How our traffic exploded in one month: from 860 to

If you want to start a blog and grow your traffic this year, it’s not too late. Here we share our struggles of starting our own blog, finding the courage to share it with the world, how we grew our blog traffic and turned this blog into a success, once we made the decision.

2015 was a weird year.

It started off like this: we had just broken up with a guy we thought was the love of our life, we worked a job we JUST hated, got shitty money for it and was totally lost.

Our life was going nowhere and we don’t mean this lightly.

The beauty in this whole shitty situation was that it finally pushed us into starting a healthy lifestyle blog.

We were always passionate about healthy living, creating new healthy recipes, fitness and natural remedies. When we talked about this, we felt like something inside us came alive.

As for starting a blog, this was an idea we had since 2012, but never found time for.

We ALWAYS came up with new, great excuses. For 3 whole years.

Now, when we say blog, in the beginning it was more of a diary and a place where we posted what we cooked and what we ate.

We didn’t join social media, Google didn’t know about our blog and nobody else did. Even our parents didn’t know where our blog was.

But it was fine. We were posting every once in a while and zero people saw what we wrote.

Then in 2016, a year and a half after we started, we decided we didn’t need to keep all those recipes to myself.

It felt scary, but also kinda exciting.

But what if people we know find our blog? What if they read what we wrote there? And what if they make fun of us?

Despite all these monologues inside our head, we decided to get out of our comfort zone of writing to nobody and start sharing our work on social media.

Our writing, layout and site design weren’t solid. They were far from solid. We were constantly redesigning, changing fonts and colors. But we knew – none of that matters.

So we decided to just let it go and see what happens. Maybe nobody will come anyway, so it’s not worth the worries.

To our surprise, by testing out different strategies – our traffic exploded within a month from 860 to 19.000 page views. Here’s how we did it.

The Six Things we did That Exploded Our Blog In One Month

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1. We uploaded our recipes to Yummly and got some initial traction.

Our blog was mainly about recipes at that point, so we uploaded our recipes to Yummly and got some initial traction. Nothing huge though.

We think this contributed to the page views from the previous months.

2. Got on Pinterest

Now we know that it’s a place to find and organize ideas you want to try.

This sounds simple, but when you think about it – it has a TON of potential. It’s the solid place for people who want to try new things. People who want and need a change.

People always look for new ideas to improve their health and lifestyle.

3. We made some pins

So instead of crying our eyes out for not making vertical images when we initially photographed our recipes – we simply made multiple image collages with some text explaining what the recipe is.

For this we used a free and powerful tool called Inkscape, now we use Canva, which is awesome, even if you don’t have experience.

4. Asked for invites

This was a SCARY, scary step for us, but we always kept reminding myself: Asking costs nothing and nobody knows who we are anyway.

The worst they can say is No and these are people we DON’T KNOW!

So we gathered all our courage and commented on pins of group board owners, politely asking for an invite (now we go the extra mile and ask via email – works better!)

To our surprise many group boards accepted us!

If you don’t have a huge following, remember: As long as your site & profile don’t look spammy – many people will let you contribute to their boards.

Even if you have a following of 150 people and most of them unfollow you within a day after you follow back (we'll talk about that another time).

5. We got obsessed

We pinned EVERY SINGLE DAY to our boards and the group boards that July. It took us probably one hour to pin all of our pins to a different group board, every single day.

We started using a spreadsheet to track where we posted what. We didn’t want to pin the same content to the same board all the time.

So what we did to keep things kinda organized was: we would write the name of the pin/post and our boards and put the date we pinned a certain pin to a certain board.

The other thing we did after we pinned our posts to the group boards was to repin from that board. From every.single.one. Every single day.

We made sure that the pins we repinned were something that would be interesting for the people who would like our blog.

So since our focus was healthy lifestyle – we didn’t repin mouthwatering cheesecake or cupcake pins (even if they looked so satisfying) – we repinned things that were healthy and mostly vegan.

Pinning and repining every day took a long time and it got messy with more boards and posts. With more and more responsibilities in our life we just couldn’t pin everywhere consistently. Therefore after a while we decided to invest in a scheduling tool and it’s been going great.

We use Tailwind to schedule the pins and it’s awesome – we save so much time and it helps us keep track of what’s going well and what isn’t. The spreadsheet didn’t do that. If you want to try it out, here’s a link you can use for a free trial.

We still try to pin manually most days, but with a scheduling tool we're just not worried anymore that our pins will get forgotten. (Haha this sounds so weird).

6. Things changed quickly And we Stayed Consistent

Once we started doing all these things everything changed quickly. People started coming to our blog since day one.

Then, in the first month – we had our first viral pin and from there our traffic exploded and we were so hysterical about it. We didn’t have a google analytics account back then, but here’s a screenshot from Jetpack.

yes, from 860 to 19.000 page views in 1 month

We were ecstatic. We would check our stats like every hour and be so damn happy (and worried at the same time – what if our site crashes?).

We kept pinning manually and 3-4 of our other pins got traction as well. Finally! We made it.

Our little illusion. Now, remember how we were afraid that people will discover our blog, make fun of us and find out we're just a loser like everyone else?

We did, but then on the other hand we thought our blog would be a hit. We felt like our blog was what people missed in their life. Something like the blog version of an uncut diamond.

“People just didn’t know about us, and once they do, we'll be all over the news” we thought.

Yes, we did watch Cinderella more than 40 times when we were a kid. And we did watch Pretty woman twice.

Eeeerrr. Nada. Nobody cared. People came, pinned and left.

But the important thing is: they came! That was a step in the right direction and it opened the doors to many more opportunities after.

What happened next

Our traffic grew further and we started making some money. So July 2016 was an awesome month for us, in many ways it was the start of our blog.

The other thing that changed is that even if we're not that active anymore (we post once-twice a week) we still make money from our blog – which has been such a big relief and something we want to work on more in the future.

We got more exposure. After getting that initial traction, our recipes got featured on Greatist, MSN and Country Living to name a few.

Google finally found us. We struggled for the longest time to pop up in the 1st page of Google search results when searching for Gaical. Back in July 2016 we were on page 6.

Now we're the first result and we come up as the first result for several other keywords (without even planning or doing SEO). We truly feel famous now that google knows our baby.

We trust myself more. On a personal note – we're not that scared anymore. We trust myself and we dare to do more things, to try new things and we're happier and more confident overall.

We can honestly say, we don’t actually care if someone doesn’t like our content. Sure, it would suck if our post isn’t helpful for them, but we don’t feel the need to be solid and prepared before we do something anymore. We just do it and see what happens.

For someone who’s as big of a procrastinator and perfectionist as we are – this is huge.

We realized nothing’s ever solid even if you spend weeks on it and if you don’t do it – you’ll never be ready.

Takeaways

After reviewing what happened over the last 1.5 years of blogging these are our major, major takeaways:

If you want to start a blog, but always find excuses – just start it. Blogging is truly something that has so much potential and can open so many doors for you. And something else: it’s never too late. If you’re committed and create useful content, great things will happen. You can create your own products, travel the world, make money and get even more opportunities that you never imagined.

Manage your expectations: if you do follow the directions here, your pins will get you more traffic than you expect, but the bigger things won’t come immediately. Again, stay patient and consistent!

Know that no matter how shitty your situation is now – nothing’s permanent and it’s going to pass. In the mean time take action on the things you want to do. Make time and work on your goals.

Alright so that was the long journey to our first traffic explosion on our healthy lifestyle blog.

We know we said we don’t care, but we do hope you found the post helpful and got some new insights to help you grow your traffic and get the courage to do everything you ever wanted.

If you have any questions, please – ask!

How our traffic exploded in one month: from 860 to over 19.000 page views