How I Exploded My Organic Website Traffic (without ads)

I’ve talked about blogging for virtual assistants before, but I want to give you an inside look into my own blog performance to show you the true potential of it.

Now I realize that my blog is more about becoming a VA than it is about marketing my VA services.

But you can use a blog to grow your reach, market your services, and book clients just the same!

That’s why I’m sharing a behind the scenes look at how I grew my blog to over 4,000 website sessions a month with one thing: Consistent and free high-quality content.

Blogging as a Marketing Strategy

Blogging is a fabulous way to share your expertise and directly demonstrate your knowledge around what you do for your clients.

They can learn from your blog and feel that much more comfortable hiring you because they’ve already seen first-hand what you can do and the value you bring to the table.

It’s also one of the best ways to get long-term exposure for your business.

I like to think of blogging for virtual assistants as the “biggest bang for your buck” in terms of long-term marketing efforts.

Think about it: You can create that instagram post and get more likes on it than anything else on your account. But in 24 hours, it’s old news and it’s not being seen anymore.

On the other hand,wWhen you publish a blog post that ranks on google it can show up in search for years and bring you client leads month after month. This helps you make money time and time again from the energy you put into a piece of content you created one time.

So all of that to say, there are incredible benefits to implementing blogging into your marketing plan.

But let’s get down to the technical side of things and how to actually end up in those google search results! More specifically, what I did to speak to the google-gods when I first started out.

The Steps I Took to Grow My Blog Traffic

Used an easy Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool

I am not an SEO expert at all. I understand the core fundamentals, but I’m definitely not well-versed in Search Engine Optimization and strategizing keywords on a deep level.

So I knew I needed something that was easy to understand and implement to get me going.

I ended up utilizing Ubersuggest for keyword research because it fit my budget at the time and seemed easy enough to navigate. I attribute the majority of my success in my first year of blogging to this tool.

I’m now exploring other options as I need something with stronger capabilities, but I would still recommend it to anyone who’s just starting out!

Figured out what Questions my audience was asking + what problems they were looking to solve

Your clients are not going to read your blog to find out where you went on vacation or what computer you use to design websites.

They are going to read your blog when they feel they are going to get an answer to their problem.

So I dedicated time to market research so I truly understood what my community wanted to know about. I spoke with 5 different people (yes, live on a video call!) to learn about what they wanted from me and what they were struggling with.

Because I took the time do to this, I knew I was giving them exactly what they wanted with keywords I knew people were looking for from Ubersuggest!

Stayed consistent

What’s the number one thing I did to consistently increase my website sessions?

You guessed it: Consistency.

Truly though, sharing relevant and helpful information on a regular basis that your clients are interested in is the best way to gain traction with your blog traffic.

Google prioritizes website domains that are updated on a regular basis. In their eyes, if the website is being updated regularly – then you’re more up to date than your competitors.

I committed to writing once a week and I stuck with that pretty well my first year of blogging.

As a result, my website traffic grew about 10x by the end of the year!

Shared to Pinterest

Contrary to popular belief, Pinterest is a visual search engine rather than a social media platform.

So when you share your blog content to Pinterest, you can gain even more website traffic from their platform. On top of what you’ll already gain from Google!

I had already worked with a lot of clients as a Pinterest Manager, so I knew the importance of a Pinterest Marketing Strategy for a blog.

I made it a point to share every post I published to my Pinterest profile boards and I’m so happy I did. Today, Pinterest accounts for about 10% of my monthly traffic!

Cross promoted on socials

I always take my blog post and find a way to repurpose it on my other social media platforms. For me, those are Facebook and Instagram!

My team either shares it as a stand alone post with no reference to the blog itself (this is repurposing at its finest!) or just telling our community “Hey! We have something for your on the blog, go check it out!”

We’ll even go back and share old blog posts from a year or two ago on our social platforms.

If you’re worried about your clients or your community calling you out on not creating something new – Don’t.

The reality is that no one other than maybe your mom stays that in tuned with what you’re doing!

The key note here is that utilizing your blog content for your socials rather than the other way around is a much stronger strategy than just posting on social alone.

Optimized website

I was blogging for about six months before I really looked into optimizing my website platform.

I’m talking about my WordPress website theme and my page load times here.

This is a huge factor in how your blog actually ranks on google so I knew once I started gaining traction, I had to prioritize this.

I worked with the incredibly knowledgeable webmaster to help switch my theme to a lightening fast one and optimize the backend of my site (not just my blog posts!) for best performance.

This was one of the best decisions I made, because it literally increased my traffic by 100% in a month!

Tracked my performance

I know this seems obvious, but I know from experience how many people don’t actually do this.

Once a month, I go through and look at all my metrics to see how things are performing. This a very intentional hour or so that I use to make educated decisions around what my audience is resonating with.

I highly recommend that you do the same thing! Here’s some key things to look at:

• Top performing post topics
• What platforms your traffic is coming from
• How many clients you booked from your blog
• How your email list is growing

These are key factors in how your content is resonating and whether or not you need to change up your approach.

After all, data over drama is always the answer!

Stayed patient

When you start blogging, you do not see results immediately.

You have to commit to writing for at least 6 months before you can decide whether or not it’s going to work for you. So keep this in mind when you start out!

I told myself I would blog for a year so I could build up a really good library of posts and work out the kinks in my process before I made an executive decision on how to move forward.

I’m so happy I did.

I started my blog in February 2020 and I didn’t start seeing significant results until about October 2020.

So when I say to stay patient… stay very patient!

My Traffic Growth + Results

Need proof that this system works? No worries. I appreciate your skepticism. 😉

This is a graph of my total website traffic for the year 2020 when I started my blog. I published my first post in February and blogged consistently each week through the rest of the year.

You can see that it wasn’t until around July that I really started to see any traffic at all.

This is a combination between my growing library of content, gradual improvements to my SEO strategy and finally redesigning my website theme in October to be google-friendly.

It also just takes google some time to “find” you online. So again, patience!

*The few random drops to zero traffic were when I was doing massive website upgrades and couldn’t track data at all in Google Analytics. I love tech, but man it can really ruin a satisfying graph.*

I really want you to understand the long-term potential of blogging, so here’s my 2021 blog traffic to compare:

It’s also worth mentioning that I blogged about half as much in 2021 than I did in 2020, but my traffic stayed fairly consistent.

Today, I average about 4,000 sessions or so a month.

This is the kind of traffic that I can expect going forward, even if I don’t publish anything new for a little while! That means I’ll be building my email list, getting client inquiries, and gaining exposure all while I focus on other projects or sip cocktails on vacay.

This is the beauty of organic blogging for virtual assistants rather than social content or paid ad campaigns.

A Note on Organic Blog Content vs Paid Ad Campaigns

Paid ad campaigns are a great way to give you a boost from the start. But as soon as you turn them off and stop spending money, you loose all of the traction you had.

I truly believe that laying a solid groundwork with organic traffic helps you to diversify and not fall so dependent on ad spend.

Are you interested in starting a blog to market your service-based business? I’d love to hear about your experience and which of these tips you found most helpful!