How To Grow Your Blog Traffic In 2020

If you’re struggling to grow your blog traffic and make money blogging, even though you’re posting a ton of high-quality content – I think you’ll find some answers here! These blogging tips will work even if you’re a blogging beginner in 2020! Trust me, I started this blog from scratch with no experience about a year ago and I can’t believe how much it has grown and changed my life and the way I see the world now.

Blogging In 2020

Last year, when my son was one and a half I decided to start this blog. I was spending a lot of time at home, because I decided to take unpaid maternity leave. I didn’t want to get back to work and leave a stranger raising my child. It was not the easiest decision for me, but I chose to make being at home with my child a priority at this time in my life. I realize not everyone will have this option, and will choose this path, but this has been my journey.

So while I was at home, I started to feel uneasy, because I wasn’t bringing in any money. I had been working since I was 12, always doing something to support myself financially so this was a huge shift for me. I wanted to find a way to support myself and my family, while being at home, so I can be there witnessing my child grow, but also being at peace with myself. At that point, I knew my sister was making enough money from her blog to support herself and I knew with some guidance, work, and patience I can start earning money blogging too.

I gave myself a year. I didn’t know much about blogging, didn’t take courses, didn’t invest too much money into my blog – just the costs that I’ll mention in the first section. But, I did have my sister to guide me. She had been blogging for a while now and had learned through trial and error what works and what doesn’t and it has helped me a lot!

Traffic growth October 2019 vs March 2019

Traffic October 2019 vs March 2019

I set a goal to reach 100,000 page views within a year and to my surprise, I reached that goal in about 9 months of blogging. This was more than I hoped for and more than the traffic my sister had after 2 years working on her blog.

So today, I want to share some tips that will help grow your blog even if you’re starting from scratch in 2020 – it’s still not too late.

1. Don’t Overspend, But Build On A Strong Foundation

I made a very important decision right from the beginning to start this blog strong with a solid foundation. I am not too techy and I didn’t want to spend a ton of time on perfecting my website before I started to create content. So I just went for it and invested around $300 in the things I needed to have an SEO-friendly blog that didn’t crash when traffic would spike (because, hey, that was the goal after all) and be for the most part automated. I created my blog in WordPress and these are the things I invested in and highly recommend you do too:

WordPress Hosting – Siteground and Bluehost are great options when you’re starting a blog. I am still with Siteground, but I know other bloggers are very happy with Bluehost too. This small investment was very important for me, as I knew site speed and uptime were huge for SEO. Both Siteground and Bluehost, have pretty much the same pricing, but if you haven’t decided yet see for yourself – you can check out the plans in Siteground here and Bluehost here.
SEO-Friendly WordPress Theme. I chose the Genesis Framework and Divine child theme – I’ve been very happy with them and don’t regret not using a free WordPress theme at all, because I think this definitely helped me grow faster and retain site visitors longer. One of the things I really love about these themes is that I don’t need to go into my hosting file folder every time I need to add header or footer scripts – I can do it from my WordPress dashboard. For example, I needed to do this to install google analytics and to verify my site with Pinterest – I feel like this saves me so much time and headaches. If you do want to check out the Genesis framework and check out what the other child themes look like, you can go to the Studiopress shop and see for yourself here.
Tailwind. I’ve been using Tailwind pretty much since I started my blog – it’s a scheduling tool for Pinterest and Instagram and it helps me automate pinning and also track which pins have worked and which haven’t. If you want to give it a try, you can start a free trial here.
Canva. I use Canva to design all of the pins and most graphics on this blog. It’s a free tool, although I do have the paid version too and I highly recommend using it if you’re serious about blogging.

And that’s all the investments I did for my first year of blogging. Not too expensive and I already made the investment back, multiple times.

2. Use Pinterest The Right Way

I feel like Pinterest is the best way to start growing a blog at this time. It’s a visual search engine and a social media platform all at the same time. Now, growing on Pinterest does take a little time, but nowhere near the time it takes to start getting traffic from Google.

Pinterest needs to see that you’re consistent and not a scammer, but once you get a few viral pins – which will happen as long as you keep creating content and pinning – you’ll get free traffic to your blog automatically.

Now, starting in 2019 I didn’t rely on group boards at all – I simply started pinning and optimizing my content and my boards for Pinterest search. I focused on designing great pins and creating new content. I’ve also been experimenting with videos, but am not quite convinced they work better than regular pins yet, I will have to report once I have more Pinterest videos published. Overall, if you want to get blog traffic in 2020 – Pinterest is the way to go!

3. Consider SEO when you’re creating content

So, while Google traffic is hard to get in the beginning, it’s worth starting to optimize your content for Google search from the start. This means when you’re writing your blog post – choose the best keywords for the topic and include them in your blog post title, subtitles, first paragraph and the alt tags for your images. There’s a little more to SEO and I’m not a huge expert, but installing the free Yoast SEO plugin has been very helpful.

4. Treat It Like A Job.

To see the traffic growth I saw within my first 9 months of blogging – I published over 100 blog posts during the first year. This means on average I was posting twice a week, I had created an editorial calendar, worked every day and was always working on my craft, optimizing my content and creating new graphics every week.

I took blogging seriously and didn’t just do it whenever I felt like it. I did it as if it was my job, even when nobody knew about it and when I wasn’t making any money from it (which was for the majority of my short blogging journey).

I knew it could turn into a full-time job or even a highly profitable business one day, so the investment and patience were worth it for me.

If you’re wondering how often you need to post to grow your blog traffic – there isn’t a right or wrong answer. Create a schedule that works for you, so that you can stay consistent – you don’t need to publish every day, but once or twice a week is a must.

5. Experiment, Then Niche

I see many people trying to niche down, when they haven’t even started yet are not quite sure what to blog about. My recommendation is to write about whatever you feel excited to write about when you first start out.

Yes, I do sound like a naive child, I know. But as long as you’re creating content for a specific type of person (even if that person is you), you don’t need to have an actual “niche”.

All you need is to create that content, promote it and see what works. Let the traffic and engagement guide you into a “niche”. Then start creating more of that type of content – not all of it will go viral, but some of it will and you’ll see more traffic growth.

I hope you found these blogging tips helpful! Thanks for stopping by and reading, let me know in the comments if you do have any questions or tips – what has worked well for you? Let me know!

How To Grow Your Blog Traffic In 2020

Blogging In 2020