For my newest blog, I went with an entirely different strategy than most others. This takes a lot of work, but it works.
It’s based on 2 pillars.
But first, some credibility. After building a few pieces of content over 3 weeks and fleshing out the site, I officially launched the blog on January 11th, 2016, with this post.
The blog is called Four Minute Books and I publish book summaries.
As of today, 1 month in, over 20,000 people have been on the site. Not bad for 4 weeks.
This strategy is not perfect, and it doesn’t absolve you from doing some serious SEO work later on, but it’s the fastest way to a lot of initial traffic I know of, other than having a 100,000 person email list in your desk drawer 🙂
Here are the 2 pillars of this strategy:
1. Publish daily.
2. Syndicate your content.
Let’s look at both of them.
1. Publishing daily
The biggest mistake I made for my first blog is to never set a publishing schedule. And instead of half-assing it with weekly or even just monthly posts, I decided to publish daily.
This has 2 major advantages:
1. More content for Google to index and help you boost your SEO rankings
2. Visitors keep coming back, because they know there’ll be something new every day
But don’t get me wrong. This is hard.
To pull it off and ship a blog post every day, you have to very clearly define the structure of your posts up front and keep it the same so you don’t spend tons of time optimizing each post.
For example my checklist for each post is:
- 1-Sentence Summary of the book
- Estimated reading time
- Favorite quote of the author as picture
- Quick intro with my 3 lessons from the book
- 3 Lessons in detail
- Personal notes
- What else to learn from the summary on Blinkist
- Who would I recommend the book to
That’s it. I check the basic on-page SEO boxes, like using the keyword in the headline, URL, once or twice in the text and creating a meta description and one image.
Make the structure clear and simple to follow.
When kicking off your site, submit it to a few places, to get it to rank faster.
But what do you do with so much content? You re-use it.
2. Syndicate your content
Since you’re publishing daily, you won’t have a lot of time to promote each individual post, which is why I suggest you re-use your material whenever you get a chance.
This also means having a quick start promotion checklist.
I always submit every single one of my summaries to a few places:
- StumbleUpon (the major driver of traffic right now)
- HackerNews
- I tweet the summary at people who have recently tweeted about the book.
- I tweet the summary at the author to see if he or she likes my work.
- I submit it to a Slack channel I’m part of.
etc.
These little actions add up, especially because I’m doing them every day.
I don’t know which posts are good, but over time some of them really pick up steam on their own.
Next up you can also republish your summaries (but wait a week or two for SEO reasons), for example on Medium.
You can also take your most popular posts and try to pitch them to big outlets, like Business Insider, Lifehacker, or Entrepreneur, and see if they’ll republish it, which will get you a ton of traffic.
What do you need to consider?
This is a great strategy to get up and running, and it can give you a steady baseline traffic of a few thousand visitors every month.
But to grow your traffic sustainably, you won’t get around SEO.
Luckily, this strategy gives you a great foundation for it.
When you’ve settled into your new publishing rhythm, you can then create one or two great, and I mean GREAT posts or resources, that you can then individually spend some time on to promote and get links to (great guide about it here).
This is what I’m doing right now.
When you start to rank for one or two major keywords in your industry, all of your other posts will naturally get a boost as well, and then you’ll really reap the rewards of publishing daily.
Hope this helps!