How my latest blog post brought in thousands of new page views

So today in one of my blogging tips blog posts, I want to guide you through a blog post that I created this week that got me a lot of traffic. I often think the best way that we can learn about blogging, and the way I learned about blogging, is just by seeing examples of what works for others. I’m all about trying to understand the steps they took and then replicated in my own blogs.

So often on here, I talk about the importance of SEO blog content-and this is definitely where I get a lot of my traffic. However, I always want to make it clear that you should have a diverse strategy when it comes to getting blog traffic.

This is for a few reasons. Firstly, you can’t always rely on Google to bring in traffic because the algorithm changes, and also if you’re a brand new site, it does take time to build your domain authority and become established in order to get found on Google.

Another reason is that we don’t want to always create the same kind of content. We don’t want to just go after new readers and new customers from Google. We also want to provide really valuable and useful content to our existing communities who follow us on social and sign up to our newsletter.

So it’s absolutely fine to sometimes create blog content for different purposes and I tend to create a mix.

Some of my blog content will be SEO-heavy. Others I will write for the purposes of sharing on social media. And others I will write just because it offers value and it’s something that people ask me a lot and I want to answer their questions. (FYI, if you are interested in learning more about these types of blog content and writing them, you might want to check out my step-by-step blog planning templates)

One of the most effective tips that I follow to create good blog content is to actually think about what’s newsworthy and timely. Now, this is something I talk about a lot when I talk about PR but it can actually apply to creating really great blog content too!

As we know, trends are newsworthy topics that are always things that are going to get us talking, and creating blog content around this can be a really great way to get a big surge of traffic to your site. Perhaps that traffic won’t be there in three or six months’ time because it might have an expiration date of relevance but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth talking about these topics too.

Planning the blog post

You might know I have another blog, a balanced belly which is all about gut health and gluten-free. And one of the most effective things I’ve done to bring traffic to that site is to set up a Google Alert around keywords such as gluten-free and Crohn’s disease. If you haven’t set up a google alert for topics around your blog and business, do it now: it’s free!

Using news releases and topical events, can actually be a really great way to create timely blog posts that everybody is talking about. So that’s what I decided to do this week. I saw lots of news coverage about Asda’s New Just essentials range and being gluten-free myself. I decided to create a blog post on the gluten-free products in this range.

Being gluten-free myself, I knew this was the type of content that people were searching for and interested in and I knew it would answer people’s questions. I also knew that it was trending and popular right now. So it might not be something that people are googling in a few month’s time, but I wanted to sort of jump on the trend and discussion around this topic and provide useful content.

A quick note here is if you’re creating this kind of content, you don’t actually have to worry too much about SEO-optimizing it. So I only spent a few minutes thinking about the SEO for these types of blog posts. It wasn’t particularly long, it was shorter than my usual blog post because I wanted to get it up quickly. And it also wasn’t really an in-depth post. So it’s okay if you want to create this type of content and you’re not worried about SEO optimizing it because you’re thinking about promoting it in different ways.

This is why I always encourage people to consider HOW you want people to find the blog post BEFORE you write it.

Writing the blog post

For this kind of topic where we want to get traffic and viral social shares. The title is really, really important. when we talk about SEO titles, we’re thinking about the keyword. But when we’re creating content that we want people to share and engage with on social media. We really need a strong title and something they’re going to immediately relate to.

So if we take the title of this blog, post: 10 foods from Asda’s just essentials range that you might not realise are gluten free. So you can see immediately that I’m talking to the reader there.

And I’m creating a sense of intrigue and anticipation because I haven’t revealed what the 10 things are and it’s something we might not realise it’s something that’s going to take us by surprise.

So if you’re aiming to create a blog post that’s going to have sort of a connection, a valuable element a shareable element, I would strongly suggest using a listicle style and using phrases such as ‘things that you might not realise…’ ‘things you need to know…’ ‘things we all remember…” ‘things only x would recognise…all of these things create a connection

Because I knew this was going to be a popular post, I also wanted to make sure that I was showcasing other blog posts in it that were in the same sort of style. So I would recommend always interlinking in your blog post. So I included at the bottom a few different examples of relevant blog posts that people might want to read next.

Promoting the blog post

I immediately sent it to my newsletter and again gave a sense of urgency, because this was a new post and it was new information that they hadn’t found before.

Secondly, Facebook groups really helped grow the traffic of this blog post

. Now what I would say is to join Facebook groups that are in your niche and that you’re talking about a lot anyway. So if you’ve got a mom business, join a mom Facebook group and have discussions. I’m in lots of gluten-free Facebook groups being gluten-free myself, so I shared it there because I knew it was really valuable information. Those sorts of groups are really great because everybody tags their friends (because the post is relatable) I also then went ahead and shared it on my social media as well.

This blog post meant my site traffic was 2.1k yesterday-and this was mainly the blog post but people also read the related posts I linked to.

I wanted to just do a quick blog post about this because I wanted to show you the value of creating this kind of content occasionally. Okay, it will die off and it probably won’t get that much traffic in a month’s time because the range is new and people you know will get to know it and they won’t be searching this as much for example.

However, it is a really good idea to have a mix of content.

And obviously, those people that read this content might then go ahead and read some more of your content and sign up to your newsletter and so on.

I hope this has been useful and has inspired you to create your own viral time-sensitive blog post. I can’t wait to read it!