How Long Does it Take to Start Getting Blog Traffic?
Blogging is all about writing. However, there are different reasons why people blog. Some write out of passion, to exchange knowledge, build brands, or earn money.
There can be other reasons besides these, but for sure, the end goal is to have someone visit or read your blog site.
And that is exactly what blog traffic is. It is the number of reads or visits that your blog site gets in a certain amount of time.
If you are new to the blogging world or planning to start your own website, you may wonder how long it takes to start getting blog traffic.
If you’ve been writing for quite some time now and haven’t seen any significant traffic on your site, then it would be worth spending some time reading this blog post.
Really, how long does it take to see progress in your blog traffic?
If we are being highly optimistic here, it is not impossible to receive high blog traffic on your first day or in just a few weeks, mainly if you publish relevant and high-quality content and reach the right audience.
But in reality, achieving a consistent traffic source usually takes three to six months or even up to a year.
And a constant traffic source leads to great traffic growth.
This is considering that you are persistently publishing high-quality content.
Of course, there is no specific time frame to predict your blog growth, but three to 12 months is still a significant waiting period to discourage or encourage you on your blogging journey.
Naturally, the latter is more advisable.
Recommended Strategies to Achieve More Traffic:
For faster growth, you can take advantage of that three to 12 months of waiting time to create and master your blogging strategy.
There are some strategies that you can adapt to improve your writing and gain more traffic to your blog.
1. Have a niche for your blog writing content.
This is an important factor that is often overlooked by new bloggers resulting in an inconsistent blog site.
You have to know and decide what you will write about and what the contents of your blog site will be.
It is understandable that there are so many exciting things and experiences in this world that you can talk about in your blog, making it tedious to choose a specific niche and solely focus on it, but you really have to do it.
Doing so makes it easier to establish a blog identity or brand.
It can also make your blog site more organized and coherent for your readers and visitors. It will also help you identify your target audience and write great articles targeting them.
Your research before writing will also be easier as you narrow down your blog focus.
When you also have a niche, you can use external links to lead organic traffic to your other blog posts or articles from other sites.
2. Study the existing niche sites.
If you do a quick tour of the blogging community, you will find niche sites revolving around different fields and areas, such as technology, healthcare, fashion, and business.
Other sites focus on the fitness or lifestyle niche. Still, the point is these are the community sites where you can observe how bloggers write high-quality content and even lazily written content related to their niche.
It is also a traffic strategy because most of their traffic source are those individuals related to their decided niche.
Look closely at their published blogs and pay attention to the content quality.
There are articles on some established sites that you can tell are professionally written, while there are also a few poorly written articles.
You have to study both so that you can take note of the dos and don’ts in new blog writing content.
So whether you want to write about social media platforms, crafts, travels, or any other field, you better decide now.
It would be best to focus on a niche you are most knowledgeable at or interested in.
If you want to level it up, you can also focus on the competitive niche.
3. Know your target audience.
As mentioned above, having a niche makes it easier to identify and write articles targeting your target audience.
When you finally identify your target audience—is it the older generation, millennials, teenagers, employed, business people, or housewives—you can now align your writing style according to the preferences of your target audience.
This is a strategy to drive traffic to your website because you have a defined group of people to reach.
If your writing voice doesn’t fit them, it might become more difficult to achieve your expected traffic in a shorter period of time.
4. Create quality content.
Blogging is such a competitive world because everyone can write and access the internet.
So if you think that the blogging world is just a small community, then you are greatly mistaken as there is a very high competition in the field.
Millions of new blogs are being published every day, making it more difficult for new blog owners and even established blog owners to be on the first page of the search results.
This means you have to ensure you are creating quality content.
You have to pay attention to your blog’s structure and check whether it is relevant and high-quality.
That’s why research is also a must.
5. Write in detail to attract organic traffic.
When you write for the blog, and you aim to gain traction and profit, writing itself becomes more complex. It is because you have to incorporate the best traffic strategy to achieve your purpose.
It is no longer all about being creative and expressing yourself as you have a target to meet, which is traffic growth.
One thing that you can do to improve your blog site is to write great articles with detailed content.
Blog visitors or readers are usually those people who seek to learn new information or skill.
If they meet what they are looking for in your blog, who knows, they may become a regular visitor to your blog site, and you can gain more traffic.
6. Use competitive keywords.
Using keywords with a very high volume of inquiries in different search engines is one of the most effective strategies for gaining faster blog traffic.
Doing so gives your blog posts a greater chance to be on the top of the search results.
Aside from researching your upcoming blog post topics, you must also allot time to do keyword research.
It is the practice of knowing keywords people usually type in search engines.
If you do that, there will be less chance for you to land on the latter pages of the search results.
7. Create a routine
Consistency is important to achieve significant traffic numbers, especially in your new website’s first few weeks and months.
It is the reason why you have to create and follow a routine.
You have to decide how many blog posts you will be publishing in a week or month.
If needed, you can have a planner or create a calendar to plot down the dates for writing and publishing new blog posts.
For starters, you can publish one or two posts per week and increase it as you go by.
New bloggers and new websites need to be active in publishing blog posts to stabilize their appearance in search engine results.
8. Seek SEO professionals.
There is also a shorter path to ending your worry about getting blog traffic, and that is by hiring people who are already experienced in blog writing.
These professionals are great assets to your team because they already know the right things to do to boost your new blog posts and the new website itself.
They will surely use high-traffic keywords and think of new blog writing content to drive traffic to your website.
9. Improve your marketing efforts.
Most importantly, it is impossible for any blog site to grow if it will only be contained in one space.
Fortunately, there are many ways for you to promote your website and attract organic traffic.
One of the most convenient ways is to make use of social media posting to promote your blog posts.
You can simply paste the link of your website or blog posts to different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, matched with catchy captions to lead anyone who will click it to your blog posts.
Sharing your blog posts with your friends and the whole wide world can help you achieve blog traffic faster.
What hinders your blog posts from getting more traffic?
If the strategies mentioned above already exist and are very easy to do, you might be wondering why websites and bloggers still fail to stabilize their traffic growth curve.
Worse, it sometimes takes them longer than a year to see significant traffic on their websites.
That is because of the little things they fail to improve in their websites—which you should avoid.
Keeping an ineffective blogging strategy
Blogging is a journey.
For sure, you’ve thought of strategies to manage your website, but the thing is, you also have to analyze it from time to time to see whether it is effective or not.
If it is ineffective, then you have to change it.
Unfortunately, most of the websites that fail or take longer to achieve blog traffic ignore this idea and keep on using their failed strategy.
One very common mistake that they make is not using targeted keywords and relying on low-competition keywords.
These are also other sites with lazily written content and so few keywords.
It was already mentioned above how important it is to write high-quality content to start getting traffic and profit.
If you don’t pay attention to your blog content, there is a tendency for you to use the wrong keywords and even cause misinformation.
If that happens, less organic traffic will land on your site, and you can even cause harm.
Again, for emphasis, you have to use really competitive keywords in your articles to stabilize your traffic analytics.
Not doing so will take you a longer time to start growing your website.
There is the Google Sandbox
If you are quite a new blogger and have been following the recommended strategies above but still do not get promising traffic growth, there is another factor that probably hinders your blog posts from ranking in Google’s top results. This is the Google sandbox.
It is a phenomenon and sometimes even called a filter that doesn’t allow content from new websites to rank in Google’s top results despite the best SEO practices that you apply in the articles.
It usually lasts six months up to two years before blog posts from new websites appear on the first page of Google results.
However, your articles will still be visible in other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo.
This is another reason why it takes three to 12 months to start getting blog traffic.
Finally, when you reach your desired blog traffic
But if the time finally comes when you have gained blog traffic, there are some things that you can do to maintain it and your rank.
Make it a habit to regularly check your google analytics and your traffic growth curve so that you can track your progress and immediately respond to any deterioration.
Keep the strategies that work for you, such as consistently creating quality content and using high-competition keywords, and let go of the ineffective ones.
If you have mastered the blogging world, you can then explore creating new niche sites.
Final Thoughts on How Long Does it Take to Start Getting Blog Traffic
In the end, “How long does it take to start getting blog traffic?” will remain a question.
No two paths are the same.
It can indeed take you a year or shorter; it still depends on how dedicated you are to pursuing your blogging journey.
In times of discouragement, you may want to go back to why you write, which may remind you why you started your blog anyway.