In 2024 How To Grow Your Blog Faster As A Solo Blogger

Being a solo blogger means you have to do everything, from installing WordPress and doing keyword research to writing and optimizing your articles for SEO. Thus, being a solo blogger myself, I can understand how much responsibility you have to grow and make your blog successful.

If you want to grow your blog faster as a solo blogger then you have to follow a proven roadmap and do the most important things first and then spend the remaining time on other things.

In this article, you will discover some essential strategies to skyrocket your blog’s growth as a solo blogger in 2024.

Blogging mistakes to avoid for making your blog successful as a solo blogger

After properly setting up your blog as a solo blogger you are responsible for creating all the content by yourself. Creating high-quality SEO-optimised blog posts takes time but when done the right way you can get sustainable blog traffic.

But there are a few mistakes you should not make as a solo blogger if you want to grow your blog faster. Knowing what not to do as an individual blogger can save you a lot of time and you can spend that time on important things that will help your blog grow and get more visibility in search engines.

1. For solo bloggers having a niche is crucial to growing your blog faster

When you write all the blog posts by yourself you can only write a certain amount of blog posts. Where if you decide to create a multi niche site to build your topical authority you need to write more content which is harder if you don’t have a team of writers.

Also, you can rank your blog posts faster in Serp if you have a niche site covering a few topics.

To grow your blog faster it’s better to start a niche blog. On the other hand, if you want to build a multi niche blog it can take several years to grow your site that generates substantial revenue.

If you build a niche site you can publish 70-100 articles in the first year and get 10k – 45k traffic once all your posts get 3-7 months to rank on serp.

Where for an authority site or multi-niche site you would need more than 300 articles in your first year to get good amounts of traffic.

So, if you want to grow your blog within one year or less start a niche site.

2. When you are starting a blog from scratch don’t target competitive keywords

When you are building a niche blog from scratch you have little authority. So, even if you write the best content and there are already established authority sites covering the topic you can have a hard time ranking your blog posts.

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How Many Blog Posts Per Week To Improve Ranking & Pageviews

To rank your new blog faster you should first write about topics that have little to no content on the search engine results page or write blog posts on underserved topics.

For the first 20-30 blog posts you should target keywords which are less competitive and in the SERP established sites don’t cover the keyword exactly or there are sites on the SERP that have thin content. You can use a free semrush account and try to write blog posts on keywords that have a kd below 40.

Following this will help your blog to get initial traffic and gradually you can create posts on keywords that have high volume.

3. Have a content publishing schedule and stick to it

For informational blogs, you have to publish quality informative articles that match the search intent. But to grow your revenue and traffic you have to publish many articles.

For new sites, you can’t expect to bring 1-2k pageviews per blog post. In your first year, you can expect to have an average traffic goal for each blog post around 60-250.

To grow your site you must find a blog publishing schedule that you can maintain for 6-8 months. For niche sites, you should publish at least two articles per week. Here’s a detailed article about how many articles you should publish per week to grow your blog.

4. Avoid Shiny object syndrome

If you can’t focus on your blog or publish new articles often, it will take you a long time to grow your blog. Also to find out what works for your niche and what type of post you can rank that brings traffic to your nice website you need to write 70 informative articles as soon as possible.

There are many ways you can get lost and spend your time tweaking little things but if you don’t publish enough content then it can increase the time it takes to grow your blog and if your blog does not get traction within a 1-2 year time period you can lose motivation.

5. Spend more time writing and publishing blog posts

If you are a solo blogger then you should spend some time setting up your blog properly but then spend a minimum amount of time tweaking it. In the first year after publishing your blog, your main goal should be to spend more time writing and publishing blog posts on keywords where you can rank in the top 5 positions in the SERP.

6. Do keyword research in bulk that is good for writing 2-4 weeks of content

Proper keyword research is crucial to grow your niche site. But if you try to do keyword research just before you write every article you will spend more time on it and you will publish blog posts less often.

From my own experience, I have found that doing only keyword research for 1-2 days can help me find multiple keywords that are enough for writing 2-4 weeks of content and it speeds up the content writing process.

7. Improve your blog site design and optimise for speed

To make your nice site successful it’s a must to have a visually appealing fast website. Your blog should be clean and reader-friendly.

Look at some of the popular blogs around your niche and try to create your blog in a similar layout.

Also, you should make your blog load within 2-3.5 seconds. To make your blog load fast it’s important that you have a lightweight fast loading theme and good hosting (you can find fast reliable hosting spending 3-5$ per month).

8. Follow fundamental SEO guidelines from the start

To increase your blog traffic organically you should make your blog SEO friendly and optimize your blog post for SEO from the start. Yes, there are many algorithms updates every year but fundamental SEO rules stay more or less the same over the year.

You can spend one week familiarising yourself with basic SEO to rank your blog and start writing content. As you spend more time blogging you will have better SEO knowledge and after 4-6 months you can spend some time updating and improving your older articles.

9. Stop being perfectionists

If you try to be a perfectionist it will make you publish less content thus decreasing the chance of growing your blog in less time.

You should not try to be a perfectionist when it comes to designing your blog or spending weeks making one article perfect.

As you write more articles and gain experience you will find out that your previous works are not that perfect even if you spent a big amount of time on them looking back after one year. In blogging every 6-12 months you will have a better experience.

So don’t try to be a perfectionist from the start. Try to make your blog post or site design better or try to make it 80% perfect and you can always come back after 3-6 months to update it.

How to grow your blog fast as a beginner solo blogger from scratch

For blogging success as a solo blogger here are all the important things and strategies you should follow to grow your blog and get traffic to your blog fast.

1. Create your blog around a niche and build topical authority

The best tactic you should follow to grow your blog as a beginner or a solo blogger is to create your blog around a niche.

Your site name should be broad enough so that you can expand in the future but create your first 70-100 articles around one specific niche. For example, if you decide to start a food blog or cooking blog you should not start a general food blog.

To grow your blog faster you should niche down and start creating content about baking and after covering the topic you can expand and cover related topics.

Currently, if you want to build a successful informational blog you have to build topical authority. Starting a niche site can help you to build your topical authority faster and it will take you less time to grow your blog. When you focus on a niche it gets easier to do keyword research and you will find many new keywords while creating blog posts.

Also In my personal experience, I have found that If I post a new article on topics where I have topical authority I can rank a blog post in the top 20 within 1-2 weeks. And after 30-40 days depending on the keyword difficulty and search volume it ranks in the top 10 and many times in the top 5.

But on the other hand, If I post an article on new topics where I have only 1-2 articles on the site it takes at least 6 months to get to the top 5 position.

2. To grow a new blog publish articles on underserved topics

You can rank your blog posts way faster if you publish articles on underserved topics. When for some keywords established sites don’t have an exact answer or only 1-3 sites ranking but they don’t optimise their title tag and H1 for a keyword then if you do proper on-page SEO and write a blog post providing an informative answer for that search quarry then you can rank in less time even with a new blog.

To bring initial traffic to your individual blog you should cover all the underserved topics or underserved keywords you can find in your niche.

3. Targeting the right keywords is the first step for bringing traffic to your blog

For new niche blogs publishing quality content does not guarantee that your blog post will rank on the first page of SERP. It’s often because bloggers write blog posts targeting keywords that have high volume whereas Google doesn’t value your website authority that much.

Below I will explain more about how you can rank most of your content by targeting keywords that are in your natural traffic tier.

When you learn what keywords to write blog posts on for your new site it will help you grow your organic traffic drastically.

For new blogs, you can target less competitive keywords that have a volume between 50-100 to rank and grow your blog traffic faster.

In the competitive niche for new blogs on average every blog post gets about 60-150 page views per month. But once you have topical authority and ranking 1-3 for most of the keywords then you can get on average 300-450 views per blog post.

Depending on the niche and how good you are at selecting keywords and writing great articles and optimising on-page SEO in best-case scenarios you can get 600-800 pageviews or clicks from SERP per article. 

4. Do great on-page SEO to improve your blog ranking

For solo beginner bloggers, it can be hard to spend time outreaching other blogs for guest posts or doing off-page SEO.

If you have an informational niche site and you target keywords which are low competition then you can rank your blog using great on-page SEO and little to no off-page SEO.

The best trick is to publish a lot of great content until your blog reaches 10k visitors per month and then use Google search console to cover those keywords where your blog is ranking but hasn’t been optimised or needs a new blog post.

After doing this you can naturally attract new links to your site organically. Also, after growing your blog to 15-20k pageviews you can slow down a little bit on content production and if it’s a competitive niche then you can start doing some off-page seo or find guest posts opportunities to build links to your nice site.

5. Publish 2-4 articles per week for long-term growth

If you want to build a successful niche informational site and you want to earn most of your revenue by displaying ads then you need to publish 2-4 articles per week to build the momentum and drive traffic to your blog.

Publishing 2-4 articles per week for the first year of your blog is also good for your long-term blogging goals. If you can maintain this publishing schedule for one year then you will end up with 96-144 posts on your website. On average you should try to publish 100 blog posts in a year after launching your blog.

If you target low competitive long tail keywords and have a good success rate at ranking your blog post then you can get 150-500 pageviews per blog post on average (greatly depends on your niche). So publishing 100 blog posts can help you grow your site to 15k to 50k pageviews after one year.

Even in a highly competitive niche if you manage to rank 70 out of 100 blog posts on the first page of Google and you can get around 300 pageviews per article which can help you get 21000 visits to your blog after one year. If you monetize your blog with ads and are able to get 10-15$ rpm per thousand visits then you can earn 210$ – 315$ per month after one year.

6. Use multiple ways to capture your audience

You can grow your blog by publishing SEO-optimised content targeting easy-to-rank keywords. But after your blog gets some initial traffic you need to find multiple ways to make your blog visitors subscribe to your blog.

You can try email marketing and build an email list (you can use the Jetpack email subscribe option for free) or use web push notification services like Onesignal (free up to 10k web push subscribers) to build an audience base.

From my own experience, people nowadays don’t want to subscribe to your email newsletter unless you offer them some freebies or resources and I have seen a lot more people subscribe to web push notifications.

7. Target keywords in your natural traffic tier

The idea of natural traffic tier came from Chris Carter. Here’s a short summary of this SEO concept – you can rank naturally in the top 10-30 after posting good content around keywords that falls into your natural traffic tier within 1-2 weeks after publishing a high-quality blog post.

Now how to find your natural traffic tier?

Your traffic tier is on average how many visits you get from search engines in a day. It’s best to calculate how many visits your website gets in a month from search engines now divide that number by 30 to find your traffic tier.

Here’s a chart for reference.

If you have a new niche site then you can target keywords that have a search volume of 20-100 per month. You need to target keywords in your traffic tier until your site traffic grows and you move to the next traffic tier.

From my personal experience, you can also target keywords which are 1-2 tiers above your natural tier if you have some topical authority around that niche.

Let’s say you have a niche site about indoor plants and currently your website gets 3.3k visits from Google so as per your natural traffic tier you should target keywords that have a search volume of 100-200. But if you have 20-30 posts about indoor plants and have some topical authority then you can also target keywords that have a search volume of 200-500. You can rank on the first page within 20-40 days if the keyword you picked has less competition or other sites don’t optimise around that keyword.

If you have topical authority then you can also target 2 tiers above or if you get 110 visits daily on average you can target keywords which have low competition and sites on the SERP not exactly optimised for that keyword and have a search volume of 500-1000 per month. But it can take 3 months and great on-page SEO to rank in the top 10.

8. Experiment and double down on what’s working

To grow your niche blog as a solo blogger you need to spend more time in content creation, especially in the first year this should be your growth strategy. After publishing around 50-70 pieces of relevant content on your niche site you will be able to find out what types of posts driving the most traffic to your blog.

Until you find what’s working you need to experiment with multiple blog post formats. But once you figure out what’s working for your niche you need to double down on creating similar types of posts around related topics to bring traffic to your site.

How fast can you grow a blog while doing keyword research to writing articles all by yourself?

In this section, I’ll provide you with a short overview of how fast you can grow your niche blog working all by yourself.

Four main things determine how fast you can grow your blog as a solo blogger.

1. Your writing skills and typing speed

Your article writing skill and your typing speed greatly influence how much time it will take to write a blog post. When it comes to growing your niche informational site the more content you publish targeting low-competition keywords the less time it will take to bring traffic to your niche website.

Also if you have better writing skills then it will take you less time to edit a blog post. The amount of high-quality blog post you can publish in less time greatly determine the growth of your niche site.

2. How good you are at finding low-competitive keywords

If you are good at finding low competitive keywords can help you to rank in Google and bring search traffic. Targeting the right keywords where you can rank your new site can increase the average pageview you get per blog post.

So, becoming good at keyword research will help you get more traffic by publishing fewer articles.

3. Your overall content writing and on-page SEO skill

If your content is not helpful or doesn’t satisfy search intent then you can’t rank your website and hold higher rankings in the SERP for a long time.

Optimising your on-page SEO is also crucial to ranking in Google if you have a niche website and have low domain authority.

4. Your blog niche

Your blog niche greatly determines how long it will take to rank your individual blog post and how much traffic it will bring. Growing a niche website can be harder in ymyl niches and highly competitive niches like tech, insurance or personal finance niches.

When there is more competition – on average your blog post might get 90-200 pageviews per month. Whereas in low competitive niches, your site-wide traffic per blog post can get 300-500 pageviews per month.

For a solo blogger, it can take 1-2 years to grow a niche site. However, it can take less time if you can publish blog posts on most days or if you are really good at writing and can publish multiple articles per day. In general, you could get some traction by publishing 50 blog posts. To have a good amount of side income you need to publish 100-250 blog post that gets traffic to your blog. So to grow your niche site that gets 50-100k pageviews per month will need 250-300 articles and how long it will take for you to grow your niche blog depends on how much time it takes to create that many posts.

Pageviews you can get posting 50 SEO-optimised informational articles

Here’s how many page views you can get publishing 50 informational articles in a competitive niche vs in a low competitive niche.

In a highly competitive niche, multiple sites are competing against each other on Serp for most keywords. So, ranking in the top 5 can become a challenge and when multiple posts are answering one keyword search traffic gets divided so on average you can get 70-250 visits per blog post.

Whereas in less competitive niches most authority sites don’t cover keywords that have lower search volume. So, you can find many keywords in underserved topics that don’t have detailed answers for many search queries. When you write a helpful blog post with a catchy title then you can have a higher ctr and can bring you lots of traffic. On average you can get 300-500 pageviews per blog post.

So publishing 50 SEO-optimised blog posts in a competitive niche can generate 3.5k-12.5k pageviews.

Where publishing 50 SEO-optimised articles in a less competitive niche can generate 15k-25k page views per month to your blog.

Related: Should your blog need to have a sidebar?

Amount of traffic you can get posting 100 high-quality informational articles on your blog

Content creators or bloggers can get 7k-25k pageviews per month publishing 100 high-quality informational articles in a competitive niche.

Bloggers who publish 100 blog posts in a less competitive niche can get 30k-50k pageviews per month.

Final thoughts about growing a solo blog doing SEO

Growing a blog as a solo blogger requires following a proven roadmap and focusing on the most important tasks first within your limited time. To succeed as a solo blogger don’t make mistakes like not having a niche, targeting competitive keywords, and being a perfectionist.

Starting with a niche blog allows for faster growth compared to a multi-niche site. It’s crucial to publish content regularly, targeting low-competition keywords and gradually expanding to more competitive ones.

Spending more time on writing and publishing blog posts is essential, along with doing bulk keyword research to always have something to write about and it speeds up your content creation process.

Setting a content publishing schedule and sticking to it helps maintain consistency and is good for hitting your blogging goals. Additionally, utilizing multiple ways to capture the audience, targeting keywords in the natural traffic tier, and experimenting with different post formats can contribute to your blog growth.

Overall, the speed of your blog growth depends on factors such as your writing skill, keyword research ability, content quality, niche competitiveness and the number of blog posts you publish on your niche website.