How I Increased 2 Blogs’ Page Views By Over 2000%

How I Increased 2 Blogs’ Page Views By Over 2000%

My first job in the digital marketing space was as a blog writer for a real estate lead generation company. There, I managed two blogs: one realtor facing and the other consumer facing. I had a solid writing background but little to no experience in digital, social media, or content marketing and—little did I know—had just entered the B2B and B2C content writing and marketing world. In other words, I had a lot to learn.

In addition to my lack of digital marketing experience, I also knew nothing about real estate. Nonetheless, I was able to increase the page views of both blogs I managed by over 2,000% in less than a year.

How did I do it? Let’s start from the beginning.

1. Do Your Research

The first thing I set out to do was learn as much as I could as fast as I could about the topic I was writing about. Whether you’re a freelancer or an in-house content creator, you have to completely immerse yourself in your subject before even thinking about putting fingers to keyboard.

First, start with a basic Google search and see who ranks for your given industry and/or topic at hand. Check out the blogs on these sites, and learn the names of those producing top-notch content. Keep your eyes peeled for list posts of key influencers and visit their respective websites and social media profiles.

The more you learn not only about the topic, but about what type of content is effective in that particular space, will give you a good idea of what to write and how to write it.

Actionable Item #1:  Research your subject thoroughly and learn who the key influencers are in the industry.

2. Employ SEO Writing Basics

As I discussed in How to Blog Like a Boss: 3 B.I.G. Blogging Basics, it’s important to understand the basics of writing for SEO. Here are a few tips for starters:

• Focus your piece of content around a keyword or phrase.
• Craft a headline that pulls readers in.
• Link both internally to the site you’re writing for and externally to other sites you’ve referenced.
• Make sure you reach the ideal content length (at least 500 words).
• Incorporate visuals throughout your written content.
• Use heading tags appropriately.

Actionable Item #2:  Learn and implement SEO writing basics. 

3. Prioritize Social Media Marketing

Once you’ve written a well-researched and SEO-friendly piece of content, it’s time to start marketing it. A great place to start is on your own social media channels (also known as your owned media). However, before you push your story out on all of your social profiles at once, you need to learn a few key tenets of social media marketing.

Let’s start with the best type of content for each social media platform:

• Pinterest: Perfect for sharing beautiful images, infographics, and DIY tutorials.
• Twitter: 280 character text and image posts, including article soundbites, retweets, and links.
• Facebook: Text posts, links, images, and especially videos do well on this social media giant.
• Instagram: Images, memes, videos, and more make this a purely visual platform.
• LinkedIn: Mostly for professional networking individually or within communities, with the LinkedIn publishing platform being a great place to publish outside of your company blog.

Once you’ve developed a basic familiarity with these social media sites and what performs well on each, you need to figure out which of these your intended audience is using and when they’re using them.

For example, at the real estate company I worked for, Pinterest drove the most traffic to the consumer-facing blog because homeowners and prospective buyers loved images of beautiful homes and crafts for the holidays. As for the agent blog, the now defunct Google+ drove the most traffic due to our community engagement efforts and the relationships I fostered with influential Realtors.

Actionable Item #3:  Find which social media sites your target audience use the most and market your content there.

4. Create Relationships

Due to the well-written content and the relationships I was able to foster via social media, the B2B blog I managed became a trusted source of information for real estate agents.

After first finding the key influencers, getting a good amount of content on the site, and finally engaging with those influencers via social media, these professionals began to share my content with their own audiences (earned media).

A great way to foster such essential relationships—other than sharing influencers’ content on your own social media profiles—is to ask to create a guest blogging partnership with them.

After taking a look at an influencer’s site, see what content topics they haven’t written about yet and pitch a few ideas to them. Meet your proposed deadline and blow them away with your value-rich article. Not only will your name be introduced to their audience, a few well-placed links in your post will undoubtedly lead readers back to your own site.

Actionable Item #4:  Interact with key influencers and foster relationships and maybe even partnerships with them.

The Takeaway

Using the above formula, I was able to take two relatively unknown blogs in the real estate sphere and develop them into trusted sources in the industry.

Not only did I increase page views by over 2,000% in less than a year, I increased brand visibility and drove a great deal of prospective customers to the site.

If you’re a small business building an online presence or embarking on your first foray into content marketing, following these four basic steps can help you get a foothold and improve your visibility in the digital marketing world.

Want me to do this for your business? Book some time with me and let’s get started.

This post was originally published in 2014 and updated in 2021.