Publishing is Just the Beginning: Promoting Your First Post
This is where the fun really starts.
How many page views might I expect to get?
That depends entirely on how much you write, and can also depend on how hard you work to promote your material. It also depends on the blog you write on (check with your editor). Posts that are popular on social media can get anywhere from 500 to 50,000 pageviews (or more) in a 24 hour period. Some additional incentives are provided for this type of promotion. Posts that are properly crafted using the best practices of search engine optimization can receive hundreds or thousands of hits per month on an ongoing basis. And over time, sites that become leading voices in their niches can provide a living to their editoral teams.
Fact: The standing record for pageviews on a single post is 1,000,000 in 24 hours.
Fact: The standing record for monthly search traffic on a single post is approximately 30,000 pageviews per month. Search terms: “electric cars”.
The 3 Sources of Internet Traffic
Before trying to get traffic to your post, you have to know where traffic typically comes from. There are only 3 sources of internet traffic:
- Search Engines
- Social Media (Digg, , Y!Buzz, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.)
- Direct Links
The most important thing you can do before mastering the techniques for maximizing each of these is simply to tell other writers you’ve written a post.
How to Tell Others About Your Post
Please take a moment to read our Communication Tools page, which will describe to you all the tools IM has available for writer communication. Each has a particular utility to us, and it’s important to understand the finer points of each.
Ways to Share Links
There are several ways to share links by using an IM client like Skype, or through the communication channels on social media sites (eg. StumbleUpon ‘Shares’, Facebook profile updates, Twitter, Google Buzz, etc.).
Background
There are three major aspects to social media traffic:
- Getting your post submitted (by a power user) to the right social media site.
- Getting users to your post from the social media site. This usually depends on the title, subject matter, submitter, and viral time-limitations (eg 24 hours for sites like Digg.com).
- Getting users to vote for and recommend your story.
Once a user has landed on your post, everything depends on the title, quality of the image at the top, and the hook, or first sentence/paragraph, as well as the overall quality of the work (very imporant for virality).
What Do I Do Now?
Now that your first post is polished, published, and shared with the rest of the writer community, it’s time to decide how hard you want to hit the gas pedal. Blogging can be a relatively addictive sport if pursued correctly, and once you start to see pageviews flowing into your posts you may be surprised to see how eager you are to grow that number.
The most important thing to understand about being a successful blogger is that everything flows from writing a lot of high-quality content.
If we go back to our 3 sources of internet traffic, we can see how this applies to each:
- Search Engines: the more published posts you have, the more search traffic will trickle in.
- Social Media: the more published posts you have out each day, the more likely you’ll get something to pop (go popular).
- Direct Links: the more consistently fresh a blog’s content stream is, the more likely readers will come back through RSS feeds or even better, by typing in the site’s domain name.
The bulk of the how-to part of this is covered under two different sections of the training blog: Writing Great Content and Mastering Content Promotion.
Before spending too much time studying the finer points of content promotion, it might be best to knock out a few posts to get a feel for IM’s editorial guidelines and the WordPress interface (if you aren’t familiar with it). Once you have a few posts under your belt, come back to the training blog to dive into the rest of the material.
Haven’t been overloaded yet?