Get More Blog Post Views: 7 Must-Have Resources & A Content Outline Process
So you want to get more blog post views?
And you’ve already found out it’s not as easy as people make out.
That’s good. It’s the first step.
They say the first 100 views are the hardest. But why aim for just 100. And who are “they” anyway? For the sake of setting a target, let’s aim for 1,000 views on your blog to start.
In this post, you’ll learn several techniques, tools, and resources that help you grow your blog.
For first-time writers, this may seem daunting. So my promise to you is that it’s not that hard.
Want proof? Five years ago, I didn’t know what content marketing was.
Today, I’ve just surpassed my 5 millionth blog view.
How do I get 1,000 views on my blog?
People often get hung up on generating the first 1,000 views. The reality is that this is just a vanity metric.
For most marketers, what is more important is getting a predictable number of views over time. And then profiting from those by converting readers to customers. This could be to sign up for your product, click through an ad, or the long game by signing up to your email list.
For example, instead of rushing to 1,000 views in the first week, wouldn’t you rather gain 500 views per month for the next five years?
You’ve probably heard of SEO. If not, it stands for search engine optimisation. And that phrase on its own is pretty scary.
I had no idea.
Until I did.
Why do I mention SEO?
Because this is the long game for most of the blog posts you will write.
Side note: Sure, there are many other reasons to write and other ways to get noticed. But, if you want to get more blog post views over time, search engines remain the largest source of information and the largest audience to dip into.
Throughout this post, I’ll drop in some tips and processes that will help you rank high(er) on search engines. No technical stuff. I promise.
But here’s the kicker.
SEO is a virtuous circle.
Nobody is going to link back to your content until someone sees it. It’s not going to get on Google’s radar unless you do some things right.
But that’s okay because we start with some basic content promotion strategies to get your blog post noticed.
How do I get my blog post noticed?
As Google is the largest search engine, therefore the largest information source, in the world, we’re going to focus on building domain authority. And yes, the more advanced content marketers at the back will already have tons of technical ways of doing this, but we’re going to focus on obtaining organic links from people outside of Google.
Because if you already ranked high on Google for everything, you wouldn’t be reading this post.
The beauty of this process is that you gain links to your content — which in turn builds authority so Google will start to rank you higher — and you’re promoting your content so you are literally getting noticed and getting more views.
The key to getting your blog post noticed is to write high-quality content.
This can be a throwaway statement if you’re not invested.
High-quality means different things to different people. For the sake of defining high-quality in this post, let’s go with:
“Creating the most comprehensive version of what is available online.”
This is my mantra. I say it about 500 times on The Juice Podcast.
There are a ton of things that go into writing high-quality content. I go into detail (6 hours worth) of this in my blogging course: How To Write Blog Posts That Get 500,000 Views.
To steal an example from the course, we’ll use an informational blog post. Let’s say someone is searching for “Microsoft Teams alternatives” on Google. That’s the topic we’ve identified to write about. What must we do to ensure “high-quality” (and make sure we get more blog views)?
For informational blog posts, this means creating the most comprehensive version of what is available online. When someone finds your blog post on Google (or anywhere), making sure they don’t need to do another search is your highest priority.
When someone stays active on your page for a long time, search engines view this as an indicator that it’s good content.
The opposite of this is poor quality content where readers don’t hang around and press the dreaded back button on the browser. This tells search engines that the content was poor or didn’t satisfy the search intent.
Why mention search intent?
The relationship between search intent and being noticed by Google is intimate. When you include answers to queries people ask on Google, you stand a better chance than fluking a high ranking for a keyword.
How do I get my blog noticed by Google?
Let’s start by setting your blog up to get noticed by Google. Rather than writing a post then shoehorning keywords in and trying SEO “hacks”, start by creating an outline based on the information Google provides you.
We can get this information through sites like Answer The Public or tools like Clearscope.
But my favourite way (and most successful) is to go to Google itself. This way you can start with your keyphrase and navigate around based on suggestions and related searches.
- Open an incognito window and start by inputting the topic you’re going to write about.
- Check the People also ask section for queries that are genuinely related to what you’re going to write about. If it’s relevant, include this query in your post.
- Get more queries by expanding the terms that are relevant and you want to use in your post.
- Add these to your blog outline as H2, H3, or H4 headings.
- Next, scroll to the very bottom of the search results and do the same with the Related searches section.
- Put the queries in an order that helps your blog post flow.
Using these queries to form your outline does several things:
- Ensures you create the most comprehensive article possible.
- Increases your word count (not the goal but long-form posts do generally rank higher).
- Provides a guide for you to fill in the blanks when writing the bulk of your copy.
- Increases the chance of getting a featured snippet.
It might be your sole strategy to try and nab a featured snippet.
When keyphrases are so competitive (lots of sites with high domain authority already rank for the term), answering queries in more detail than competitors can lead to you displacing them.
For example, your primary keyphrase might be project management software. But you can see that established sites already occupy the entire first page of Google.
Instead of writing about only to optimise for the term “project management software”, see what the frequently asked questions are when people search “project management software”.
In this example, the Related searches section give us this:
Immediately, we can include project management software specifically for Microsoft and project management software for individuals rather than companies.
In this high-level example, you might want to change your primary keyphrase. When you search “best project management software for individuals”, there are several People also ask questions we might want to include in that post.
Once you’ve gathered the queries you need to answer, you can start filling in the blanks. My personal advice at this stage is to write the most comprehensive post you can.
This means:
- Getting quotes from expert sources.
- Finding original research to back up statements.
- Explaining your points in great detail.
- When you could type “and more”, tell the reader what the more is so they don’t have to go and search elsewhere.
If you love writing blogs but you’re not a natural writer, read The Art of the Click. It changed my life (and my writing).
Outside of copy, the best blog posts also have images, videos, and tweets embedded. Use these to help the reader gain a visual understanding of what you’re explaining.
There are also the added benefits of breaking up the text so the reader doesn’t feel overwhelmed and the opportunity to sprinkle in some keywords into your image titles and alt text.
Writing an outline based on what Google provides is the most important part of getting more blog views from search engines. I create a live outline in module two of my blogging course: How To Write Blog Posts That Get 500,000 Views.
When you think your post is ready, pause. Don’t hit publish yet. There are some things we can do to optimise your post before we jump into promotion.
How do you rank higher on Google?
Optimisation is the name of the game.
By using the process above, we have focused on passage authority. Google (and we must assume other search engines do or will) ranks passages rather than just pages now.
So, by writing passage by passage to best answer our searchers’ queries, we have written comprehensive passages that make up a comprehensive post.
There are several other things we can do here. And you don’t need to be a technical SEO to succeed. All the examples I use in my course (and have used throughout my content marketing career) have been created with my own SEO understanding — and I’m no techie!
If you’re a WordPress user, there are three free checks you can undertake each time you publish a new blog post.
Yoast
If you’re new to SEO, Yoast uses a traffic light system to make recommendations for SEO changes you can make.
You don’t have to make all these changes but they sure help tick off some minor optimisation techniques.
Common red lights include:
- Overusing your target keyphrase
- Underusing your target keyphrase
- Not using your keyphrase in above the fold areas (title, first paragraph, meta description)
- Lack of keyphrases in your image alt text
- No internal linking
These won’t guarantee you get #1 on Google but they help you make sure you’re doing the basics.
Rank Math
Rank Math is another free WordPress plugin that goes a little deeper than Yoast. After a while, you’ll start to have fewer red lights on Yoast. When that happens, switch to Rank Math.
You can see above that we have another traffic light system. This time we have more areas that can be flagged. Follow the same process and tick off as many items as you think are helpful.
WordPress block editor
When you move to the latest version of WordPress, you get access to the block editor.
Not only does it help you format your posts easily, it pulls up specific things you can change per heading or image.
All you need to do is go through the available options and fill them out. You can be clever around what you include to make sure you optimise for keywords.
Images, in particular, are important to optimise. On the Mio blog, when an image appears on Google, it gets clicked 70% of the time. And where does the image lead? The blog post!
Outside of optimising our passages, you can also spend time on page and site authority. This is where more technical SEO comes in handy.
How can I improve my SEO?
We must optimise both our site for domain authority and each page for page authority.
While I believe that the best and most comprehensive content gets rewarded by search engines, you need its attention in the first place.
The answer to How can I improve my SEO is not as simple as dropping a few instructions. SEO takes time and often concentrated efforts from cross-functional teams.
To improve your overall SEO, here are some things you can start right away:
- Build links to your content.
- Speed up your website.
- Refresh your existing content.
- If you’re a new site, publish more content.
- Hire a technical SEO consultant.
While these will help in the long run, the #1 thing you can do to improve SEO over time is to become an authority in your niche.
How do you do this?
Create comprehensive content. Trust the process.
Still feeling lost with this process? If video content is more your thing, How To Write Blog Posts That Get 500,000 Views is literally a video version of the process and real-time coming together of a blog post.
How can I increase my blog traffic fast?
If you are after quick traffic, there are many content promotion techniques you can use.
These options are useful when you have an article released in timing with an event or piece of news. While the content may be designed to rank over time, there’s no reason why we can’t promote it elsewhere now.
For superfast blog traffic, marketers often pay for adverts on Google or social media.
Outside of paid advertising, there are so many places to promote your blog and get your first views.
How do I promote my blog?
There are literally thousands of places to promote your blog. Any website is an opportunity.
While your blog designed to rank high on Google is doing its thing, try out these to boost immediate numbers (and gain links and shares from those who see it):
- Personal Twitter
- Learn how to craft a viral Twitter thread
- Company Twitter
- Ask colleagues to share on Twitter
- Personal LinkedIn
- Company LinkedIn
- Ask colleagues to share on LinkedIn
- LinkedIn groups
- Facebook groups
- Email newsletter
- Email contributors
- Email people or brands mentioned
- Medium (with canonical link)
- Answer Quora questions
- Find a niche forum
- Create a promotional video
- Use as a sales enablement asset
- Internal linking
- Warm link building relationships
- Write a guest post on a site with higher domain authority
- Add to show notes on a podcast
- Repurpose as en eBook
How do I improve my blog and increase traffic?
While your work through these promotion strategies and optimisation techniques, make sure you have access to these seven resources:
These are quite literally the tools of my trade, and the process I use with all of them combined.
1 — Course: How To Write Blog Posts That Get 500,000 Views
In 2021, I decided to buck to peer pressure of:
“You should make a course of your blogging process.”
I live recorded the entire writing, editing, and promoting process of two blog posts.
Contents include:
- Finding a topic
- Writing an outline
- Writing the post
- Editing your own work
- Optimising for search engines
- Promoting your masterpiece
- Afterparty
Throughout 2022, 22 people can get 22% off my course using the discount code 2022.
Here’s module 4 as a taster:
It takes six hours of your time, or you can watch it at 1.5x speed if you’re in a rush 🙂
2 — Tool: Hemingway
As used in the course above, the Hemingway app makes my copy better every single day.
This doesn’t mean I use Hemingway for every post. But, through using it every day for the last five years, the sloppy copy mistakes have almost left my writing. It’s rather nice when I do shift my copy into Hemingway and there are only a few things to tidy up.
For every writer I hire, I insist they use Hemingway before submitting their work. If it’s obvious they haven’t, I send it back! There is no excuse for copy that isn’t sharp and flowing.
3 — Tool: Grammarly
This won’t be groundbreaking news to seasoned writers but nailing your spelling and grammar is the first part of being a great writer and a great marketer.
Don’t leave it up to your editor. Do use the tools available.
You can get Grammarly for free or opt for the paid version to get access to features like:
- Clarity-focused sentence rewrites
- Tone adjustments
- Plagiarism detection
- Word choice
- Formality level
Read this review of Grammarly to decide whether you need to buy the paid version.
4 — Plugin: Yoast
Recommended for beginner SEOs and writers who’ve not focused on optimising their posts for search engines. The traffic light system makes it easy for WordPress users to do the basics well.
Unless your company is paying for it, stick to the free version then move onto Rank Math.
5 — Plugin: Rank Math
When you’ve mastered Yoast and it’s natural to do the things it flags, move on to Rank Math. As mentioned above, it gives you even more on-page SEO items to check off as you move through your post.
The free version is great; the paid version is another level. You can use multiple keyphrases per page and it even suggests where you can add internal links.
6 — Tool: WordPress block editor
Lots of people tell me they haven’t moved to WordPress block editor because they love the old version or it looks too fiddly to learn.
News flash! It’s the most intuitive WordPress ever. And that’s coming from someone who uninstalls an app if it doesn’t do what he wants it to do immediately.
Drafting and editing in blocks not only formats your post better than ever, it gives you more opportunities to optimise. Choose from different “blocks” like paragraphs, headings, images, videos, lists, etc., and assemble your blog better than you ever have.
Sure, there are a bunch of other great CMS out there too. For me, switching is hard. I’ve only ever known WordPress and when I’ve tried Squarespace et al, everything has felt clunky and restrictive.
You do you. But, if you’re a WordPress user, upgrade to block editor.
7 — Book: Content Chemistry
If you’ve ever read one of my content marketing strategy posts before, you’ll be familiar with me name-dropping Andy Crestodina and his book, Content Chemistry. It really is the key to the city when it comes to content marketing.
For the advice, processes, and tactics in this book, you’d expect to pay $1,000s in consultancy fees. If you do nothing else after reading this post, do yourself a favour and buy this book.
Conclusion
Getting more blog post views is hard.
If it wasn’t, content marketers would get paid peanuts.
And sure, some still do. Because they won’t change their process.
Use the tactics, tools, and processes laid out in this post to take your dwindling blog post to the top of Google.
If you’re stuck, reach out to me on Twitter. My DMs are always open. Just say you came from here 🙂