This weekend, my little blog reached a milestone of having hit 2 million views.
Now I know that this may not seem like much to some people, I'm sure the top blogs achieve that within a year and its taken me 3 years to achieve it - but still, it feels quite surreal to think that people have clicked onto read my ramblings over 2 MILLION times now.
I go through ups and downs with blogging - sometimes I love it, sometimes it causes me stress, sometimes I fall dramatically out of love with it and vow to never blog again! - if my blog and I were a movie couple, we would without a doubt be Bridget Jones & Mark Darcy...we have so many fallings out and misunderstandings but at the end of the day...we were made for each other!
But the purpose of this post is not to brag about milestones or wax lyrical about blogging, it's to simply share some tips that have helped me to reach this figure.
I had been hovering around the 1.5 million views mark for months and months, the increase was a painfully slow process - I was averaging around 1500 views per day (more if I had a competition running).
Whenever I published a post, my promotional efforts would be to send out a tweet about it once or twice on the day it went live, to post about it on my blogs Facebook page and to promote in 2 or 3 Facebook blogging groups - occasionally I would submit it to Digg or StumbleUpon but not very often.
However, over the last 3 months I have seen a MASSIVE increase in my pageviews...and from then on, the climb to 2 million hits was far quicker.
My page views increased from 1500 per day on average, to around 5000 per day (without any competitions running) - I was still posting to Facebook just once per day and still promoting in the 3 Facebook blogging groups, but I wasn't submitting to StumbleUpon or Digg at all due to time constraints - all I did was change ONE thing.
And it couldn't have been more simple.
After chatting with Aby of YouBabyMeMummy about how much blog promotion is enough, I realised I was being far too coy with my promotional efforts.
So instead of sending out one or two tweets, I started using SocialOomph to send the tweets out on an hourly basis - SocialOomph is a fantastically easy scheduler for Twitter that I cannot recommend highly enough - all you need to do is write your tweet, select when you want the first one to go out and then select from a drop down menu how often you want to repeat that tweet.
I select Hourly...you then have the option to enter the maximum number of times you want the tweet to be sent out...but if you type 0 then it goes out indefinitely.
This is what I do.
I used to worry that tweeting my posts so frequently would annoy people and result in mass unfollows but actually I have had very few, infact my follower numbers increase slightly everyday - I'm more active now so it makes sense that would happen.
After a few weeks, I simply go in to Social Oomph and change the tweets around - I pause any that I feel have had enough promotion for now and need a break, lower the frequency of tweets on some, etc - but I make sure that promotional tweets are going out for various posts every few minutes.
And this is what has resulted in my traffic more than doubling over the last few months.
It is that simple!
I don't have millions of Twitter followers, I was on 8,500 when I started doing this - I'm just over 9,000 now - so you don't need masses of followers for this to help your stats.
If you're worried about bugging people, just try it for a day or so and see what you think - thats what I did but I soon found that the increase in stats was more than worth the potential annoyance to some people who could easily unfollow me if they wish to.
I hope this tip has been helpful, lately I have had so many requests for more detailed posts on working with brands and blog monetization and so I will be running a quick & free course in the new year to offer some help, advice and support on a more personal level.
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