Starting my blog in early March is one of the best things that I’ve ever done. It’s helped me write more consistently, and also taught me a lot about on-site SEO and keyword research. While I do off-site SEO for a living, my first love and passion will always be writing. That is why since March I have made a real effort to increase my blog traffic in order to have more people read my articles. To do this, I’ve submitted my sitemaps to Google, used Ahrefs to help build backlinks and have had several articles go viral.
As a result of my efforts, my blog traffic has shot up tremendously this month. Historically, it has hovererd around 2k-2.5k views a month. At least that is the case for the last several months. But this past moth due to an article about Warhammer 40k and an article about free speech, I’ve had close to 10k views. Those mostly came from those two articles, and are largely the result of stirring up controversy on Facebook groups.
While it’s been great to have more readers, this has had a big downside. For one, it’s wrecked my bounce rate. I’ve more recently raised this by writing more niche articles, but the generalized blog traffic has not helped my site. In fact, it’s hurt my organic search rankings a bit. Still, that’s not what has caused me to write less. What has caused me to write less is the expectation of getting massive amounts of blog traffic.
But what I’ve realized more recently is not every post should be intended to bring in the most amount of readers. Generating controversy is an easy way to do this via social sharing, but its not always great for the health of your blog traffic. In fact, it might be better to target different people with different types of posts. While I don’t intend to specialize in a niche anytime soon, I do love writing travel and culture articles. However, I also like writing about any topics as well.
Because I’m not blogging for money (at least not yet), I can do that. Not everything I write needs to generate a ton of blog traffic. But what it does need to do is be enjoyable to me to write. And as long as I focus on quality as a metric, I think I’ll be able to be enjoy writing this blog for years to come.
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