Some time ago one of my sites crossed the one million monthly page views mark. The screenshot from Google Analytics for the month of August is below.
While I know there are thousands of other websites out there with much higher traffic, reaching this milestone made me quite happy, as this is a website I built from scratch (i.e., I still remember when I registered the domain).
Below you’ll find the eight most important lessons I learned while building this site (I won’t reveal the URL for privacy reasons, but the useful stuff is below anyway):
1. Choose Your Niche Wisely
Most people who read this blog probably think it is my largest and most profitable website. Well, it’s not. The reason? Niches like blogging, make money online, SEO or Internet marketing are pretty small when compared with mainstream stuff like gadgets, movies and television, cars, health and so on. That is why my “money” sites are placed in those niches, while I write on Daily Blog Tips mostly because I have fun doing it.
2. Find A Unique Angle
While picking the right, relatively large niche is important, I wouldn’t recommend you to start yet another tech or cars blog, where you would get most of your content from other, larger blogs and sites. Most mainstream niches are crowded, and if you just write about what everyone else is writing, after them, people will have no reason to visit your site. The solution? You need to find a unique angle. You need to come up with an idea that will differentiate both your site and your content from others in the same niche. Not easy, but possible.
3. Repeat Visitors Matter
There’s one metric that very few people pay attention to, yet I believe it’s one of the best indicators of the potential of a website: repeat visitors. Basically if the amount of repeat visitors on your site is increasing over time it means that you are converting some of your casual visitors into loyal ones, and that your overall traffic will increase overtime. If the amount of repeat visitors is not growing, on the other hand, it means that your content is failing to engage visitors to the point that they will remember your site a couple of days after visiting it. In this case you need to rethink your strategy.
4. Quality Over Quantity
If you need to choose between quality and quantity, go with quality. In order words, you’ll get much better results publishing one top quality article per week than publishing five average ones. It’s the quality of your content that will increase the amount of repeat visitors you get, after all, and the amount of backlinks you’ll receive from other sites (more on that below).
5. Google Is Your Friend
Whether you like it or not, Google is the main traffic driver around the web, so you better befriend it and use its help to grow your site. This means that you need to understand how search engines work (e.g., how Google crawls the web, how it decides which websites to serve when people search for stuff, etc.) in order to optimize your content, pages, and to promote your articles in a way that will increase their exposure with search engines. It will take some effort from your end, but the results are certainly worth it.
6. Research and Gather Data
When it comes to Search Engine Optimization and to promoting your website in general, you’ll need to research and gather data (as opposed to trusting your gut or intuition). That is, you’ll need to understand what are the hot topics inside your niche, what search terms are sending you more traffic, what visitors are more likely to stay on your site and so on. With the numbers on your hand you’ll be able to make much better decisions, both in terms of content and promotion.
7. You Can’t Do It Alone
While there are many people who manage to grow large sites alone, I found that getting some help along the way made all the difference. On most sites I have these days I focus exclusively on the strategy/promotion aspects, while leaving the web design/content development to other people. Sure, you’ll need to spend some money, but this is one of the most efficient ways to grow any website (and any business, for the matter).
8. Slow and Steady Wins the Race
It took me around three years to go from zero to one million monthly page views. During that time frame there was no single event that catapulted my site’s popularity, no large spike in traffic. It was a gradual and slow process, where every month I would promote the site a bit more, do some guest posts and so on. All that mattered to me was to see the traffic numbers increasing, albeit slowly, month after month.
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