For most people, starting a brand new site from scratch inevitably means a dip that can last months where you slave away building the site, creating content and putting in lots of hours but with little to no reward.
It’s the most difficult time in creating an online presence – you’re full of uncertainty about whether your efforts will pay off and even the most epic piece of content is rewarded with deafening silence from your tragically fictitious audience.
Well, you may be pleased to know that it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way!
We asked the top online entrepreneurs in our market to tell us what they would do to get 1,000 visitors to their site within the first 30 days. And here are the answers that they gave:

QuickSprout
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Neil Patel Says:
I would focus on business development deals. For example if the website was on "pet supplies" I would go out there and connect with all of the pet/animal blogs out there. I would do so by direct messaging them on Twitter, adding as friends on Facebook, emailing them, and even try calling them.
Once I get a hold of them I would make a pitch on why they should blog about my site. Ideally I would want them to do this for free, but if they weren't interested I would offer discount codes, gift cards, or some sort of promotional offer that benefits their readers.
By doing this throughout a 30 day period, you should easily be able to attain 1000 visitors if not a few thousand.
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Social Triggers
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Derek Halpern Says:
That's easy. I'd reach out to as many bloggers as possible to introduce myself. I wouldn't reach out to the top bloggers though because they're busy.
Instead, I'd reach out to people with smaller audiences... people who aren't used to getting a ton of emails from people. Why? Because when you need traffic, the easiest way to get it is to get it from people who have it. You can't get it from people who have it unless you know who they are.
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Think Traffic
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Corbett Barr Says:
Simply write great content on an interesting topic, craft engaging headlines and share that work across social media.
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The Sales Lion
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Marcus Sheridan Says:
My answer is the same one I give to most companies I work with--- I'd brainstorm the top 50 questions consumers ask in my industry and seek out *exactly* the way they would type that question into a search engine like Google. Then I'd turn each question into a title of a blog post and make the post itself the answer.
If a company publishes two posts a day for the first 25 days-- and they truly were addressing those top questions of their marketplace-- the results would be exceptional--and long lasting.
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Gain Higher Ground
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Rob Cornish Says:
1. Create a small product by either writing a report, recording some tutorial videos or, if I don't have a great deal of knowledge in the niche, find 5 experts and interview them on Skype.
2. List the product for $7-$17 on JVZoo.com because this network is good for any niche and offers instant PayPal commissions to affiliates (very appealing for them compared to Clickbank where payments are delayed and there are other restrictions such as having to make sales on different credit cards). See Full Answer
3. Compile a spreadsheet of at least 50 potential affiliates from some or all of these sources:
- Steal your competitors’ affiliates by seeking them out in Google - Find existing affiliates who are active on Ezine articles - Get the contact details of high profile bloggers in your niche - Find YouTube videos related to your product’s subject matter that don’t have any links in the comments. - Email newsletters/Ezines
4. Contact the potential affiliates introducing myself, explaining the benefits of the product and saying that if they think it would benefit their audience then they can earn instant and 100% commissions on all sales they make by recommending it. I'd also ask if I can do anything to help them with their business and follow up with them if I don't initially hear back.
Obviously, there are faster ways to get traffic (e.g., buy a solo ad, banner ad or run a PPC campaign) but I've chosen this method because:
a) The traffic is free and driven by other people.
b) It will build my list with buyers who are the most valuable type of subscriber you can have and much more profitable than people who have signed up for a free report often using a dodgy email address.
c) It will help me build relationships with other marketers in my niche which is a fantastic thing and can open up joint venture opportunities in the future.
d) Although I'm giving 100% commission on this "leader" product in order to motivate the affiliates to promote, I can make a lot of money very quickly on the back end (i.e., after people have purchased my product and been added to my list) by promoting affiliate products and other products that I may create in the future which is a sustainable business.
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Traffic Generation Cafe
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Ana Hoffman Says:
The best way to create traffic is to find someone who's already driving a substantial amount of it and tap into it.
The most traditional example of that would be guest posting, but I am not talking about "find a couple of random blogs to post for, write a variety of miscellaneous articles (topics varying wildly) and then hope for the best" kind of guest posting. See Full Answer
A great guest post is the one that benefits the hosting blog, as well as "primes" their readership to come back to your blog for more. More of what? It's up to you. It could be a free bonus (preferably requiring an optin, of course), or more information on that specific topic, or your products or services that might help the readers to put your actionable advice into practice in their businesses.
Since we have only 30 days to make that strategy work for our brand new site, we also need to think of ways to ensure our guest posts would be accepted. Epic content goes without a question, but what else? How about digging into the revenue model of the blog(s) you are targeting?
If it fits within the flow of the article, include a link to a webpage that offers the publisher an opportunity to monetize their traffic from their visitors reading your article. Use of this tactic alone will not get your article published, but it might just be that little extra boost that gets you through the door.
Other ideas to leverage another webmaster's traffic:
-- Find popular podcasts that target your niche-specific audience and see if you can get interviewed by them.
If you are a newbie, you might need to do some leg work as far as finding an interesting angle to approach them with, but the potential traffic return might be very well worth it.
--Approach bloggers who do speedlinking posts and offer some of your best content to them. Building a relationship first always helps, but if your content is great (which it should be, of course), then it just might get your foot in the door all on its own.
Have fun storming the castle!
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Become a Blogger
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Leslie Samuel Says:
I would do EXACTLY what I did to build my Biology Blog to 4,167 Unique Visitors in one month. I would create high quality, informative, and helpful videos. I'd keep them short, sweet and to the point. Then post them on Youtube and embed them in my blog.
Youtube is the #2 search engine in the world, and people go there to find videos that help them solve problems. If you can provide the solution, and have a clear call to action to come back to your site, you'd be surprised at how much traffic you can get.
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BrightIdeas.co
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Trent Dyrsmid Says:
Step 1. I would very clearly define precisely who I was writing for and carefully research what they were interested in by reading other blogs in my niche and making a note of the posts/topics that got the most social sharing.
Step 2. I would create content that was specifically targeted to this audience and I would be sure to make mention of several other prominent bloggers in my niche as I wrote my posts. See Full Answer
Step 3. I would find out where my audience hangs out online and then go and start interacting with them with the mindset of "how can I help them?"
Step 4. I would attempt to get some guest posts in my niche, and/or create a piece of content that these other bloggers would find worth of sharing with their audience. (long, detailed, "how to" posts would fit for this.
Step 5. I would interview several other bloggers in my niche and then when published on my blog, ask the interviewee to share the link with their following.
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YoungPrePro
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Bamidele Onibalusi Says:
The number one activity I would focus on is guest blogging.
I've written a single guest post on a big blog that sent over 1,000 visitors in a month before and I've also written a guest post on several smaller blogs that sent a few hundred visitors.
I'll look for the top blogs in my niche that cover a variety of topics and I'd look for smaller blogs that are very focused on what I blog about and work on getting published on them.
As long as I can find the right blogs, guest blogging is number one on my list.
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Extra Money Blog
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Sunil Says:
I'd hire a VA offshore, have them reach out to fan pages and groups that include the target audience of my site, and reach out to each one individually and introduce them to my site/facebook fan page (through which I'd encourage them to visit the site). I've done this for several new sites and it's worked great to get the ball rolling with some direct and hopefully (depending on your content) recurring visitors. my new authority site has greatly benefited from this approach.
other options are reaching out to folks with large email lists or readerships and propose a guest post or email broadcast of some sort. however, these relationships are difficult to build instantly. the response above assumes such relationships do not exist in place. it also assumes that the site owner is not willing to spend a large sum of money (i.e. pay for an email broadcast or guest post) to push this initiative.
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Casey Zeman Online
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Casey Zeman Says:
I have a few different strategies in doing this. Some new promotional tools with Facebook have been getting me 500 visitors a day (from facebook) but that is paid...However, my niche is Video and YouTube so...let's talk simple strategies as they relate to video!
I would make education based videos on a niche, one every two-three days and post them up on YouTube. I would then add branded overlays to those videos so that people would click back to my blog site (or Webinar...where I can get signups). See Full Answer
I would also add annotations to the videos as call to actions. Build up a subscriber base. So I would be looking at about 15 videos in 30 days. Each video would be titled with the same intro for instance one video would be titled: "Video Marketing 101: How to add an overlay", the next video would be titled: "Video Marketing 101: How to add annotations" and so on and so forth...
The intention behind this is that you are trying to get found with the keyword phrase : Video Marketing more then anything else. Adding that same keyword in your title over all of your videos will help in that, however you should also add in what your video is about as it relates to your niche.
Finally, I would consider guest blogging on high PR ranked sites where you can add your YouTube videos that have your branded overlays on them to get click throughs back to your site that way.
2nd Finally: You can also do paid promotions through YouTube and Google Adwords for video. I can spend about 300 dollars to get 3000 click throughs back to my site. So both of these strategies could help. The organic traffic and the paid traffic.
Again, I am also working on some Facebook Strategies that are also proving very well...(paid posts)
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And there you have it. 11 traffic generation strategies from some of the top marketing and blogging experts in the industry are now at your disposal. I want to give a big thank you to all our experts for sparing some of their valuable time to answer these questions – you all rock.
If you enjoyed this post, please be sure to tweet it and share it on Facebook! Also, leave a comment answering this question: What’s your biggest takeaway from this post? What will you implement right away, to get more traffic?
I see that you follow a lot of the same people that I do. I also see that you are already following the advice that several of them give in this article, principally Rob Cornish and Trent Dyrsmid.
By posting a comment here, I’m following Ana Hoffman’s advice, sent I know that you already have massive traffic. So maybe through this comment, I can get people to a site that I just started and get some initial traffic, although I’m already getting close to 1000 visitors a month just through SEO.
But traffic isn’t the end goal. I have a couple of blogs with more than 15,000 to 20,000 visitors per month that aren’t making much money, so for me, conversion is a more important topic than traffic. It’s worth noting that the thing that got me here was an email, so my next project is to try to get some of the traffic I’m getting onto an email list and start a regular newsletter in the niche.
This is a new experiment for us – we’ve never done an expert round up post before so thought we’d give it a go and see what happened.
If that 25k – 20k/month traffic is in a market where there’s money being spent then I’d definitely recommend getting them on a mailing list!
Howard, I’m curious why you are starting a new site when you already have two high traffic sites that aren’t making you money?
Remember that making money online involves traffic + conversion… You can’t have just one or the other. I hope you’ve found a way to add more value to your visitors now and your sites are profitable.
Actually, I started all three of my “guest” blogs at roughly the same time, but did not do any backlinking to the one on relationships until just recently (mostly in comments like this one).
I also haven’t been doing much other work on the relationships blog, and due to other time commitments, I will probably look into outsourcing some of the content creation.
Great article! Picked up a few tips on guest blogging from all the contributors and want to say thanks to all of you. YouTube and Facebook have been working great for me to get new subscribers and of course, Hybrid Connect has been working it’s magic. Going to try guest blogging next. Any one on this blog open to that? I write about building WordPress sites and online marketing. Look forward to reading more on your blog soon. Thanks
Glad to hear Hybrid’s working out well for you… Ana and Bamidele’s tips about guest blogging are great – definitely recommend following their advice there.
If you’re in a competitive niche then it’s all about leverage. I really want one of the takeaways from this post to be all about being proactive. Instead of creating something and waiting for people to come, proactively put your stuff in front of people and make it happen.
This post rocks! My biggest takeaway from this post is Rob Cornish’s contribution. He gave me easy to follow directions that make sense. I understand the big picture when I read his insight.
I also want to give a big thanks to Casey Zeman, Sunil and Neil Patel for the ideas you shared.
Takeaways:
Casey. Youtube keyword ranking.
Sunil. Instructing my VA to reach out to Facebook groups and pages related to my customers persona.
Neil. Relational marketing tactics.
Great job!
Hi Eddie, not sure if you’ve heard this before but we did a podcast with Rob where he talked about some awesome stuff including his concept “The Traffic Escalator” – well worth a listen http://activegrowth.com/podcast-episode-7/
Just finished watching the interview. Thank you for referring me!
Just took Marcus S’s concept and emailed a prospect who had asked me about keyword strategy for their site. Asked them to brainstorm the 50 questions and send them to me the top 25 in an email (thought 50 would scare them off). I will deliver the top 10 keywords and 10 articles (~500 words) for $1000. The other keywords and articles can be had for $100 per. He has a website firm that would then optimize the site for keywords so no worries there as I can take that over after they prove unable to do it correctly.
Using SECockpit will make this a breeze and the future localized rank feature will make it über targeted reporting.
Will let you know how it goes but a quick proposal sent just 5 minutes after reading your post makes this one of the most actionable posts I have read in a while.
Cheers,
Rick
This concept of just simply focusing on the people rather than only using keyword tools as indicators is such a powerful one. I did something similar on one of my niche sites – it was going well before my shady backlinking methods led to its ultimate demise :)
Thanks for another great insight into how others acheive the goals we all have.
Not being a fan of social networking I have been doing a little forum marketing with sparse results and have more recently looked at yahoo answers that has given a little bit of interest.
Marcus Sheridan has given the answer that I believe will best suit my preferences towards traffic generation, and has expanded on an idea I had been considering as a possible generation method.
Good to hear from an expert that idea does indeed hold value, before investing too much energy to doing something blind.
Thanks again for the diverse range of expert opinions and I am confident that I am gaining, or have gained, a better understanding of what it takes to generate a volume of traffic that sometimes appears out of reach.
Jim.
Hey Paul,
Great post!
While all of the tactics are pretty common knowledge, because they are tried and true, the little twists and insights provided by others is always helpful.
I particularly liked, Rob’s ideas and am preparing to implement them ASAP.
I think it is also interesting to note that not too much mention of social site marketing was made, except for Casey, and that was paid traffic. Personally, I have not seen a good ROI with free social marketing. Social site participation is important and necessary, but don’t count on it for a lot of quality traffic, especially quick traffic.
Regards,
TJ
Well it’s quite interesting – I’m just working on a post for the blog at the moment where I’m programmatically scanning for the top shared posts in the industry to see if I can see any patterns with what kind of stuff people share the most of and you wouldn’t believe the amount of exposure some content gets in the social sphere.
I think, like anything, there’s a tipping point. To being with, sure, it won’t bring you much traffic. But, a lot of the top blogs instantly get their stuff shared with thousands of followers through their social media channels – that’s clearly a very powerful way of getting your stuff in front of new eyeballs.
And, in some niches, social media marketing is ridiculously powerful. Any content that’s has mainstream emotional appeal, is shocking, makes people laugh, wows people etc. can get shared incredible amounts. In fact, I’m going to be interviewing someone soon who only uses Facebook as his source of traffic and earns revenue from Adsense. Trying to get social media activity on your blog about piles, though, could be a tough one!
Excellent topic and job.
Since the responses clustered around guest blogging, I suggest a follow-up round-up post just on guest blogging.
Something along the lines of “Guest Blogging: 3 tips for 1st timers and 3 for the experienced.”
Thanks to this post, I have a winning concept. Some actionable tips will seal the deal.
Thanks,
Oran
Great idea Oran, or perhaps “The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging” – it wouldn’t be written by Shane or myself but one of our associates who has done hundreds of guest posts.
Hey, thanks for compiling and sharing these tried & tested traffic strategies – much appreciated.
Without expert advice it’s easy just to do the same things every day, but to expect different results.
Note to self:
Write 50 posts solving a problem relevant to my audience. Use half of them to land guest posting gigs.
Reach out to the small & medium sized blog owners within my niche using Social Media
Parallel to that work on creating a small product and selling it through JV.Zoo.
Then create some education based product videos with keywords in annotations.
And look at ways of using FB to get more people looking at my blog/ offer. If that works then use a VA to repeat this process.
Not to forget to write an epic round up post ;-)
Gosh, I better get to it….
Sandra
P.S. I’d be interested to hear if anybody has used Pinterest to drum up considerable traffic to their site – that might be an avenue worth exploring if you are good with graphics/ photoshop :-)
I’ve tried writing articles both for useful content and some that are purely trying to grab some long tailed keywords. My site doesn’t seem to be ranking very well at all for these.
I’m finding it really hard to rank even just for my domain name MoneyMaster.
I like the idea of videos in my articles, which is something I would like to try doing soon as I can find some time.
How do you approach someone about guest posting on their sites? I mean, what do you say?
Well, you could check out my guest blog, and fill out the contact form. I’m looking for guest authors. But in general, just Google any keyword in your niche, and look for “guest blogger” or “guest author”, and contact the blogowner with an offer to contribute an article. Most of them (like me) would welcome that, especially if you can write anything like coherently.
Great article, I really enjoyed Casey’s tips on unique ways to use YouTube to get traffic to your blog.
Hi Shane,
Credibility and trust are vital in any two way interaction with your subscribers. I don’t believe its necessary for you to wave cheques in the air , or display Clickbank screenshots to prove you are an acknowledged expert.
In fact, I think your existing style, and engagement with your subscribers is a testament to your popularity,
I would however be interested to see some details about the process itself regarding building an enduring , and profitable presence online.
As a previously successful Business Analyst, ( 70 years young), and just starting out as an IM Affiliate, I believe many aspiring entrepreneurs, and Newbies would welcome a process orientation approach to IM Marketing.
Thanks
Garry Clinton
Guest blogging has been working well for me along with trying to write great content on my own blog.
Also interesting that your expert interview brought me here from Ana Hoffman’s blog more than 6 months after you posted this. A clever strategy tapping into all these bloggers traffic as well :)