 per month in income, which is pretty darn good.

When we look at the income reports, we can see a breakdown of the strategies the author used to transform a modest blog into a decent online income, including:

The lesson here is that if you want your blog to gain traction faster, you need to be aggressive about marketing. If you just wait for search engines to find and lead traffic to you, you’ll need a lot of patience.

However, organic traffic isn’t the only game in town. Depending on your blog’s niche, you can get a lot of out of platforms such as Pinterest. Plus, if you play your cards right and look into multiple monetization methods from the get-go, you can start making money earlier than you’d imagine (although probably not that much at first).

When you put both of these examples together, you get a pretty clear-cut strategy on what it takes to gain blog traction. First, you need to keep publishing content often and learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, you also need to market your blog aggressively at first. Once you gain some traction, you can let search engines do the heavy lifting.

Finally, sticking to a single monetization method will only delay how long it takes for your blog to start earning you a decent income. Instead, we recommend you play the field a little bit and figure out what works best for you.

Conclusion

Blogging is a legitimate way to make money. However, you need to understand that running a blog won’t turn you into a millionaire overnight. It might not even earn you a decent amount of money for months or years, depending on your blog’s niche. However, if you’re willing to put in the time, you stand a good chance of success.

In our experience, if you’re putting out good content and focusing on SEO, it should take around three to five months to start gaining blog traction. Anything else, and you may want to run an SEO audit to figure out what’s wrong.

How long did it take for your blog to start earning you money? Share your stories with us in the comments section below!

Article thumbnail image by Makc / shutterstock.com.

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26 Comments

  1. Thanks a ton, for sharing this.

    Keep up the good work.

    • You’re welcome, Nabin. 🙂

  2. Hello john,
    Thanks for your valuable information,
    Really helpfull
    Keep posting like this.

    • I’m so glad you liked the article, Yogesh. 🙂

  3. Can you tell us more about how these sites have got backlinks to work, please?

  4. Blogging is certainly not a “get rich quick” scheme, but it is a great way to develop a passive income. My primary niche site grew from $0/mo to $10,000/mo in just 27 months. It’s an awesome experience to watch people discover (and get excited about) something you’ve built. It takes a lot of time and effort but it’s so worth it.

    • Hi, awesome, my website qsaudi.com gets 1000s usd in adsense. What’s your website if u don’t mind

    • Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences, Nicole! 🙂

  5. Hi John,
    Persistence, Relevance and Consistency are certainly the key ingredients.
    The trick might also be a case of “knowing when to hold them and knowing when to fold them”.
    At what point do you give up rather than keep on being “consistent” ? How long is that piece of string ?
    Thanks, Matthew ?

    • That’s a good point, Matthew. There’s certainly no easy answer for this, but it’s worth keeping in mind that many blogs simply never take off, even if you put a lot of time and effort into them.

  6. Needed subject, but for me too general, “marketing efforts” – this is ocean big, ocean deep amount of possibilities. I was hoping for a very prescriptive recommendations.

  7. Hey John,

    Great post and thanks for sharing the article. It captures all the key things one should look at while creating a blog. For me, the content has always been the most important bit. But before creating the content it is very important to understand the intention of the user. I personally look at the search traffic and decide the kind of content that needs to be created. And analytics helps me improvise further. I have a blog on health and nutrition and I focus more on SEO. I have not done much on marketing and social media and still figuring out how to go about it.

    • I’m very glad you enjoyed the article. Thank you for sharing your thoughts as well!

  8. Great down to earth advice. This is what people need to hear about starting a blog and not the pie in sky riches that some write about. Thanks

    • You’re welcome, Horace. Being realistic about your goals is absolutely key to succeeding. 🙂

  9. Good sound advice guys, especially for anyone wanting to start a blog. A good read, thanks

    • Thank you, April. I’m so glad you liked the article. 🙂

  10. Truly good and understandable tips. Thx so much.

    • You’re very welcome, Philipp! 🙂

  11. “It might not even earn you a decent amount of money for months or years, depending on your blog’s niche.” This is so true, and my experience with several sites. The key takeaway – keep working hard and stay patient, it takes time.
    Thanks for this post!

    • Thank you, Jeremy! I’m so happy to hear you enjoyed it. 😀

  12. I have just started a blog a few months ago. But I think there is a long way to go to earn money. By the way good article at the right time.

    • It can certainly take time, effort, and patience to get to a point where your blog generates money. I wish you all the best and hope it works out well! 🙂

  13. Great article. I always tell people to get at least 5 very nice and detailed posts to start with on their site. After that just keep making good posts on a regular basis and you will be golden.

    • Thank you for your comment, I’m really happy you enjoyed the article. 🙂

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