How to get 150,000 people to read your blog post in 1 week

  When I started blogging in 2004, I took a good look around at other blogs, calmly chewed a cookie in my dorm room, and then vomited. There were only about 12 big personal-finance blogs back then, and yet even in 2004, I noticed the trend of new bloggers complaining about why they couldn’t get covered by the Big Blogs.

Today, I’m going to share a strategy I’ve used to get regularly featured in The Wall Street Journal and extremely high-traffic blogs like Lifehacker.

You can skip right to the detailed writeup (includes examples & screenshots), but I hope the story below is useful.

This advice can be useful for getting thousands of new readers to your blog, customers to your new startup, or to get your dream freelance job. And you can start using it tomorrow morning.

So, back to the question: Why do some bloggers get the lion’s share of attention, while others toil endlessly to write posts that virtually nobody will ever read?



On a recent forum where both new and experienced bloggers share tips for getting traffic, SEO, etc, most of the discussions were debating minutiae about meaningless changes they could make to their blog to get more readers. “What SEO plugin should I use?” one asked. “Does anyone think I should change my blog’s name???” another wondered. After 20 minutes of reading, I had to close the window because I was getting so frustrated.

Look, here’s a simple chart of what matters for getting traffic for your site.


The Guest Post Strategy

Besides writing really good content, the easiest way to get traffic to your blog is to write something interesting for another blogger who has more traffic than you.

It’s funny — when you point this out to many new bloggers by saying, “Hey, why don’t you write up something really good and send it to a bigger blogger as a guest post?” — many of them quickly make up a bunch of excuses. “Well, uh…I am really busy this weekend” or “I’m in the middle of this really interesting post on how HSBC interest rates changed!” Yes, okay.

But it’s not just as simple as deciding to write a guest post. When it comes to high-traffic bloggers, there are very specific ways to approach them so they’ll accept your pitch.

Before we get to the tactics…

Who could apply this strategy? 3 examples

Like I said, this works for bloggers and many other areas of business:

1)You’re a new blogger who wants more traffic: If you’re a blogger and you’re looking to grow traffic, put yourself in the mind of bloggers with large readerships: They’re busy, they have huge egos, and they need to constantly post new, interesting stuff to satisfy their readers’ voracious appetites for content. Could you write one piece of excellent content for them?
As an example, here were the results of Nora Dunn’s travel post earlier this week, which drove nearly 100,000 pageviews in 72 hours. I’ve already invited her to have a regular guest spot on I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

2)You want to break into the fashion industry: Or let’s say you read fashion magazines and really want to break into the industry. The magazine needs fresh perspectives, especially things that haven’t been done (think Money Diaries for a magazine, for example). How could you help them?

3)You just started a new company and need customers: How about if you’re starting a business on Christmas ornaments, and you aren’t sure how to get traffic to your website. The first thing I would do is record some interesting videos for other Christmas sites and give them away for free.