In this article, I will show you how I grew my blog from 0 to 80000 views per month with no paid tools used.
Views in 2018 November
Views in 2019 November
Why blogging
Sharing knowledge to the world
Improving your confidence
Building community
Learning New Skills
Choosing Topics
In this section, you will learn how to choose topics for your blog.
1) Google Trends
It is the best free tool available to find new topics based on the
region.
Let's say you need to write about JavaScript, open google trends and
enter JavaScript in the search area.
Note: If you need views from the United States then you need to find topics that are currently searching in the United States.
If you scroll down the site you will see related queries which are currently trending in the United States.
Have you seen in the above image currently optional chaining topic is getting most searches because it is a new topic only a few people wrote about it?
2) Stackoverflow
Stackoverflow is another best resource to find topics for your blog.
Open StackOverflow and click on tags then choose the topic you are interested in.
When you click on any tag by default StackOverflow shows the newest questions, so that you need to click on more tab and select the highest voted questions, because those are topics that are getting the highest number of organic searches from google.
3) Google search
Google search autocomplete shows the long-tail keywords and also related
keywords mostly searched on google.
autocomplete
These are some searches related to the following topic.
Choosing platform
There are many static site generators available to start a blog easily.
personally, I use Gatsby for my blog.
Some other static generators
For hosting a blog I use netlify because it is easy to setup.
Netlify gives you 100gb bandwidth for free so that initially it is more than enough.
Showing Up consistently
Most bloggers failed because they don't write consistently, I know writing is hard but if you want to succeed at anything you need to do the
work you have never done before.
I publish a new post every day in my blog currently, I have more than 360 posts.
The one thing I observed in my 1st year of blogging is most people are searching for small topics instead of large topics.
I found a keyword called react header and footer in Google and I published a post called How to add a header, footer components to React router now my post is ranked top 1 in google search.
Social and Community sharing
Social and community sharing boosts your blog and creates new
backlinks that build authority and trust in Google.
I shared my blog post Getting started with GraphQL, React on Reddit and most people upvoted it.
boom CSS-tricks twitter account posted my blog link.
CSS-Tricks@css
⚛️ React Links!
Getting started with GraphQL, React and apollo client reactgo.com/graphql-react-…
A Complete React Boilerplate Tutorial — From Zero to Hero medium.freecodecamp.org/a-complete-rea…
How hooks might shape design systems built in React jeremenichelli.io/2019/01/how-ho…05:40 AM - 21 Jan 2019
and also react.js related newsletters shared my blog link.
https://react.statuscode.com/issues/122
https://reactdigest.net/digests/183
You can also share your blogposts in dev.to, it is the beginner-friendly community where most people encourage you to do more work.
It takes time
Yeah, it takes time to build quality and trust there are no quick tips to
grow instantly for me it takes one year.
Every post I published started ranking on google after 1 to 6 months
I hope this article will help you to start a blog in 2020 and get good results.
For, more updates you can follow me on twitter
Next post, How to get initial traffic to your blog
Top comments (32)
Awesome job at getting to 80k but to be honest your metrics looked better last year. A lot more of time per user and much less bounce rate. Regardless, my blog is still very far from reaching your numbers so great job!
those metrics are what you usually get when your traffic is mostly driven by Google - people search for the solution, land on your blog and go away. My blog has similar stats. I don't think you can do much about it.
I guess you have a point. Unless you provide some kind of multi-page course it's hard to make the user spend a lot of time and visit multiple pages.
Hey Alberto, don't think more about bounce rates in technical blogs, because people visiting your blog have a different kind of knowledge levels.
If they already have the knowledge they can understand by reading the code.
scotch.io bounce rate is 83.74% and session duration is 1minute 11 seconds in the year 2018
You can find more about here Scotch.io 2018 Year in Review
Yeah, you are right tim sometimes google just show the solution in the form a featured snippet.
Thank you Alberto.
Thanks, I have been hearing about
GatsbyJs, Have some questions. IsGatsbyJsfree for commercial and personal use ? IsJavascriptknowledge enough or we should learnReactto useGatsbyJs? Any tutorial to create blog usingGatsbyJs?Great job! It seems we're on pair. I also started blogging in November of 2018 and have similar results (last month ~91K sessions). As for the bounce rate and session duration - I think it's mainly due to the traffic coming from Google Discovery. When a post gets there, many people click but don't necessarily stay long. I'm currently looking for ways to improve that on my blog. Anyway, keep up the good work!
Most Ad-blockers block the google analytics tracking on the sites, I think we are getting more views than the data showing in google analytics.
These days people have less attention span, they just find the solution and move away.
So true. What's more, I've even tried other, more privacy-friendly analytics tools (namely Matomo and GhostBoard) and they both give slightly different results than GA - even when considering session duration.
I have tested once by adding Anti-AdBlock to my blog, it improves bounce rate and session duration.
This is really impressive! Kudos to you for sharing your techniques freely. You could almost consider making a small paid course about this sort of thing 🤔
This.
Thank you Emma, I will plan a paid course in future if most people are interested.
well done with your blog.
and thanx for sharing your experience. ( I find the Google Trends tip for blog posts inspiration very very interesting and useful!)
Thanks Davide.
Any tips on getting traction while at the same time avoiding "social" media - I don't like the superficiality and toxicity of Reddit for example
You can try cross-posting your blog posts in dev.to , medium, dzone, and hashnode, etc.
Try to create a new twitter handler related to your blog and post some daily tips like last month I created a @codeexampless twitter handler and started posting simple code snippets it works for me.
One question, are you still on the free plan on Netlify? Or was your traffic too much for it?
This is really nice. Thanks for sharing.
Great stuff! Thanks for sharing.
Thank you Shannon.
Thanks for sharing your insight.
Thank you truetechcode
Do you earn anything from your blog? I assume you lose a little on hosting the website.
Great work! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you vaibhav
I have the response for title question. You can write post about "how to start a personal blog" (:. But seriously, wow, great job
Thank you milosz.
Nice job!
What the ratio of traffic comes from Google search?
92.50% from Google
Direct 3%
Remaining traffic from Bing, Yahoo, Yandex , YouTube, Facebook etc.
Hey do you wanna collaborate ?