How to Start a Blog From Scratch Course Day Five

Hey, there Day Five. There’s a bunch of stuff to learn today. These things will help you start with a plan and keep moving forward until you see the results you want. Grab some coffee or some strong black tea. We like Oolong. You’re going to learn a few strategies and figure out where you want to start. Let’s go. This task takes 1 hour. But only because you will be setting up your social accounts too. If these are already up and running for your blog, you can skip those steps. Here’s the outline.

1. How to Get Traffic
2. Setting Up Socials
3. Using Facebook and Instagram for Community

Starting a Blog | How to Get Traffic

Consistency: Remember back on Day Two when we talked about Blog Post ideas and your Main Topic for your Blog? Think about this. If Google is looking for a website all about Cars, will it choose the website with 100 articles about Cars ( all with different keywords of course; car mechanics, car style, new cars, car colors, car history, etc.) OR the website with 2 articles about cars, 5 articles about recipes, 3 articles about Christmas, and 4 articles on homeschooling your kids? Answer… Google will pick the website that knows what it’s about- Cars.

Frequency: Search Engines (both Pinterest and Google) like frequency. They like new posts, regularly. Make sure you’re posting once a week if you can. Major websites are posting daily. While it’s irrational to believe you can go up against competition that big, getting a regular schedule of posting will help you get traffic. 

SEO: We talked about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) back on Day Three, when we mentioned the Yoast SEO plugin. And while SEO is very complex, the Yoast plugin will help you make sure that every single blog post is optimized to get found by google. Here’s the strategy. The Yoast SEO plugin will let you know it’s perfect with two green dots. Always aim for the two green dots.

You do this by putting your chosen keyword in:

1. 1. The Title
   2. The Post (mentioned several times)
   3. The Yoast SEO plugin as the Focus Keyword
   4. In the Metadata paragraph in the Yoast SEO plugin.
   5. As a tag ( and all related keywords as tags also)

You can grab the Yoast SEO plugin by going into your Bluehost account or your WordPress admin page. Go to Plugins- click Add New- then search for Yoast SEO. Once found, click Install. 

Starting a Blog | Using Pinterest for Traffic

Pinterest drives more than half of our traffic. The way it works is that you can share posts directly from your website and then traffic is driven to those posts. We highly (highly) recommend the course Pinterest Traffic Avalanche to learn all the ins and out. It will be worth it. It was the one thing that helped us go from 25k in traffic to 100k in traffic in less than a year. 

• Create a Pinterest Business Account.
• Turn on Rich Pins. 
• Claim your blog website address. Go to Your Account- Settings- Claim- and add your blog address.
• Create pins in Canva using the Pinterest template
• Add the Pin you’ve created for your post into your blog post. So, you and others can pin directly from your post.

Pinterest Strategies

You should create at least 5 different pins for each blog post you have. You can use Canva to make sure your pins each look different. Brainstorm different ways to title your post so that the pins all have different words. ( Do this every few months for your posts. Pinterest loves new pins.)

• Pin at least 1 brand-new Pin to your boards a day.
• Do not pin all of your new pins in one day. You will get more traction if you slowly add a new pin or two each day. This signals to Pinterest that you “always have something new” and they will make sure you get seen more.
• Create Boards that reflect all of your interests but at least 10 that reflect that topic of the blog.
• Pin other people’s content. In the beginning, when you don’t have too many posts to promote, you should try to aim for 50% of your content, and 50% of other people’s content. This will later change to 80/20 as you get more posts to share.
• Create an Idea Pin once a week
• Tailwind. The EASIEST Way to manage all the Pinterest stuff is to get Tailwind. This will allow you to upload pins ahead of time, write their descriptions, add a title, schedule it to a board, and share it with Tribes. Tailwind Tribes will help you get you traffic because people in your tribe will share your pins with their followers, and then the snowball begins. We also love that this can be automated, so when we’re on vacation…we don’t have to touch our business account. We can just schedule everything ahead of time.

Starting a Blog | Using Google Web Stories for Traffic

As Google moves into the image search engine game, Web Stories are something you want to have in your arsenal. These multi-image automated pins are prioritized by google and can ramp up a lot of traffic for a short period of time. We recommend trying to create at least one a week to get some momentum going. You can grab the Web Stories Plugin for your WordPress site to get started. Check out Our Web Stories to get an idea of how these look. 

Starting a Blog | Setting Up Socials

Pick a Social Media Account to Master: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and LinkedIn are all social account platforms that allow you to share blog posts, product launches, ideas, and discounts.

Pro Tip: Choose 1, and only one, to master. While you will want accounts on ALL of the platforms, so that you can set up the automated posting from your blog (on WordPress, through the Jetpack plugin), you can’t do everything at once. Picking one platform to be amazing at, can create a community of like-minded people that want what you have to offer. The main social accounts to consider are below. 

• Facebook – to build community, share posts, stories, sales
• Instagram – to share pictures, candid shots of products, travel, fashion, food
• Twitter – to chat about topics in 280 characters or less
• LinkedIn – to share articles, and connect with other business people
• YouTube – to share videos, reviews, DIY projects, un-boxings, etc. 
• TikTok – to share short-form videos of any kind. 

Starting a Blog | Using Facebook for Community

If you’re already using Facebook, by all means, USE it to grow your traffic. Create a Facebook Business Page. You will connect this to the WordPress Jetpack plugin so that your posts automatically post to Facebook. You should also do the following. Find Facebook Pages to follow that talk about your topic. Engaging and reading posts on these pages will give you an idea of what your followers are looking for. Join Facebook Groups meant for bloggers. Here are a few to request to join.

• Blogging Boost
• Connecting Bloggers
• Bloggers Supporting Bloggers
• Stumbles and Shares
• Bloggers’ Social Media Support

So, there you go. Some significant ways to get traffic on your blog. Tomorrow we settle into our last day. Day Six: Motivation and Mindset. The big kahuna. The things that will keep you going and focused and make your success inevitable.

Return to How to Start a Blog Course Day Four

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