If you know exactly what you’re doing, you can build a blog from scratch that gets over 100,000 visitors per month in less than a year.

Of course, that usually requires some great conditions and a lot of things to go right. 

Still, even if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, as long as you’re willing to learn a few things and stick with them, you can build a sustainable business out of a blog—it just might take an extra year or two, or four. 

In any case, your blog will progress through five distinct stages during this journey:

  1. Blog creation
  2. Initial growth
  3. Scaling up
  4. Mature growth
  5. Maintenance and defense

Top Rated SEO Tools to Optimize Website Traffic

First things first, if you want to optimize website traffic, you’ll need adequate SEO tools. Some of the best ones to start with include the following:

You can read our full reviews of each SEO tool here. It’s a good idea to get familiar with these before you get started on your blog. That way, you can know what to expect when you do. 

Stage 1: Blog Creation 

Expected time to complete: Around two weeks.

There’s nothing like building a fresh new blog from scratch, and that’s what you get to do during this stage. From figuring out what you’ll be blogging about to making your site look sleek and fun, there’s a lot to do. 

Remember that creating a good blog is a big task that deserves your full care and attention, so take your time. 

You’ll want to create a blog that you can work on every day, so be sure to build a rock-solid foundation. 

Define your niche

This is the step where most blog owners fail because they don’t clearly define or even know who is going to benefit from their content.

In other words: it’s critical to understand who you want your content to serve.

You don’t need to know how you’re going to do it yet. Determining the audience you want to help comes before things like the products you will make, the content you will create, and the methods you’ll use to generate traffic.

You need to be able to state what type of people you’re trying to serve and be as specific as possible—because it’s better to be too specific than too general. If you need to expand your definition of your ideal customer group, you can always do that later. 

For now, think about the expertise you have. For instance, if you love creating recipes that busy home cooks can whip up in minutes, that topic could last a lifetime.   

Alternatively, maybe your niche is office workers who want to learn how to squeeze more exercise and fitness activities into their workdays.

Or, maybe you know a lot about homesteading and gardening, so your audience could be folks who want to learn how to grow their own food in their homes or even apartments.

Just remember, it’s okay to play around with different ideas until you find one that clicks. 

Create a reader persona

Once you know the people you want to serve, you need to learn more about them.

In order to create content that will resonate with them, you must understand who they are, how they act, and what they struggle with.

One of the best ways to do this is to create a reader persona, which is essentially a composite representation of the average person who’ll be reading your blog. 

Let’s pretend your blog is all about using iPhones and iPads to make short films. To find out who your target audience is, for example, you could conduct some in-depth market research by doing the following:

  • Joining filmmaking groups on Facebook and LinkedIn
  • Searching the #iphonefilmmaking hashtag (and other similar ones) on Instagram and Pinterest
  • Looking up the most popular film schools in the country and researching the demographic information for who attends them
  • Chatting with anyone you know who uses iPhones and iPads to make films
  • Posting questions to filmmaking groups on forum sites like Reddit
  • Using tools like SurveyMonkey or PickFu to run surveys that help you understand your audience

There’s usually an existing online micro-community for just about any topic. All you need to do is mine the internet and you’ll find your people who are active online—once you get to know them, you’ll be able to find out what conversations they’re already having about your topic. 

As you do this research, think about the combined traits of all your readers. Find the answers to questions like these:

  • How old are your readers?
  • Where do they live?
  • What’s their average education level?
  • What kinds of professions are they in?
  • What do they look for on blogs? (Tutorials? How-tos? Personal essays? Listicles?)
  • Which blogs do your intended readers already follow? 
  • What challenges do they face related to your niche?
  • What skills do they already have, and what skills do they want to acquire?

By compiling the most common answers to these questions, you’ll have a reader persona to understand your target audience and guide your early content decisions.

Picture this persona each time you sit down to write and you’ll create content that matters to your readers. 

Create your blog 

If you’re going to build a blog-based business, you’ll need a functional and optimized website to host it. There are many website-building tools out there for beginners and experts alike. Some, like Squarespace, are perfect for artists and creators. Others, like Shopify, are built for ecommerce brands. 

Before you start blasting out content on the first website you can create, keep in mind that some website builders are self-hosted and offer limited customization options. Others, like WordPress, are highly customizable but require third-party hosting. A good idea is to play around with free trials until you narrow down the best website builder for you.

If you end up choosing WordPress for all of its powerful features, keep in mind that it comes with a learning curve. If you don’t know where to start, take a gander at our guide on beginning a blog with WordPress. 

Discover where your readers hang out 

Before you can even attempt to draw your target audience to your blog, you have to figure out where they spend their time. 

Note that in some niches, you may have to get offline and go to conventions or local meetings to connect with your target audience and get them on your site. However, many niches have a variety of existing blogs that you can find online. It’s important to see these bloggers as friends, not foes—if there are multiple blogs in a single niche, it probably means there’s a healthy thirst for the content.

To find the most popular blogs in your niche, a simple method is to conduct a simple Google search for “top [your general niche] blogs.”

Google search results for top iphone filmmaking blogs

If you’re serious about tracking these sites, create a spreadsheet with important details. In one column, indicate if the blog allows comments, and in another, if it allows guest posts. This will help you later on in the blog-building process.

To check for guest posts, Google “[domain name] guest post.”

Go through any big lists of blogs and visit each one individually. Look for signs of high traffic such as several comments on each blog post or a lot of social shares.

Add the best ones to your list. 

You’ll want to identify blogs that your reader persona visits because your goal is to get them to visit your site, too. Ideally, you want to identify as many as you can, but at least 50 if your niche is large enough. 

If you’re having trouble getting that many, think broader. For example, “best filmmaking sites” instead of “best iPhone filmmaking sites.”

Google search results for iphone filmmaking + forum

Remember to browse the content and read some of the comments to understand your target audience better.  

Another good idea is to check out forums in your niche. Again, search for “[your general niche]+ forum,” and go through the results on the first few pages.

Explore these forums to learn more about your target audience. You can even post a question, like “Which blogs do you love to read about [target topic]?”

Or, you can just get a feel for your readers by good old-fashioned lurking. Study their likes, dislikes, questions, and answers to questions. Use this to come up with blog topics they might be interested in—it’ll help you down the road. 

Stage 2: Initial Growth

Expected time to complete: Less than four months.

When you first begin a blog, you’re starting at zero. No matter how well you research your target audience, you’re likely to make mistakes. The problem here is that no one will tell you what mistakes you’re making—at least not yet.

Still, as long as you’ve defined your target audience well enough, you can reach the next important step: attracting your first 100 fans. These fans will play an instrumental role in the growth of your blog.

Loyal readers will comment on posts and respond to emails. They will tell you when something resonates with them through comments and feedback. They will also tell you when they don’t like something by leaving a comment, responding to an email, or showing how they feel with silence.

For instance, if you have 100 high-quality subscribers and still can’t get any comments or email replies, then the problem isn’t your subscribers. It’s probably your content. 

Use this feedback to tweak your reader persona and craft content that helps this updated persona. That’s when you’ll start seeing consistent resonance and more rapid growth of subscribers.

Here are four strategies for getting your first 100 true fans:

1. Guest posting

Guest posts play a big role in the strategy for blogs of all sizes. When you write a post on an already-established blog, you put your content (and a link back to your blog) in front of your target audience. 

Your first move here is to start pitching a few of those popular blogs with huge audiences that you found in the first stage of blog growth. A portion of this audience will be your target audience as well. You can then get these readers interested in your site through a great guest post. 

One common mistake people make is that they try to write any guest post they think will be popular on a site. However, even if a guest post becomes popular enough to win you a lot of new subscribers, it might not be the kind of post you can truly build your blog and business around.

Instead, find a topic that you think will do well on the blog you’re guest-posting on, but also angle it towards your target reader.

For example, let’s say you pitch a guest blog to a major site with a big audience of filmmakers. The most popular posts are about news or recent developments in the filmmaking industry. If you wrote a guest post that lined up with this topic, you might get a lot of subscribers—but they might unsubscribe once they realize your site is all about filmmaking with iPhones and iPads rather than filmmaking in general.

In this case, you’re much better off writing an article focused on iPhone filmmaking. You might get fewer subscribers, but they’d be more likely to become real fans. 

Always remember that your goal at this stage is to find that small group of 100 true fans and get them to your site. Attract their attention first and foremost.

For more info on getting the results you want from guest posts, we’ve got you covered:

2. Traffic magnets

While it might be ideal to pump out a ton of content to get your blog rolling, it’s not the most important thing when your time is limited. 

In the early stages, you probably don’t have many visitors, so it won’t behoove you to create massive amounts of content. 

Instead, you’re better off trying to generate traffic from other sources. Once you’ve done that, then you can thrive by creating a high volume of posts on your blog.

That said, you do need some content on your blog to start out—and some types of content are better than others. For example, if your blog is small and lacks credibility, it’s not a great idea to write a ton of opinion pieces. 

Try to create a few posts that can attract quality backlinks and help you build relationships with influencers. These “traffic magnet” posts include:

  • Beginner guides
  • Link roundup posts
  • Ego bait posts
  • Interviews with big names in your niche
  • How-to guides

Beginner guides work well because they do two things. First, they provide the reader with a valuable resource for people just starting out in the field—especially when they’re looking for a fresh one that’s up-to-date.

Second, they give you opportunities to link to notable influencers or companies in your niche. A beginner guide might have a title like this: “A Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Short Film on an iPhone 14.”

With link roundup posts, you can ask several influencers in a niche the same question and then publish the results. Alternatively, you can do your own research on the best items to use for a task related to your niche. You can even look for excellent competitor blog posts and round those up for other people to read. 

As a rule of thumb, make sure to tag the brands and influencers you promote. Some may comment on the post, link to it, and share it on social media. 

An ego bait post is what it sounds like—its goal is to appeal to the ego of an influencer or company with a large following. Make the person or company look good by showing that their advice solved a problem for you or someone else. Let them know you created the post, and maybe they will link to it.

If you can get an interview with a well-known figure in your niche, go for it. Interview posts can help bring that person’s audience to your blog—and the person is likely to share the interview on their social media, too. 

Similar to a beginner guide, a how-to post is a great way to provide valuable information and links to relevant posts and products in your niche.

Unlike beginner guides, however, how-tos aren’t necessarily for beginners—though they can pair well with beginner guides by offering advanced knowledge on the same subject. The goal is for a reader to visit a beginner guide and then head to a how-to post to learn even more about a given topic.

3. Paid traffic 

If you have more money than time to invest in your business, paid traffic can be a suitable way to accelerate your growth.

That said, it’s completely optional, and the quality of your content will still reign supreme. Many successful blogs never use paid ads, while many other successful blogs do it at one point or another.

The big benefit of paid ads is that you can create an audience without having an existing base of traffic. Of course, it can get expensive—especially if you’re new to using paid advertising. At the end of the day, it’s important to give adequate attention to building both organic and paid traffic. 

There are a few different ways to drive paid traffic to your blog: 

  • Pay-per-click (PPC) ads: This type of advertising strategy is popular because you only pay for your ad when people click on it. You can create an ad campaign via Google Ads or pay to have your ads displayed on other websites in your industry. Social media is another popular space to run PPC ads.
  • Affiliate marketing: With affiliate marketing, you work together with other companies to get their product in front of your audience. If your visitors click the affiliate link and buy the product or service, you earn a commission. Ideally, the other company will also share your blog with their audience, bringing you traffic that could convert into subscribers. 
  • Sponsored posts: These are like guest posts, but instead of posting to another site for free, you pay the website owner for the opportunity to share your blog on their site. Down the road—if you build enough traffic—you might be the one getting paid to host sponsored posts from smaller blogs. 

Here are some of the best resources on using paid traffic to build a blog’s audience:

4. Social media presence 

Social media platforms tend to have boatloads of traffic, and the most popular ones (like Facebook, Instagram, and X/Twitter) almost certainly have some of your target audience members.

One of the biggest challenges to remember here is that most good social media strategies take time to work. If you’re going to use social media, you have to be prepared to wait for months until it pays off with decent traffic. 

Consider the following tips to boost your social media presence: 

  • Use branded graphics or compelling images each time you share a post
  • Make everything you post easy to share, especially on sites like Facebook
  • Repost content from other blogs you love—no one wants to see you toot your own horn 24/7, and reposting from other blogs might earn you some link love in return. 
  • Include key hashtags and keywords to appear in relevant searches

If you’re dead set on using social media to funnel traffic to your site, you can speed it up by using paid traffic. Paid ads on Facebook are relatively cheap and can help you build an authoritative page quickly. You can promote ads on Instagram, too. 

Due to the ongoing long-term costs, we don’t typically recommend using social media as a primary traffic strategy unless you’re willing to invest in it heavily. However, you can still benefit from building up one or two social channels while you focus on other traffic-generation methods.

What about SEO?

It can take several months of publishing high-quality content to gain the authority and trust of search engines. Do your best to build authoritative links when you get the chance and use relevant keywords in your blog posts. 

You should start seeing some real organic search traffic after about a year, and that’s when you can shift more of your focus toward SEO.

Stage 3: Scaling Up

When you have some traffic and you know what your audience wants, the next step is to grow like crazy. 

Keep in mind that you’ll be growing much faster than you did during the last stage, but it will still take time. There’s no silver bullet to online success. 

Scaling up heavily relies on maintaining the existing momentum you’ve already gained. Too many bloggers lose interest in their content or suddenly stop posting on social media at the wrong time.

Instead, follow these optimal strategies. 

1. Continue with your traffic-building strategies 

You’ve got your first 100 true fans. Keeping them around means spending more time on content creation, which gives you less time to spend getting traffic from other sources. But we still recommend continuing the traffic strategies from stage 2—just think a little bit bigger. 

Instead of pitching to write guest posts on super-niche sites, broaden your horizons. You still want to pitch to blogs and websites in your industry, but now’s a great time to go for names with a little more buzz around them. 

Reach out to notable people in your industry on social media, too. Check to see if they do social media takeovers or video interviews to post on Instagram Reels or YouTube. Be sure to feature them on your pages in return. 

2. Create a content schedule

In the previous stage, you started creating content for your blog. Now you need to do it on a regular basis. We don’t recommend trying to write entire posts from scratch on one set day each week. Instead, plan ahead with a content schedule. 

This goes both for blog posts and social media posts. Plus, if you send out email newsletters, you need to make those consistent, too.

All of this planning minimizes the risk that you’ll forget to post—which means your fans might feel like you’ve gone off the grid and forgotten about them. 

A thorough content calendar will help you plan out content for up to a year in advance. At this point, we recommend planning your content for only a few weeks or months so that it can be adjusted based on the feedback you receive from your audience. 

Once you achieve consistent resonance, you can plan your content schedule as far in advance as you’d like. 

Tools like CoSchedule, SproutSocial, and Trello can help you get organized. Some can even post on your behalf.

To gather content ideas, use a tool like AnswerThePublic or the Ahrefs Keyword Generator Tool to find out what questions people are asking about your keywords. 

If you write a food blog for vegetarians, for example, enter a keyword like “best vegetarian recipes.” 

Keyword generator for best vegetarian recipes

AnswerThePublic will spit out several potential blog topics for you. Keyword research tools like this make it so much easier to build a backlog of content ideas for your schedule.

3. Begin monetizing your website

Traffic is nice, but the end goal of a blog business is to produce revenue to stay afloat and thrive.

Here are four ways to monetize your website: 

  • Sell a service: If you plan to offer graphic design, writing, or consulting services, you can do this early on as you build your audience. It doesn’t take a lot of time to create a simple landing page. Put a link to it in your menu and drop it in your emails to subscribers when appropriate. The more traffic you get, the more conversion chances you’ll have.
  • Sell a product: If you already have a product, you can start selling it during the building phase and put some time into improving your conversion rate over time. If not, now is a great time to take what you’ve learned about your audience’s pain points and create a product that aims to solve some of those issues. Most products take months to create and prepare for sales, so the farther ahead you can plan, the better.
  • Google AdSense: If you don’t mind sharing ads on your website, Google AdSense is a straightforward way to monetize your blog—especially if you already have a steady flow of traffic. With AdSense, you add a line of code to your website and Google will use that to place targeted ads on your blog. Advertisers pay to get featured on your blog, and Google pays you a cut.
  • Affiliate links: Affiliate links are one of the most popular ways to monetize a blog. First, you build a relationship with a company in your niche or join an affiliate program. Second, you include a special affiliate link on your website. Each time one of your visitors clicks the link and buys a product, you get paid a commission. You can read more about the different types of affiliate programs here. 

Take a look at our guide to making money from your website to learn more about the pros and cons of different monetization types. 

Stage 4: Mature Growth

Expected time to complete: three to six months

First things first, keep in mind that the lines between stages 3 and 4 are often a bit blurry. 

When you develop a sizable audience (somewhere between 5,000-10,000 subscribers), you should try to monetize your blog as soon as possible. At the same time, you also need to keep growing and continuing to implement the strategies described in Stage 3.

Once you’re making at least $2,000 to $5,000 in gross profits each month, you’ll know you’re ready for Stage 4. 

1.  Focus on Monetization

“Why does it always have to be about the money?”

It might feel inauthentic or greedy to start monetizing as soon as possible, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

For example, if you have tens of thousands of visitors per month and you only focus on content, your visitors might be missing out on products that could benefit them. 

That said, if creating a product is not your focus, there’s another option. Bloggers with a sizable audience are regularly approached for joint ventures (JV).

Here’s how it works:

  • The other party creates a product
  • You provide an audience to sell it to
  • You and the other party split the profits

Once your audience is big enough, you may start getting approached for JVs all the time. Don’t immediately accept the first JV offer you get. Take your time, and only work with someone you trust and respect to provide as much value for your audience as possible. 

Likewise, it’s always a good idea to have a lawyer look over your joint venture contract. You can do this for relatively cheap on sites like Rocket Lawyer.

Let’s say an email marketing company approaches you, seeking a joint venture opportunity. You write a blog about blogging itself, so it’s a perfect match. The company wants to sell its services to your big audience of aspiring bloggers, so you set up a joint venture where you host a series of email marketing webinars on your website, dedicating an entire section of your site to the company. 

The company gets a built-in audience, and you get a cut of the profits it earns from your joint venture. 

Of course, if you’re feeling ambitious, you can create your own email marketing service for your audience of bloggers and reap all of the profits—but not everyone has the time to create great content and great products. 

If you don’t feel ready for these big steps, you can always promote other reputable affiliate offers, and you can also work on making your site “sticky.” A sticky site is one that’s so valuable to readers that they’ll stay for a long time and keep coming back. 

The stickier your website, the more ads your audience will see, and the more your Google AdSense partners will pay you—so remember to link each post to other relevant, valuable posts on your site, and try featuring your top five posts in a sidebar. You can also offer suggestions for additional posts your readers might like.  

Finally, if you have any especially high-performing posts, double down on whatever it is you’re doing right. The inverse is true as well, so try to identify the reason why your worst posts aren’t performing at the same level and fix them. 

2. Hire a Team

If your blog is bringing in a solid stream of income, it’s a great idea to reinvest some of it into a team to maintain its success. 

First, you need to decide which parts of the blog need your attention the most.

For many bloggers, writing the content is something they’re not willing to outsource—so they prefer to hire help for everything else. For others, bringing on another writer, editor, or graphic designer can be a great way to get more content out there and make more of your posts stand out. 

Here are the most common areas that blogs usually hire for:

  • Product support: Tired of helping your customers navigate your product? Hire someone else to take care of that aspect of your blog. 
  • Product development: Need help developing a product your customers will actually buy? Hire someone to do it for you.
  • Answering simple emails: Don’t spend hours answering emails. Hire a virtual assistant to answer emails, comments, and reviews on your behalf. 
  • Graphic design: From infographics for social media to images for your posts, a good graphic designer adds a ton of value. 
  • Web development: Times change, and so do website design best practices. A web developer can keep your site up-to-date.
  • Content strategy development: Overwhelmed at how much content you need to manage? Get someone else to find topics and assess keywords for you. 
  • Content writing: Share the load of writing blogs with a content writer. You can work with independent contractors to save costs. 

Once you’ve identified which parts of your blog require your personal attention, start hiring people to take care of the rest. Just remember to do this slowly and make sure you’re hiring quality people to help you. 

Sure, it’s a bit of legwork upfront, but it’ll probably save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

Stage 5: Maintenance and Defense

At this point, you have a full-fledged business and your blog should be generating enough revenue for you to focus on it full-time. 

In some niches, you will reach this point faster than others. It all depends on your specific audience and the size of your market.

In any case, once you’ve reached success, you can’t sit on it. With blogs, your business is almost always in a state of growth or decline. Obviously, it’s better to focus on growth than let the results of your hard work wither away.

Your main challenge at this point is to continue producing high-quality work in the form of blog content and products. Take care of basic site maintenance, like scanning for dead links, updating content, and removing spammy comments. If you don’t, your audience will notice, and they will leave you and start following one of your competitors. 

Thanks to website ranking tools, competitors will know exactly who you are. Their main goal in life will be to outrank you.Don’t let that happen. 

Since they’re studying you, don’t be shy to study them back. Use sites like Semrush to analyze competitor traffic. Then, work with your product developer and content strategy manager to stay ahead of the game.

Here are some strategies to maintain your success:

1. Keep Hiring

If you’re doing things right, your traffic is only going to keep increasing. To keep up your quality standards and to free up time, you will have to find more reliable people to keep scaling at the same level.

At this stage, you might need to hire some of the following roles:

  • Brand partnerships manager: Someone to help you find and negotiate brand partnerships and other growth opportunities.
  • Video producer and editor: If you want to explore other social media avenues like TikTok and YouTube, you’ll need someone who can create excellent videos for these sites. 
  • SEO specialist: A team member who knows SEO inside and out can make a huge difference in keeping your blog ahead of your competitors.
  • Content/product marketer: You need pros to help you keep spreading the word about your content and products as time passes and technology changes. Marketers are businesspeople who will treat your blog like the business it is. 

The hardest part about maintaining a successful growing business is finding and keeping good people on your team. If you find someone who does their job well, do your best to pay them accordingly even if you could get them to work for you for slightly cheaper.

This not only keeps your team members happy while working, but it also prevents them from wanting to leave in the future. Not having to spend half your time recruiting and hiring will save you much more in the long run than saving a few dollars on salaries.

Finally, make sure you don’t get too excited and hire more people than you can afford. Grow your team slowly and keep plenty of space in your budget. The last thing you want is to hire so many people during a high-profit phase that you have to let half of them go when profits dip.

2. Automate Processes

The great thing about having a significant amount of revenue coming in is that you no longer have to do things you don’t enjoy. Almost all boring parts of running a blog can be automated or delegated with paid tools.

Find software or a person who can automate: 

  • Payroll tasks like paying your employees and generating pay stubs
  • Social media posts
  • Task creation and notifications
  • Note-taking during meetings
  • Sending emails and newsletters
  • RSS feeds
  • File organization
  • Customer support ticket organization
  • Data backups

Most hires should be for a specific task. When you hire someone, don’t just leave them to figure out things by themselves.

You need to create easy-to-follow systems that outline what you’d like your employees to do step-by-step. Yes, it takes time to build standard operating procedures (SOPs), but it’s often time well-spent.

Imagine you take the time to provide your content writers with detailed briefs that outline exactly what you need in each piece.  

First of all, your content writers will enjoy working with you. There’s nothing better than knowing exactly what to do with a piece. 

Second, your content will feel uniform in a non-boring way. Readers will know what type of information and tips to expect when they read your blog. Readers appreciated this type of continuity. 

Third, your writers won’t email you with questions that can stall the progress in your content creation pipeline. They’ll already know exactly what to do. 

Although initial training will take time, it will save you more time in the long run that you’d otherwise waste correcting mistakes and fighting with conflicting work habits. 

3. Audit Content Routinely 

Content goes out of style pretty quickly these days. Information that’s more than a few years old is less likely to be relevant to your readers, which means Google won’t rank your site as high. 

That’s why conducting routine content audits is so important. Once or twice a year, you should review every piece of content on your site. Choose what to keep, what to update, what to consolidate, and what to delete. 

A good practice here is to use a website scanning tool to identify broken links and low-performing pages. Create a spreadsheet and build an inventory of every URL on your website. Include fields like: 

  • Purpose of the page
  • Page title
  • Content type
  • Keywords
  • Current ranking of target keyword
  • Backlinks 
  • Funnel stage
  • Date updated or originally published
  • Author

This catalog will guide your first audit and all the ones that come after. You’ll update it during every audit, and maybe even in between audits.

4. SEO

Now’s the time to hire an SEO expert if you haven’t already. SEO is both an art and a science. It involves keeping track of things like:

  • Link building: Reaching out to other websites to build backlinks to your website
  • Keyword targeting: Finding the best keywords that each content topic should rank for 
  • Site speed: Maintaining your site so that load speed is three seconds or less
  • Alt text: Adding alt text to every single image on your site
  • CTAs: Making sure your calls-to-action are relevant and lead to the right places
  • FAQs: Adding SEO-optimized questions as FAQs at the bottom of most pages

Though it’s possible to improve your site’s SEO yourself, an SEO expert is one of the most valuable assets you can have in your arsenal. 

Conclusion 

Growing a successful blog is not something that can be done quickly without taking the time to do a ton of things right—and a good deal of luck. 

That said, if you know how to use the right tactics at the right time—and you actually do it—you can grow your blog methodically and take most of the luck out of the equation.

Still, at the end of the day, the bulk of your success will rely on your audience, so do your best to create an excellent reader persona—and keep it updated.