The anatomy of the "spike of hope."

Most bloggers have an unhealthy obsession about the "spike of hope". It is just too satisfying and rewarding to watch your traffic go up pretty much the same day as you publish your new post. Instant gratification: our brains are too addicted to it.

Let's take a closer look at this so-called "spike of hope". Where does this traffic come from?

1. You ask to your existing audience to come to your blog, because you have something new for them via social media and newsletter. The size of this section is determined by the size of your existing audience. Which means that if you're just starting out, this section would be quite tiny, if any at all. But most importantly, there are no new people in this group. Your email subscribers and social followers have discovered you long ago, so you're not reaching any new people by sending an email to your subscribers or tweet to your followers.
2. The next thing you do to bring more traffic to your newly published article is share it with a bunch of relevant communities. This promotion channel is only effective when starting out, but over time the amount of new people that you can reach this way will drastically decrease.
3. Word of mouth. This is the traffic that comes to your article when people from the first two sections share it with their friends and followers. This often happens passively, which means that you don't have to do anything other than publish great content that people will genuinely want to share. But you can also generate word of mouth proactively, by reaching out to people with big audiences and showing them your content in hopes that they will share it with their big audience.

Turns out that the sweet spike of traffic that you get immediately after publishing and promoting a new article will mostly consist of the people who have visited your blog before. Which makes little sense. Because in order for your blog to grow, you have to be reaching new audiences all the time.

In order for your blog to grow, you have to be reaching new audiences all the time. And this is where the traffic from Google kicks in. Traffic from Google doesn't come to your article immediately after publishing. It takes quite some time to build up. That is, if you invest in SEO, of course. With a pinch of SEO magic applied, your article will start ranking in Google for some relevant search queries, and this will bring you consistent traffic that will not fade over time. But at this point you may actually argue with me. Traffic from Google takes time to build up, while generating buzz on relevant communities and social media seems like a much faster way to bring people to your blog and grow your traffic numbers. But is that really so?

Two major strategies of growing a blog and the challenges that they bring.

• Viral traffic that comes as a result of generating buzz on relevant communities and reaching out to influencers asking for support.

  • Challenge #1: You have to be really good at creating content that will resonate with your target audience. It should resonate with them so much that they won't be able to resist the urge to share
  • Challenge #2: Virality doesn't happen out of nowhere. You need to get support from influential people in your industry, who will promote your content to their huge audiences and kick start the viral effect. Influential people are insanely hard to pitch.
  • Challenge #3: The goal of your blog is to consistently reach new people, who will become your new customers. So if you rely on viral spikes of traffic, you'll have to regularly produce sticky viral content and regularly get support from industry influencers. Because if you stop publishing, your traffic will fade.

  A few years ago guys from Pulsar studied how content goes viral by examining a bunch of real viral campaigns. What their study had shown is that viral content actually spreads if exposed to a super-huge audience. In other words, someone with a huge twitter following has to tweet your article, so that thousands of his followers would retweet it to their followers. These two steps of the viral outburst bring the most traffic and visibility. And from there, there goes a rather quick decay in the amount of retweets and traffic. The fact that an influencer has tweeted something, doesn't mean that all his followers will pick it up and retweet it. That is why the top 2 challenges of viral content that I've listed earlier are:

  • Creating super-sticky content that everyone would want to share with others
  • Pitching the biggest influencers in your space to kick-start the viral effect.

  Both of these challenges are incredibly hard to crack.

• SEO traffic that comes as a result of putting effort into making your content rank high in Google.

  • Challenge #1: Your content still needs to be awesome. It doesn't necessarily need to resonate with people that much, but it has to be insanely useful to them
  • Challenge #2: Get backlinks to your piece of content. Backlinks is one of the key things that push you up in Google search results. And building backlinks is something that most people struggle with. But here's something positive about SEO traffic. You don't have to publish regularly! That's because the traffic from Google doesn't fade over time. Unless of course your competitors put enough work to outrank you.

These are actually two extreme cases, which in reality don't exist one without other. There's no way to consistently go viral and not get a single visitor from Google. As well as there's no way to pull massive traffic from Google and not have a single person share your content on Twitter or Facebook.

Busting the "you should publish more often" myth once and for all.

You can build your entire business around a single article. Take a look at this article from healthline.com, "How to lose weight fast.". If I put the URL of this article into Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool, I will see that it gets over 300,000 visitors from Google every single month. Every month well over 300,000 people find this article while searching for weight loss advice in Google. That's a huge business opportunity right there. Even if you convert half of a percent of all these people into customers, that's over a thousand customers every month, which is clearly a ton of money. But this example is of course an outlier, because it's quite rare for a single article to get that much traffic from Google. And yet, why force yourself to publish dozens of articles every month, when you can focus your efforts on creating just a few keystone articles, make them rank in Google and get a passive stream of prospective customers as a result. But there's more! Viral traffic is mostly a gamble. You cannot know upfront if your article will take of or not. You can only guess. And if it does take off, you never know how much traffic this will bring you. But SEO traffic is predictable. In fact, I just showed you how to take any article and estimate its search traffic potential with the help of Ahrefs. Whatever the topic you're going to cover on your blog:

• Put it into Google
• Grab the URLs of the top-ranking articles
• Plug them into Ahrefs, to see how much traffic they get and what keywords they rank for.

These traffic estimates will help you make educated data-driven decisions and better prioritize your budget, efforts and resources.

Convert visitors into subscribers

Regardless of the blog growth strategy that you choose to pursue, viral traffic, SEO traffic or a mixture of both, you need to retain people who land on your website. You need to grow your audience! If you won't convert a first-time visitor of your blog into an email subscriber, the chances are you will never see them again. This means you won't be able to show them the next article that you publish. You won't be able to pitch them the next product you release. And, as a result, this person won't spread the word about your new content and new products to their friends. In other words, your audience is one of your biggest assets. So the sooner you start building it, the better. There are a lot of tactics and strategies\nthat can help you grow your audience.