- I used to blog seven times per week.
Now I only blog once a week.
And you know what?
My traffic has gone up.
I went from 800,000 visitors a month in January
all the way up to 1.6 million visitors a month.
In less than a year.
So how'd I get this big traffic growth?
I blogged less.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel
and today I'm gonna share with you
how you can grow your traffic by blogging less.
(upbeat music)
Here's the thing that I learned about blogging.
It's not about how much content you're producing.
Yes, the more text you have, the more keywords,
the more pages that can rank in Google.
But here's the thing that most people don't tell you.
Just because you write more content,
it doesn't mean that you're gonna get more traffic.
More content doesn't mean that Google's magically
gonna place you at the top of search rankings.
You gotta promote that content.
But you know what?
If you wrote one article every single day,
how much time would you have to promote your articles?
I don't know about you, but probably little to none.
Sure, if you have a huge marketing team,
yeah you can spend a ton of time on promotion.
But if you yourself are the one blogging,
and you spend two, three, four, or five hours a day
blogging,
you're gonna be burned out.
You're not gonna market your content,
you're just gonna be like, alright I wrote it,
now it's up, let's see how much traffic I'm gonna get.
So if you look at my analytics traffic,
you'll see that there's huge spikes every Tuesday.
Why is this?
Because I release a blog post on Tuesdays.
Now sometimes I may change it to Mondays,
sometimes I may do Wednesdays,
but in general I'm only blogging once a week.
And when I'm blogging once a week,
the reason I'm getting so much more traffic,
sometimes 90 plus thousand visitors in one single day,
is because I'm spending more time marketing my content
than I am writing it.
So here's my process on how you can get more traffic
by blogging less.
The first thing I recommend to you,
is to send out emails.
So every time I release a blog post,
I send out emails to my whole list,
letting them know my blog post has just came out
and how it can help them.
This is one of the easiest ways I get more traffic
If I send out a email blast
seven times a week because if I was blogging daily,
people are gonna be like, whoa Neil, you're spamming us.
This is overwhelming, stop emailing me.
But now that I blog less,
not only am I able to email my list,
but they're appreciative.
They're like, thank you for sending the email.
They really help me.
It made my day.
I get messages like that all the time.
If you don't know how to collect emails,
use a free tool called HelloBar.com
You can collect emails from your website,
and then every time you have a blog post,
you can notify every single one of those email list members,
hey, my new blog post is up.
And just don't send a simple email like,
hey John, check this out, this is my latest blog post.
Send a customized email,
put in the subject line the name of your blog post,
and your email to the people should go over what you discuss
in the article, how it can help them,
and where they can check it out.
The second tip I have for you,
is to use Subscribers.com.
Subscribers is a push notification software,
it's free, there's no premium plans, it's just fully free.
And what it does is when someone's coming to your website
from a browser, whether it's Chrome, Safari, Firefox,
it allows them to subscribe to your blog
using browser notifications.
Then whenever you release a blog post, using Subscribers
you can send them a message letting them all know
that your blog post has come out,
and through their browser, they'll get a notification.
They can click on it, they can go back to your website.
This little simple hack using Subscribers
gets me over 40 thousand visitors a month.
They're not all unique visitors
because I have a lot of subscribers and they keep
coming back,
but that's still 40 thousand plus visitors a month.
When you write a blog post you naturally are using stats
and data to back up your point.
If you aren't, you should consider using them,
'cause it'll help anchor you as the expert in the industry.
When using all these stats and data
and you're linking to these sites, send out an email.
But when you send them an email saying hey,
I mentioned you, I really love your content,
thank you for creating it,
there's a good chance, over a 10% chance,
and anywhere usually from 10 to 30%
that you're gonna get people to share your content
on the social web.
It's that simple.
The next strategy I have for you is to use Buzzsumo.
Using Buzzsumo
you can type in keywords related to your article,
see what other relevant articles are out there
that are similar,
click the view shares button and you can see all the people
that shared similar content.
You can then email them, you have to do some Google searches
to find their email.
And you can email them and say like,
Hey Curtis, I know you shared out X, Y and Z article
by author A, B, and C.
I have a similar article that just came out,
you can check it out here.
Cheers, Neil.
It's another simple approach to get more traffic.
As you can see a lot of these tactics that I'm talking about
take time.
I'm not saying it's easy to get more traffic,
but you can get more traffic if you blog less,
because you can spend all this time promoting your article.
The last tip I have for you,
is to work on your headlines.
Everyone thinks if you write the longest
and the best blog post, you get the most traffic.
And that is true, good content helps you get more traffic.
But here's an interesting stat for you.
Eight out of 10 people will read your headline
but only two out of 10 people will click through
and read the rest of your article.
So if you spend time making amazing headlines,
you'll get more traffic.
And when you're thinking about headlines,
just don't create one headline for your blog post,
create at least five if not 10 headlines.
Then pick the one that's the most appealing.
Look for headlines that are around five to seven words,
around six is ideal.
If it's longer it's gonna be too long
and it'll get cut off from the Google search listings.
If it's too short, it's not descriptive enough for people
to know what your article's about.
In addition to keeping it around that length,
you want your headlines to evoke curiosity.
For example, if I was writing a article on green tea,
my headline may be like,
the seven benefits of green tea, number six will shock you.
I know that headline's a bit long,
but you get the point I'm trying to make,
I'm trying to invoke curiosity.
I'm like, wait, number six is gonna shock me?
What is number six?
And by doing those kind of things,
more people are gonna click through
and wanna read the rest of your headline.
So if you wanna get more traffic,
don't just spend more time blogging,
spend more time on the marketing than blogging.
That doesn't mean you can write mediocre content,
that means the content you write has to be really amazing.
But you should spend even more time than whatever you did
writing it, promoting the article.
Use the 80 20 rule.
If you spend a hour writing the article,
spend four hours promoting it.
If you have any questions on how to get more traffic,
by blogging less, leave a comment below.
And I'll make sure to answer and help you out.
Thanks for watching, make sure you subscribe, like,
comment and share.