{"id":9918,"date":"2018-12-19T10:36:19","date_gmt":"2018-12-19T10:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordlift.io\/blog\/en\/?p=9918"},"modified":"2021-11-02T17:45:28","modified_gmt":"2021-11-02T16:45:28","slug":"how-to-get-traffic-to-your-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordlift.io\/blog\/en\/how-to-get-traffic-to-your-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"A Few Lessons Learned On A Year Revamping A Dead Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I started <\/span>Four-Week MBA<\/span><\/a> back in 2015, I had in mind a portal where people could find practical business insights they could readily apply. Opposite to the concept of traditional business school where you invest two years of your life with a full-time commitment, massive financial resources and get out of the job market. <\/span><\/p>\n

I wanted to create a place where people could find easily executable and practical advice from other practitioners. I wanted it to be the farthest thing I could imagine from the purely academic world. Yet, even though I had managed to bring traffic and some awareness to the site, it didn\u2019t generate enough organic reach. And in December 2017 the situation was quite depressing:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"traffic-fourweekmba-2017\"<\/p>\n

I made up my mind and as a New Year’s resolution. I decided I needed to create some traction for the blog. Yet as often happens with New Year’s resolutions I didn\u2019t do anything about it for three months. <\/span><\/p>\n

Until on March-April 2018, I started to experiment a bit to try to figure out how to make an amateurish blog, a professional one. In the last six months I accelerated the experimentation, and after many trials and errors this is where I got:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"traffic-fourweekmba-2018\"<\/p>\n

What lessons did I learn along the way? I want to show you a framework I used to get where I am.<\/span><\/p>\n

Try WordLift <\/a><\/p>\n

Niche down like a Ph.D.<\/span><\/h2>\n

In a Ph.D. program, you need to focus on a single area of expertise for years. At that stage you won\u2019t be satisfied anymore with a superficial knowledge of a subject; you\u2019ll look for understanding. The step from knowledge to understanding is not an easy one. It requires years of research, study and thinking about that subject. <\/span><\/p>\n

The reason why my blog hadn\u2019t been successful was lack of focus. Thus, I asked myself a simple question, which would have massive implications on my editorial strategy \u201cwhat topic would I be so passionate about to be worth my time for at least five-ten years of research?\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

In short, I thought in terms of completing a Ph.D. program. When you decide to go for it, it isn\u2019t a simple choice; you need to love it at the point of knowing you\u2019ll be spending the next years researching into the topic. In my case, after a few weeks thinking about it, it came up, and it was \u201cbusiness modeling<\/a>.\u201d I knew I wanted to know everything about the topic and that I\u2019d be willing to devote hours of research on the subject to master it at the point to be as good as a Ph.D. <\/span><\/p>\n

The reason for narrowing down so much is to allow your blog to gain traction quicker. Indeed, you have to think of a blog just like you would with a startup or small business. For instance, when <\/span>PayPal<\/span><\/a> started out, it didn\u2019t go for the whole market right away, but it identified a niche, a thousand power users that could help it gain traction, quickly. <\/span><\/p>\n

From that focus, I started moving toward an editorial strategy.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Branding vs. traction<\/span><\/h2>\n

Early 2018, I was looking for potential keywords that could be part of my editorial strategy, and I fell into the \u201csearch volume trap.\u201d In short, this consists of going after large volume keywords that though look hot in reality are not worth the effort in terms of real traction. Those are keywords that have a search intent that is purely informational. While this distinction is clear in theory, it\u2019s often hard to catch in practice. <\/span><\/p>\n

In short, when it comes to informational keywords, people look for <\/span>how, what, when, where and why <\/span><\/i>of things. And if you\u2019re building a publishing business, but also a blog around your company\u2019s products, many of the keywords might be informational.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet not all the informational keywords are born equal. Indeed, as we\u2019re moving to the voice search<\/a> world, many of those traffic opportunities that existed in the past are getting lost. A trivial example is about asking Google \u201ctoday’s weather:\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"today's-weather-google\"<\/p>\n

In the past, weather websites gained millions of visits a day from Google. Those days are long gone. Thus, if you want to target an informational keyword that has a real value for the business you need to think in terms of what can and what can\u2019t be answered fully via Google search results pages. <\/span><\/p>\n

Therefore, your content will need to: <\/span><\/p>\n