How I Grew My Blog to 10,000+ in Less Than a Year

My blog rapidly expanded through SEO and marketing. Here’s how I did it.

In the April of 2021, I decided to casually start a blog. I don’t know what really compelled me how to do it, but then I used it as first as a strange place to dump my thoughts. Some of those are still alive somewhere in the void, but ever since then, I expanded to include travel diaries, as I go on a lot of day trips and somehow find random opportunities where I’m in another city, television reviews, movie reviews, and book reviews. I’m thinking about expanding into theatre reviews next, as I am pretty active now in the theatre community and go to shows whenever I get the chance.

One thing I did during this time, however, was realize that this could easily become a business opportunity outside of my regular programming of freelance work. I started casually taking free SEO courses and marketing work, then I discovered as my views started going exponentially up, that I needed to start posting more consistently. Thus began a project that expanded into over 10,000 visitors by April 2022, hundreds of posts, and a strange plethora of opportunities.

Let’s dive into strategies on how you can potentially expand your website. I will say, however, that it takes a long time for results to appear, especially for SEO. This isn’t going to be instant. It takes time to build up a castle—it doesn’t just appear within a month!

Know your categories very well.

I don’t want to use the word niche here because I hate labeling myself into a quote-on-quote specific niche. In real life, I find that when you put yourself into a tightly bound box, you really limit your opportunities. Hence the word “categories”!

What I mean by this is that understand the ins and outs of your category. Are you posting film reviews? If so, what do you think is the best way to frame an article around your audience? A film review is going to look a lot different when compared to, say, a lifestyle blog. You’re going to not be using images from your life, which you may do if you’re posting a fashion post.

You also need to be capable of tailoring your posts with the proper images. This post wouldn’t make sense if I were mixing in a bunch of anime or K-pop pictures, wouldn’t it? Pictures are necessary for a lot of longer blog posts because of how it keeps people’s attention spans going. Having your visitors immediately click out of your site isn’t going to benefit you in the long run; in fact, the search engines may penalize you because of the short visit times.

Become familiar with the basics of SEO practices.

SEO, outside of social media and real-life marketing, is going to be the lifeblood of bringing in new guests to your website. You need to understand how to properly use headers and format a post in order to maximize the best results. Understand how to format your blog posts first. Heading 1 is what you use with the main keywords, then progress into the other headers for other low-hanging fruit.

Something I discovered working with some of my clients is that they seem completely unaware that you should be labeling your pictures with proper names as well. They never seemed to realize that the images also appear on Google Search, specifically in the images tab, and the more accurate the name, the more likely it’s going to show up towards the top of the image carousel.

Also consider using multimedia presentations for your blog. You’ll see a lot of YouTubers making websites and linking their posts back and forth; that’s one of the best ways nowadays to get your voice out there into the world.

Start writing for other publications; guest post and find writing positions at magazines.

One critical part of SEO is called backlinking. When you have your website on Google, when other websites link to it, especially if they’re more popular, it, in turn, boosts the authority of your own website and that increases its status on the rankings. I currently have about fifty websites linking back to mine, which has helped with the rankings and authority a lot.

There’s also another more obvious benefit to having other sites directly linking back to yours: the traffic. I have a passive website traffic stream because of how many sites have linked back to mine, and that nets in about two hundred visitors a month to my website. I haven’t really done anything lately in the poetry or writing world, which is my main arena, but because I’m active in entertainment journalism and social media work for other websites, them linking back to me has brought in a steady form of incoming traffic.

Network online and in real life.

Let people know what you do! Don’t be afraid to tell people about your blog, especially as it begins to expand. I recommend just playing around with the blog and setting it up the way you want it to be before telling people, so you’re happy with the product before people like Mom, Dad, and Random Cousin #3 come to stalk your digital space. But literally the more people know about your website, the more they’re going to subscribe to your newsletter or keeping coming back to check up on you.

Also online networking with other bloggers helps create a community. If you make friends, you can collaborate on posts or on social media, making the chance to have a lot of cross-engagement between your followers. It’s why you see so many YouTubers making friends with each other, or people tending to live within influencer bubbles. Not only are their jobs similar, but their audiences most likely are too.

Understand what’s trending and thus be timely with your posts because of it.

This is absolutely critical when it comes to organic traffic. For example, I got my Squid Game review and analysis up within two days of the show’s release, and that brought in two hundred visitors in two weeks. Not only does it play into the current field of what’s dominating, for example, pop culture, but it helps establish a foundation that will create a tree. This is called evergreen content. It grows into a steady tree that brings in a constant flow of traffic no matter its age. One of my most popular posts is my Almond book review by Won-Pyung Sohn (it ranks first on Google), and it brings in so much traffic every week. I posted that review coincidentally around the time a BTS member recommended it, included that word as a keyword in my article, and then bam! Traffic.

Make an editorial calendar.

I post daily, but most people do not do that. I also schedule my posts way in advance (like months in advance) to have flexibility, and if something becomes trendy, I just bump it up. If it’s timely, I post it immediately. Set like thirty minutes a day towards writing blog posts. You’ll start to see results if you spend time working on your blog, and it’s always nice to have a schedule to sit down and understand when it coming out when.