4 Examples of Blogs With Great Traffic (Steal Their Strategy)

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This is a guest post from Gareth Simpson, Technical SEO and Startup Founder – see his full bio at the end of the post

There are loads of extremely successful, borderline celebrity bloggers for almost every niche you can think of these days. For example, when thinking of digital marketing and ecommerce, chances are that Neil Patel’s blog will spring to mind. But how did they get there? And how can you come up with a similar strategy for your blog to boost traffic to your site? These four examples of blogs with great traffic will offer you some real, actionable inspiration that you can use on a smaller scale.

For growth-hacking inspiration for your blog, check out our previous post.

Entrepreneur’s Journey

Entrepreneur’s Journey is a powerful blog owned by Yaro Starak that attracts over seven thousand unique visitors per month. Starak is very transparent about his business model, which, in his own words, is as follows:

1. Start A Blog
2. Grow An Email Newsletter
3. Sell Your Own Digital Products

Since 2005, this blog has been Starak’s outlet for articles on topics ranging from how-to business guides, to truthful exposés of his entrepreneurial failures. By capturing his audience’s contact details through multiple calls-to-action on his website, Starak was able to cultivate a database of prospective clients.

Starak has now turned his attention to spreading knowledge to his readers, using his database to sell his experiences as a product. He makes his money by coaching his audience using subscription services and online training programmes, revealing how they can make an income with the Blog Sales Funnel. His success was fuelled by his transparency; people were interested in him and his content because they wanted emulate his success.

Starak’s blog gained popularity thanks to his down-to-earth honesty of his experiences in the world of business. His fly-on-the-wall content convinced people that he was a credible source of information, and made people more likely to invest in his expertise later on down the line. Selling a digital product is a great way to capitalise on your blogger brand and traffic — especially if people really believe in you as a source for information. Check out this article for more information on how you could go from blogger to online entrepreneur on a smaller scale.

Jezebel

 

 

 

Gawker Media launched Jezebel, a blog with the aim to become the ultimate women’s magazine. This blog boasts a staggering 197,000 visitors each month, and is a firm favourite among women across the world searching for celebrity gossip and popular culture news.

Jezebel is not like most other women’s magazines. This publication acknowledges the ‘five big lies’ that are perpetuated by women’s media:

1. The Cover Lie – digital artistry & airbrushing of cover photos
2. The Celebrity-Profile Lie – glossing over the talents and attributes of celebrities to endorse products and services
3. The Must-Have Lie – when magazine editors and writers promise readers that a particular product is life-changing and a must-have in exchange for a monetary reward. These products are, more often than not, remarkably average and not worth the money
4. The Affirmation Crap Lie – where magazines dish out unsolicited life, health and beauty
5. The Big Meta Lie – Jezebel’s argument that we use mindless magazines as ‘harmless escapism’, which is extremely unhealthy, because buying and reading them adds fuel to their fire

This ground-breaking and novel approach to women’s media is seen as a breath of fresh air, and sets Jezebel apart from its competitors. Jezebel has now been adapted into print form, granting this magazine a more permanent legacy. Posts are often controversial and opinionated — this online publication isn’t afraid to go where others won’t tread.

You could adopt this strategy yourself by analysing the competitors in your blogging niche, finding out what they are lacking, and ensuring that your blog is fine-tuned to cater to a gap in the market.  Why not consider being controversial and delivering some home truths to set you apart? This way, you will be sure to attract attention and traffic to your site.

Neil Patel

Neil Patel is one of the world’s most famous digital entrepreneurs, and for good reason. He co-founded Crazy, Hello Bar, KISSmetrics, and also hosts a blog of his own, offering insightful advice to his visitors to help them grow their businesses.

Neil’s advice, like this article on how to increase your open rates on Facebook messenger, is extremely actionable with step-by-step instructions, commentary, and screenshots to guide his audience through each process.

One of the secrets to Neil’s success is that he has diversified into multiple relevant digital areas and purchased an unimaginable number of domains; this has ensured that his name is solidly recognised as a leading authority in online commerce and digital marketing. He has created a digital empire, and this ensures an impressive flow of traffic to all of his sites that link together.

Focus on delivering awesome content to your audience — real 10x posts with plenty of actionable information. Try to own your niche and vertical as much as you can and make sure that your brand has a clear overall message.

Shopify’s ecommerce blog

Shopify’s blog is hugely successful in itself because the brand has created a real sense of community and produced a lot of high quality collaborative content pieces. Shopify’s blog is just one branch of the brand’s clever marketing strategy, which includes podcasts, webinars and other useful resources for startup entrepreneurs. Here the blog acts as an anchor for a wider content and social strategy — focusing on serving the entrepreneur community, as well as creating highly sharable and linkable content.

A focused blog like this can help build bridges, and even generate leads.  Take a look at this post for in-depth information about linkable assets. Could your blog help boost your lead generation and traffic with some focused, targeted content?

These four blogs all have very different strategies that have helped them make it to the top of Google. You can use their strategy as a blueprint for your own, or mix and match different ideas from each one to create a bespoke strategy for yourself.

Which of these blog strategies has inspired you the most? Let us know in the comments.