How I Grew My Blog To 1/4 Million Page Views a Month

Not another post about 'How I Grew My X to X in X time frame'... Social media is absolutely bursting at the seams with those kinds of posts.

With the same generic advice...

'Give VALUE' (what even is value?!)

'Write helpful content' (what makes content helpful?!)

'Never stop learning' (okay, learn what and from where?!'

So here's my backstory: I started my food blog Fatima Cooks in 2015, and after tons of dilly-dallying and even abandoning it for 1.5 years, I grew it to a full-time income. And then I started taking it even more serious and it started to blow my old day-job salary out of the park. Today my blogs make me 2-3x my old day-job salary.

Fatima Cooks now gets circa 250k page views a month, give or take.

What you'll see in the green text (+111,376) is my monthly page views compared to the same period in the previous year.

I won't sell you a story that it was quick or straightforward. I've experimented with a lot of things, tried a whole load of techniques and gone through a bunch of tactics that just didn't work.

Here is what I did that *actually* moved the needle for me and contributed to getting a quarter of a million page views a month.

Picking a high demand, low competition niche

This is something I didn't purposely *do* per se. I picked my niche (Pakistani food) because it was something I liked and was good at. But I can't write a post about how I grew my blog without giving credit where credit is due.

I had an advantage because my niche was very much an emerging market when I started, and it grew into a high demand niche with the benefit of also being low competition (the jackpot in the blogging world).

In layman's terms, this means lots of people were searching for my niche, but not that many were writing about it.

I always see this pattern - people who write about high demand, low competition niches always find more success, and quicker success, than those who pick a low demand niche, or a high competition niche.

Which brings me to my next tip...

Taking keyword research seriously

Keyword research is *THE* ultimate edge. It essentially tells you which posts and topics have a better chance of doing well. It's legitimately like the bloggers cheat code.

And I cannot stress this enough, learn how to do keyword research so you can direct your time, effort and focus on the things that will make the biggest difference.

Keyword research can help you assess how much demand and competition your niche has, as well as individual post ideas.

I always do thorough keyword research before I write ANY post - it takes me anywhere between 30 minutes to 1 hour per post, sometimes more!

Keyword research is also HUGE part of all my 1:1 client work because it's initially very time consuming to figure out!

[Read: How To Do Keyword Research]

Learning how to write blog posts that work

Blogging is the simple art of writing well about the things people want to read about. That's it. That's literally a simple one-sentence summary of how to succeed as a blogger.

Once you've got the 'things people want to read about' sorted, you need to get the 'writing well' element down.

Blog writing is not the same as regular writing. This is a HARD concept to grapple with, especially if you may be from an academic, professional or even creative background.

As you're reading through this post, think about the style in which I'm writing. Can you notice anything?

Here are a few writing pointers I always keep in mind for blog writing:

• Short paragraphs (some of them are just one sentence long!)
• Short sentences
• Short sections broken up with headings
• Non-professional, simple English with limited jargon (even though blogging is a technical industry and I *could* use A LOT of jargon in this post!)

This isn't everything - there are a lot more elements that contribute to good blog writing.

Essentially, it all boils down to the fact that people online are reading on small screens and are after a quick, easy read. They're not holding onto every word you're writing.

The quicker you understand this and adapt your writing to cater for this, the better you'll get at serving your readers well.

Regularly going back to update old posts

One of the BIGGEST mistakes you can make as a blog writer is to forget about posts once you've posted them!

You should be going back to your old posts and regularly optimising them. This means:

• Updating them with any new, more relevant or up-to-date information.
• Making them more SEO-friendly.
• Adding new photos if you've taken any.
• If a post hasn't performed well after a few months, revisiting it to see why that may be and then improving it.
• If a post did initially perform well, and then began to decline, checking out why that happened (e.g., maybe another competitor blog uploaded a better blog post) and going back in to make it better.

As a blogger with over 100 posts, I spend more time going into my old blog post to improve and re-optimise old posts than I do actually creating new content. It's THAT powerful. Some of my posts have been updated and re-updated over 10 times since publishing!

Nurturing my audience on social media

Disclaimer: I'm really big on my stance that you absolutely *do not* need to have a social media presence to grow a profitable blog.

Does it help though? Hell yeah!

In my case, having a social media presence on Instagram has helped because it's created a touch point beyond my online blog. That touch point is a daily reminder that says 'Hey, I exist! I'm a great solution for your needs!'.

Social media has helped me build that know, like, trust factor that makes people more likely to turn to you when they have a need, which in my case is a recipe.

I need to add another disclaimer here, social media has evolved A LOT over the last few years. In today's day and age, the algorithm for most social media platforms reward regular posting and high engagement. And due to the nature of this, you simple cannot half ass social media. If you do, it's just not worth your time. So if you would like to incorporate social media into your blog growth strategy, please know that it will require learning about what works and implementing those things.

Treating it like a job, not a hobby

I once read a quote early on in my blogging journey and it completely reframed my mindset.

It said: if you treat it like a side hustle, it'll always be just a side hustle.

If I treated my blog as a cute hobby, it would *never* had blossomed into a full-time career because I'd show up with cute hobby energy. If I believed my blog was only ever going to bring in £300/month, I'd show up with £300/month energy.

I treated it like a job though. That means I set certain boundaries, rules and I made certain investments, giving it the same priority as I'd give a job. Here are some things I did:

• I set aside time for it daily. Yes, DAILY. Even if it was just half an hour a day, I prioritised that time. And I only began to see rapid growth that catapulted me into full-time income region once I started prioritising my daily blog time.
• When I was working on my blog, I made sure my husband knew I was working. We have two young kids, so it's not that easy to keep them away from me when they know I'm in the house. But this boundary meant my husband knew I need an environment with no distractions, no interruptions, no walking in because he needed something. My work time was no different to being on call with a client or being in a meeting with my boss.
• I invested in tools that would make my job easier. In the same was you'd invest in an accountant, a card machine etc if you were starting a brick-and-mortar business. In the same way you'd expect an employer to have certain tools. The tools I invested in included (not limited to) a premium keyword research tool, proofreading services, a premium theme for my blog and a mailing service.
• I created a blogging schedule and stuck with it.

[Read: How To Start a Blog With a Busy Schedule]

Setting very specific goals

It's not enough to say 'I want to make money from blogging'. Let's get specific. How much do you want to make in the first year? How about in 2 years?

And then, how will you execute it? 'I'm going to post regularly' is not enough - how often? Once a week? Twice a week?

What are you going to write? What topics are you going to cover?

There's a lot of power and gravity in writing out those specific goals. Your brain then starts working on ways to attain those goals. Your brain responds differently to 'I want to make money from blogging' and 'I want to start making £1000/month from blogging by the end of the year'.

Before I end this post, I would like to stress the following: growing your blog takes TIME. I don't say this to put you off, but rather to put you in the right mindset for blogging. If you're in it for the long haul, then the tips I've shared will help you get to impressive numbers.

Having the right knowledge, tools and guidance can give you the edge that helps you grow your blog quicker, though. You can fast-track your success by learning about the things bloggers like me did to grow. And in the same way, you don't have to make all the mistakes we made - you can simply learn from them.

PS: if you're interested in working with me 1:1 to help kickstart your blogging dream, click here to see the options I'm currently offering!