How to Get Blog Traffic to a New Blog (with Elna Cain)

Blog traffic is something lots of new bloggers struggle with.

You start a blog and work hard and hard on it, designing, writing, sharing, networking… but it seems like you are stuck at 2000 monthly pageviews (or less) forever.

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The truth is, it’s not as difficult to get blog traffic when you know exactly what you are doing.

The problem usually arises when you always change up your strategy before it’s due. Because you just aren’t sure that you are doing the right things.


get traffic to a brand new blog

To clear up your mind once and for all about what you should be doing to get blog traffic, I have Full time blogger Elna Cain sharing her proven strategies.

If you don’t know Elna, she’s a favorite among mommy bloggers and not just because her strategies work but because she’s a mom.

Her strategies are things crazy busy moms like us can implement without sending off our kids to boarding houses, a ton of cash or a large workforce behind us.

Let’s meet Elna.


Hey Elna! Thank you so much for agreeing to chat, generating blog traffic is something a lot of new bloggers struggle with so I’m really grateful you are here to help with this. But before we get started, can you tell us how much blog traffic you get to your blogs monthly, how old each of them are, what niches they are in, and where to get blog traffic by niche as you’ve experienced with your blogs?

Sure! The three blogs I blog on are Twins Mommy where I help mom bloggers make money blogging, Elna Cain where I help new writers become successful freelance writers and Smart Mom Ideas where I share my pregnancy and postpartum tips to new moms.

My oldest blog is Elna Cain. I’ve had this blog for around four years. This blog didn’t have much traffic for most of those four years until my brand started growing and I used some search engine optimization and networking to grow my traffic. Currently, this blog gets 76k pageviews a month and over 70% of traffic is organic, or from Google.

Twins Mommy is around 2 years old and my focus on this blog was growing my blog traffic using Pinterest. I wanted to try a new strategy that I wasn’t using on Elna Cain. Currently, this blog generates 65k pageviews a month with almost 50% organic and almost 40% Pinterest.

Smart Mom Ideas is my newest blog and I’ve had that for around 18 months. This blog primarily gets Pinterest traffic and I optimize this blog for Pinterest traffic. This blog receives 82k pageviews a month from Pinterest.

With all the advice about focusing on growing your list, and diversifying your income, do you think it’s still important to try to get blog traffic? If so, why?

Yes I do! I strongly believe that the heartbeat of your blog is your blog traffic. It cannot survive if you don’t have some traffic coming to your blog.

I use affiliate marketing as a monetization strategy for Smart Mom Ideas and it wasn’t until my pageviews reached 50k that I saw daily sales and more consistent sales.

This is the same for my Elna Cain blog – as soon as more and more people found me on Google, I was able to convert them into sales easily.

I also feel having an email list is important if you want to eventually monetize your blog and make it a business. But, I tell new bloggers to learn blogging first before you learn all about email marketing.

So you are saying essentially that people need to get blog traffic first to be able to then… Let’s talk about how to get blog traffic for beginners then. How should a new blogger go about generating blog traffic? Are there any tricks to increase blog traffic you would like to share with us.

New bloggers should work at trying to gain social traffic first. This is the easiest method to generating traffic.

I like to use Pinterest to grow my blog traffic, but other bloggers may find that their audience is on Instagram and use Instagram to grow their traffic.

Find one or two social platforms to market your blog. From there, your content is what will dictate how much initial blog traffic you’ll receive.

The more you blog and the more valuable each blog post is, the more likely it will get read and shared.

So write each blog post with a problem you need to solve and speak to your ideal reader!

That point on getting blog traffic from Pinterest is very interesting, can you share more about how to get blog traffic from pinterest? I’m sure a lot of people would be interested in that.

Pinterest marketing is ever changing so what I tell you today may not be accurate tomorrow! As it stands, Pinterest is favoring us bloggers – the content creators.

They want us to pin our pins consistently and they want us and others to pin from our blog. So, for your initial strategy, you have to be consistent when you pin (pin every day) and you have to pin a lot (your pins and other pins).

But, your profile is also very important. Pinterest likes categorizing everything. They want to know what your profile niche is and what each of your board topics are. So make your profile niched down and each board topic a relevant search term on Pinterest.

You can use the Pinterest search bar to find keywords. For example, if you are a sewing blog, plug in sewing terms into the Pinterest search bar to get suggested terms. Use those terms and more to create your board topics.

Let’s talk about how to increase blog traffic for free, as awesome as pinterest is sometimes you need paid tools to be effective with it and I know that you generate organic blog traffic in tons AKA you get free blog traffic! Yes you get free blog traffic from Pinterest but this free blog traffic from google is on another level of free no? So how do you get organic blog traffic from search engines? What do you do?

Yes, the best free traffic you can attain is organic or Google traffic. When someone searches for something on Google you want your blog post to rank on the first page (or #1 is the best).

The first step of SEO – this is search engine optimization which means structuring your blog content to favor Google traffic – is having a strong foundation on your blog that is ready for Google traffic.

This foundation is comprised of your blog content. Spend the first 6 months to a year writing highly valuable content like resource posts, how-to content, list posts, tutorial based posts and other long-form content.

Each blog post should solve a problem or help a reader obtain some tips to help them through a transition.

These foundational blog posts will act as a measure for Google. If people resonate with that content by sharing it, commenting on it and linking to it, Google gets those metrics and knows over time that your content is helping others.

If you get enough of those signals to Google, it will take notice and start ranking you for various terms.

Of course, you can work at this the opposite way – strategically using keywords to rank. I usually tell my course students write for humans first and then work on keywords after. I’ve used this strategy for all my blogs and it hasn’t hurt me!

Is there some kind of magic “Free blog traffic generator” that can help you get blog traffic fast or it’s just the little things you do to get more blog traffic daily that helps to boost blog traffic overall for your blogs?

Blog traffic is something you work at it every day. You can get a boost if you have a viral pin for example, but typically, it’s how your readers connect with your content and what they do with it (share it or link to it) that will determine if your post is the best example of whatever search term that post is about.

Pinterest Vs Google, what is the best way to get blog traffic? Seeing that they are both excellent ways to get traffic to your blog for free, are there any pros and cons you would like to share?

The easiest and quickest way to get blog traffic is from Pinterest. Google traffic is a long-term strategy, so put your focus in Pinterest marketing first.

What do you do when you try and try to get traffic to a new blog and month after month the blog is still getting no traffic AKA the “Blog getting no traffic” syndrome. Are there any ways to get blog traffic in this case or would you have to re-evaluate your blog?

There are many factors as to why a blog isn’t getting traffic month after month. The content might not be helpful or long, the blogger isn’t consistently promoting it, the user experience on the blog is poor, or the pins aren’t attracting clicks. There is not a general answer to this question as it’s based on each person’s blog strategy. But usually it stems from lack of promotion and lack of value in the blog content.

How long does it take to get blog traffic to a new blog? Like I get traffic to my blog daily but it doesn’t mean I get sustainable blog traffic everyday. How can my blog get more traffic that is sustainable where you don’t have to worry about ebbs and highs as much?

Create more content! Create content consistently and promote it consistently. If you blog every day for ten days and then create two pins for each of those posts, and then pin them and then share them in Facebook groups and on your page, you’ll probably gain more views to your blog.

You can kick this up a notch and look at ways to repurpose that content so that you can grow your brand.

So all these tips to get blog traffic you’ve shared are not outdated right? If someone wanted to increase blog traffic 2019 and beyond, they would still apply?

Yes these are accurate blog traffic strategies and tips for 2019. As I mentioned, Pinterest is every changing so what I mention hear may change in 2019!

And that’s it! Thank you again for sharing Elna.

I hope that you’ve gotten a few important takeaways you can begin to apply for a viral blogging 2019.

Want the exact strategy Elna uses to get traffic to her blogs laid out in easy steps for you? Check out her course Ready, Set, Blog for Traffic.

Make sure you pin the post so you can refer to it again when in doubt.

get traffic to a new blog

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6 thoughts on “How to Get Blog Traffic to a New Blog (with Elna Cain)”

  1. These days it’s not that easy to drive traffic compared in the past where only few people are creating a blog, we need to be creative and consistent in what are doing. Great post lily I learn something from you

    1. Hey Paul,

      Thanks for stopping by from Enstine’s!

      Actually I think it’s easier to drive blog traffic these days with all the tools at our disposals. Pinterest for one is a huge huge tool for driving blog traffic. Pinterest helped me start making money in my 1st month!

      Did you know that you could drive as much as 20,000 pageviews to a new blog with pinterest?

      Take a look at Mckinzie’s interview here to see what I’m talking about.

      Cheers!

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