Are you a blogger who lies in bed at night worrying about what would happen if your blog’s search engine traffic dried up overnight?
If so, you’re not alone. Like you, millions of other bloggers spend way too much time worrying about that too.
And, truth be told, that worry is well-founded if the vast majority of your blog’s traffic comes from a search engine.
Trust me, I know that quite well from personal experience.
That’s why it’s so important to take steps to diversify your blog’s traffic sources to prevent your blog’s ultimate success from being totally dependent on the search engines.
There are many ways to attract visitors to your blog, and I strongly recommend that you take advantage of as many of them as possible. That way if one of those traffic sources dries up overnight you’ll still have plenty of visitors coming to your blog from other places.
One great source of immediate blog traffic is advertising. By spending some cash you can generate traffic to your blog at any time. But that can be a problem if you don’t have an advertising budget or you can’t find a way to make the ad spend profitable.
Another great source of traffic these days is social media. You can post links to your latest blog posts on your social media Timelines and when your friends/followers see them they’ll click through to read the posts.
Depending on the topics covered by their blogs, some bloggers do well by tweeting their links on Twitter or Facebook while others do better on Pinterest or Instagram.
Of course there are numerous other traffic sources (such as forum posting, commenting on other blogs and guest posting) that are worth pursuing as well.
But today I’m going to tell you about one simple 30 minute task that’s virtually guaranteed to send you hundreds (and even thousands) of visitors to your blog each and every time you do it.
And no, I’m not exaggerating. I literally mean hundreds and potentially thousands of visitors every time you complete this simple task.
And best of all, this method is absolutely and completely under your control.
You won’t have to worry about losing it if you get kicked off of Facebook or Twitter and a search engine update won’t affect it in the least.
If you do this one simple task, you WILL receive that flood of traffic. Every single time.
So what is this “magic bullet” for generating a flood of traffic to your blog, literally at your command?
It’s something all bloggers should start doing on the first day they start writing posts on their blogs: Growing an email list and sending email updates to their subscribers!
I know what you’re thinking. Growing an email list and writing the emails to send out take a lot of work.
I know you’re thinking that because I used to think it as well.
But guess what? Neither of those things are true!
Truth be told, growing an email list is easy once you get started…
All you have to do is open an account with a good email marketing service and place “Sign Up” forms on your blog. Your list will start growing automatically on the very first day!
Depending on your blog’s current traffic level, your list might grow slowly, or it might grow quickly. But it WILL grow if your blog offers information people are looking for.
And surely it does or you wouldn’t be blogging, right?
My list is currently growing by approximately 100 subscribers per month.
If your blog receives more traffic than mine your list will likely grow faster. If it receives less traffic it will probably grow a little slower. But either way, it WILL grow!
Once you have your first subscriber on your email list you can immediately start sending out your emails. Yes, you should start sending your emails after you have your very first subscriber.
Why? Because that person is interested in what you have to say in your blog posts. That’s why they signed up, right?
Of course not every person who subscribes to your list will open every email you send to them. And some of the folks who open your emails won’t click the links to your blog posts.
But the things is, plenty of them will!
Here are a few stats about my own email list to give you an idea about the potential that awaits you after you start mailing to your own list…
As of this writing my email list has approximately 16,300 subscribers on it.
The “Open Rate” for my emails (the percentage of recipients that actually open a given email) varies a bit – usually between 25% and 30%.
The “Click Rate” for my emails (the percentage of “openers” who click on at least one link in the email) usually runs between 30% and 50%.
Those stats might seem a little low, but they are actually a little better than average compared to other blogs in my niche (i.e. tech blogs).
In a nutshell, every email I send out (and I send one every morning) brings in somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 visitors to my blog. And yes, that’s every single day.
That’s some pretty good “bang for the buck” in my humble opinion.
By now you’re probably wondering how long it takes me to write each of these daily emails that generate so much traffic to my blog.
Well, as I said above, it takes me approximately 30 minutes to create each newsletter email.
Since I use a template that already contains the info that doesn’t change from day to day, all that’s required to create each day’s newsletter is to change the date and then place the new links and that issue’s “Quick Tip” into the email.
That’s it! A quick 30 minutes of work ends up driving anywhere from 2,000 to 2,500 visitors to my blog every single day.
Pretty simple, right?
Of course you’ll have to grow your list before you can start drawing in lots of visitors from it, but the key to success is getting started.
Conclusion: If you have a blog you need to attract visitors to it. It’s as simple as that.
And while there are numerous ways to draw in those visitors, the only method that you will ever completely control from start to finish will be your email list!
That’s why I strongly recommend that you start building an email list for your blog immediately, even if it’s only receiving a handful of visitors at the current time.
Over time your blog’s traffic will grow and your email list will grow right along with it.
I’m often asked what one thing I would do differently if I were starting my blogging adventure all over again, and the answer is always the same: I would start building my email list the very day I started writing posts for my blog!
I made a big mistake by not understanding the power of an email list from day one. You can avoid that mistake.
All you need to do is sign up for a great email marketing service and place a sign-up form on your blog, the start sending emails to your list every time you publish a new post.
There are several good email services to choose from, but I happen to love Substack because it’s so easy to use and it has everything I need in order to create my emails and send them out.
By the way, you don’t absolutely have to send out a new email each and every day.
The reason I do it is because I create new content every day and my subscribers love being notified about my latest posts as soon as they are published. It really is a convenient time-saver for them.
If you only write a handful of new blog posts each month, that’s fine. Simply send out your emails when it makes sense to do so.
But regardless of their frequency, every single email you send out to your subscribers will bring a spurt of extremely targeted traffic to your blog. Every single one of them!