Introduction
I used to run a blog on surajondev.com, but it was WordPress-hosted. As the blog grows, I need more control over the design, structure, and analytics, but WordPress is limited. So I let that domain expire and deleted the blog(I should have preferred to migrate; that was my mistake ), thinking that I would buy the same domain from Namecheap and continue, but even after waiting for 6 months. I couldn’t get the domain to list.
So, I dumped the idea of buying the same domain. I purchased the surajon.dev. I seriously started posting articles a few months ago. I started posting new articles and previously published articles from WordPress. Not only did I just copy and paste the content, but I also improved it for today. In a month, I was able to grow the blog to 4K visits. Below you can see the details of the analytics.
Today, I am going to list down the methods that I used to increase blog growth in one month.
SEO Optimization
I primarily connect to Google and Bing search engines. From there, after the scan, this platform provides you with a bunch of suggestions that you can start implementing on your website. You can also run a manual scan from Site Scan on Bing.
I also used the Ahrefs free version to identify further issues in my website. I tried to fix all those. I was able to get more impressions and a better position now.
Some of the fixes include:
- Optimized title within 50-60 characters.
- Optimized description within 150-160 characters.
I worked on optimizing the title and description of every article. It is not only for search engines, but to increase your Click-Through Rate(CTR). A good title and description make people want to click your link over others in the search results.
You can audit your website from Ahrefs to find SEO issues that you can work on it. You can learn more about technical SEO through my article, The Developer's No-Fluff Guide to Technical SEO.
Cross Posting on Blog Platforms
I have a blog on dev.to, dev.to/surajondev, where I cross-post my blog articles here. I provided the canonical URL for my website’s article. With a canonical URL, the search engine will understand that the original article is from the website.
I noticed that after cross-posting to dev.to, my original article started appearing in the Google Discovery feed on mobile, which brought in a new wave of traffic I wasn't expecting for a new website.
Link Sharing
Sharing your article links on various websites not only gets you reach but also builds a solid backlink. I started using X to share the article and through my newsletter on Substack.
I would also recommend sharing your post daily.dev](https://app.daily.dev/) if it’s focused on developers or designers. You can get a good amount of views from there.
Note: I share my links on X and developer communities like daily.dev. The key is to share high-quality content that is genuinely helpful, not just spamming links, which can hurt your credibility.
Conclusion
These are the methods that I used to grow views to my blog in the last month. My next target will be to reduce the bounce rate. While in the case of a blog, a bounce rate being higher is fine, as people come, read the article, and leave. But reducing it will help the blog with internal links and more discovery.
Thanks for reading the newsletter. What growth tactics have worked for you? I'd love to hear them.
Top comments (0)