How I grew my college blog from 0-1000 views in a month

I’ve been blogging for about 4 years now. I bought my domain 2016 but I never published any content.

I always knew I loved to write and wanted to create content but it was hard to even figure out where to start, and at the time if it felt like I was entering the game too late because so many people had already grown huge blogs, so who would even notice me?

When I got to college I decided to get over my excuses and just start. I had had the domain for years (that I was paying for) and not doing much with.

As I started to take my blog more seriously I would read all the “how to start a blog” post on Pinterest. I would spend hours learning from just about every top blogger that was.

I learned quickly about the basics of setting up an attractive website, how to format my blog, and how to use keywords so my blog can be found on google.

All of that knowledge was great but I still wasn't getting much traffic to my blog. After a year just receiving 200-400 viewers on my blog post, I felt frustrated and stuck and really started to wonder, was it my content? Was it my niche? Was it my writing?

Turns out it was none of those things.

I finally hit 1k monthly sessions and over 2k pageviews by implementing these strategies.

Writing more content

For the year that I decided to take my blog seriously, I would write one new post a week. That alone felt like a huge undertaking since I was a full-time college student, with a job.

Every post that I had read about growing your blog didn’t mention just how much blog post a month was enough so I stuck with a number that was doable for me.

Looking back I don’t regret that because it gave me the momentum to start my blog but I’m gonna give you some hard truths. If you want your blog to be found you need to have a lot of content on your site.

You see having more content on your site isn’t just about looking like you take blogging more seriously, it’s about giving people more opportunities to find your content.

If you’re trying to get 1000 viewers on your blog with only 10 blogs post it’s going to be much harder because approximately 100 people would need to view each post. But say you have over 30 blog posts on your site then you make that number even smaller for the number of people who need to find you for you to reach your goal.

The average amount of posts on-site that ranks well, is 50 posts. So if you’re trying to grow your blogging numbers, before you start going heavy on promotion (which I’ll talk about in a sec) you need to focus on getting more good content on your site.

Create a content calendar and see how many blog posts you can write in a week realistically and start scheduling them for a month ahead, even if you can write 7 new blog posts a month, it will help, trust me.

While you’re writing more content you don’t want to forget about your audience. Really look into yourself and ask yourself what do you know that you think someone else might be searching for or what perspective do you have that can help people?

It's all about writing searchable content, which means writing a post that answers questions instead of focusing all on your life.

Posting every day on Pinterest

If you’re trying to get into the blogging game then you need to focus your marketing efforts on Pinterest. Pinterest is one of the only social platforms made for bloggers. This means that people on Pinterest are more likely to click on your content because they are there to find answers.

I wouldn’t recommend focusing your efforts on any other social media at first other than Pinterest.

When I first started promoting my blog on Pinterest there were a lot of hoops to jump through. In order to be seen you needed to be apart of group boards and pin about 30 times a day and a bunch of other nonsense, but lucky for you if you’re starting now, Pinterest has updated its algorithm so you don’t need to do any of that.

So all the posts you may have seen about joining group boards and all that is irrelevant for 2020. My Pinterest strategy that has increased my traffic by over 100 percent is that I post one “fresh pin” (newly designed pin) every day. It’s okay if you miss a day or two but your goal is to post as frequently as possible without being spammy.

P.S: Fresh pins just mean a new pin design, you don’t have to write a new blog post for each new pin. Most of my blog posts have over 5 pins on Pinterest!

Here’s exactly how I did that:

I have a content calendar so I know what blog post I’m writing for the month and I take one day each week to create 12 Pinterest pins (because Pinterest only lets you schedule up to two weeks ahead)

I would create pins based on topics that were coming up on my blog so that I would have that pin ready once my blog post was ready and I wouldn’t need to keep switching from writing blog posts to creating new pins.

Creating my pins in one day really helps because it helps my blog to grow so much that its worth adding that as a part of my blogging routine.

Here are the steps I take to creating each pin:

I search for my pin topic in the Pinterest search bar: I do this to see what types of pins are popular for that topic and how I can format my title so it’s more appealing to users
I use Canva to create the pin using custom dimensions of 600x1000 pixels because I find that the Canva Pinterest template is much smaller than I would like
I do a squint test: I zoom out of the template at 25% to make sure I can read the text even its small because most Pinterest users are on their phones!

So that's so how I go about coming up with pin design but I would also recommend creating a strong brand with your pins because it really helps people to recognize your blog, so I save the colors, fonts, and elements that I like to use on one pin and then I use that pin to create new pin designs using the same features.

I don’t stick with one Pinterest template because it gets boring but I make sure to use similar fonts and styles so my audience can recognize my pins from others.

Follow me on Pinterest for more ideas!

I created a workflow

This the last big change that helped me to finally start reaching my blogging goals. As you can see I really hammered down on a Pinterest process that helped me to create over 30 pins for the month but that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Since I’ve had more time at home, I have a schedule where I write a blog post with is Mondays, I write about 3 blog posts in a day and on Tuesdays I edit and schedule those blog post and then I take a break to do other things on Wednesday and on Thursday I create 5 pins.

This process has helped me to increase my input because I don’t have to worry about what I’m supposed to be doing.

Last year when I really wanted to grow my blog I would spend hours reading blog posts, tweaking just about everything on my site, and doing a bunch of busy work but this year I finally cracked the code.

All you need in order to grow is good content, so something that is well researched and provides real answers, and then you need to aggressively promote that content, hence Pinterest.

So instead of trying to do everything at first like growing your email list, doing SEO, and creating a bunch of freebies. All you need to do is make sure your website is easy to navigate and nice to look at and start uploading content.

You will get to do all that other stuff but that the stuff that isn’t as important so you can prioritize them over having good content on your site and lots of it.

Start by following this:

Create a content calendar of all the blog post you want to write for that month
Set a schedule of when you will write those post
Pick your branding elements for your pins
Schedule your pins using Pinterest by clicking on the plus sign on your profile, uploading a pin and choosing “upload later”

You don't need a fancy course to start with and you don’t need to invest in any Pinterest scheduling platform all you need to do is to be ready to put in the work to write more content and promote yourself. You’ll get there eventually but it takes time!