How We Grow Our Blog to Over 1.5 Million Visits Per Month

Buffer
Buffer
Jul 27, 2017 · 7 min read

After six years and more than a thousand blog posts, we’re honored to receive more than 1.5 million visits to our blog every month.

During our journey from zero to more than 1.5 million monthly visits, we’ve learned a ton and would love to the three-step system behind our blog growth.

(This is a shorter version of the original blog post. If you would like to read the full blog post, you can find it here.)

1. Audience

Understanding what content our audience craves

And in turn, we hope a few readers would become Buffer customers, eventually.

Before thinking of blog post ideas, it’s helpful to understand what your readers want from you. Otherwise, you’re shooting in the dark and hoping everything works out.

After several iterations of our content and through studying our blog posts data, we uncovered that our audience enjoys our long-form, educational blog posts.

Knowing that has helped us to decide what types of blog posts to write. And no matter what type of post we’re creating, the aim is to help marketers and small businesses to become more successful on social media.

Coming up with blog post ideas

Here are the various ways we come up with blog post ideas:

  • Keyword research
  • Popular, relevant discussions in the industry
  • Social media news
  • Past experience
  • Intuition

Often, our content ideas come from an amalgamation of the methods listed above.

2. Cadence

Finding the right cadence to meet our goals

After some experimentation, we realized we needed to do the following:

  • Publish consistently: We had tried publishing four or five times per week, but found that our standards were dropping. We’ve found that two new blog posts plus our podcast show notes per week feels like the perfect amount of content.
  • Plan ahead: By planning our content up to four-six weeks ahead of publishing, we have plenty of time to research and plan how each new piece of content will be promoted.

Planning ahead and giving ourselves more time to edit our content has enabled us to take the utmost care with every post to ensure the quality is right when we want it to be when we hit ‘publish’.

I would recommend experimenting and finding a suitable editorial cadence based on your content goals and the amount of time you have. There is no one right editorial cadence. HubSpot publishes several articles a day while Backlinko publishes less than once a month.

Streamlining our editorial communication

Communication can get a little overwhelming at times. To counter this we have all the key discussions in the respective blog post Trello cards.

This serves two purposes:

  1. Single reference point: Instead of having to look through Slack or trying to remember what we discussed five days ago on the video call, we know we can find all the key information about an idea on its Trello card.
  2. Information transparency: By having the information on Trello, we can keep the relevant team members in the loop even if they missed the Slack or Zoom conversation.

2. Making time to chat face-to-face

Ashley Read, our blog editor, and I have a weekly meeting every Tuesday where we talk about all things related to our blog.

Here’s what Ash and I usually do during our content syncs nowadays:

  • Review recent blog post performance
  • Discuss blog post ideas that are being worked on now or that are planned for the next few weeks
  • Discuss interesting social media or marketing news
  • Share well-written blog posts we read recently
  • Brainstorm new blog post ideas

These recurring meetings encourage us to reflect on our recent work and think how we can improve.

3. Promotion

Focusing on content promotion, not just creation

It’s smarter to find another 10,000 people to consume what you’ve already created as opposed to creating more.

Or, in other words, create content 20% of the time. Spend the other 80% of the time promoting what you created.

We are far from spending 80 percent of our time promoting our blog posts but here are three ways we share our content with more people.

Promoting our content

We repurpose our blog posts into content suitable for each social media platform. For instance, here’re some things we do:

  • Brian G. Peters, our Digital Marketing Strategist, creates Instagram stories with the key points of the blog post and invites our followers to check out the full post on our blog.
  • He also creates short videos using the content in the blog posts to share on Twitter and Facebook.
  • I republish our blog posts on here, often with a different headline and shorter content.

Instead of simply sharing a link to each social media platform, we found that customizing the post for each platform such as adding videos for Facebook has generated more engagement from our fans.

While doing this might not always drive traffic to our blog, I believe it helps our followers gain trust in the content that we create. And next time, when they are looking for help on social media marketing, maybe they will think of the Buffer blog first.

2. Paying attention to long-term traffic (SEO)

We generally aim to generate long-term search traffic for each of the posts we publish.

Our blog post on Instagram algorithm is a great example. We knew it’s a popular topic among social media marketers, and people are searching for “instagram algorithm” on Google (about 4,000 searches per month).

By understanding the term people are searching for on Google for this topic and writing a well-researched, high-quality piece, the blog post was able to rank on the first page of Google and has been bringing in 600 to 800 views per day since we published it.

3. Relaunch older posts to boost traffic

We update existing blog posts on evergreen topics that have outdated information using a process known as content relaunch.

This keeps our blog posts relevant and useful for our readers and brings in more traffic through search.

For example, when we updated our social media analytics tools post in March 2017, the daily traffic more than doubled from about 300 to 700:

The two spikes of traffic came from our RSS feed and email digest.

Thinking about vanity metrics and 1.5 million thank you’s

As content crafters at Buffer, we’re in the business of selling software. We don’t take a direct, hardline approach to this, but our content is essentially here to increase our reach, build our brand, and in-turn drive Buffer’s sign ups and revenue figures in the right direction.

Alongside traffic, we also pay close attention to the number of Buffer customers referred by the blog, and the monthly recurring revenue figures generated by those customers. These metrics give us a better sense, in quantitative terms, of how the blog is providing business value.

Overall, we’re happy with the progress of the blog, and we hope you found this blog post useful. If you have any questions about our editorial process, feel free to ask them.

And, finally, thanks a million for being one of our readers. We truly appreciate it 🎉


The full version of this blog post was written by Alfred Lua and first published on the Buffer Social blog on July 27, 2017.

If you like this post, you might also like the posts on our Social blog on social media marketing:

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Buffer is a suite of products to help you build your brand and connect with your customers online. Come say hi and see what we’re about at buffer.com.

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