Now this sounds out of the ordinary, isn’t it?

Imagine if you could start getting over a million unique visitors per month to your blog in less than a year or so. How great it would be… More visitors, more subscribers and hence more income. Sounds like a dream?

Derek Flanzraich did this with his blog in less than a year, can we?

Derek Flanzraich is the founder of Greatist which is a health and fitness blog. He was able to generate over a million unique visitors per month in the first year of starting his blog. And in the next six months the traffic grew to about two million unique visitors per month!

In his interview at Mixergy he talked about his blog and how he was able to drive this huge traffic to his blog. You can watch the video interview here : Greatist: Growing A WordPress Site To 1M Visitors – with Derek Flanzraich

You can go and watch the full interview on the link above, but if you don’t have 1 hour to sit and watch it through, I’ve got something you. I saw the full video and was able to take some notes. I’ve written below  the top 3 things that I learned from the video that Derek did to get his blog grow so fast. Read them one by one and give yourself some time to think about them.

If these things helped him succeed, it can definitely help you too.

So, How Do I Get So Much Traffic In Such A Less Time?

Here are the three things that I learned from Derek that I’m going to apply on my blog. I would recommend you do the same if you want to see the same results as Derek.

1. Writing Epic Shit isn’t enough

You’d have probably heard write epic content and people will rush towards your blog. But its not completely true. People all around the world are creating a lot of  great content everyday and still they’re not getting any results.

Derek also used to write posts that were very high quality and even expert approved. But he also did not see any result. So, what’s wrong? Should you stop writing great content?

No, here’s what you should try to do – Create content that will help your visitors promote themselves.

People share content that speak for them. They’ll share content that tell people about who they are or what they want to be.

Imagine a situation that you own a Samsung smartphone and all your friends own some sort of Apple product. They don’t like your decision of having a Samsung phone. They even find ways to prove your decision wrong. This happens a lot of times, isn’t it?

Now tell me – would you like to loose any opportunity of sharing an article on Facebook that’s speaking out loudly – Samsung Is Better Than Apple. No, you won’t. Why? Because sharing this post with your friends will just make you feel good.

Nothing bad with this. This is how we, as humans behave. We tend to share things that help us to promote our self.

Keep this mind in writing your post titles. Think about how someone would feel if he shares your post. If you get a positive response from your inner self, you’ve just create an epic sharable content. It will help others solve their problem, make them feel good by sharing it and drive immense traffic to your website – in turn making you feel good.

You see it all comes back to you at the end.

2. Let Celebrities Promote You

If you are new to blogging and want to build a huge list of followers and drive immense traffic to your blog. You could probably start with this – just let celebrities promote you.

When Derek was at the initial stage of his blog he contacted about 100 top influencers in his niche and asked for their help with his blog. About 70 of them responded and also agreed to help.

What this did is it helped him connect with these top influencers and build a relationship with them.

Now as these influencers agreed to help him, they sub-consciously became a part of his blog and without even knowing it they begin promoting his blog for him as now they felt connected with it. And this did the magic.

Now, how can you apply this to your blog? Try to find the top bloggers in your niche and try to contact them. Be polite. Contact once and make a follow up after that, if they respond, good, if they don’t, just skip on to the next one.

Build a good relationship with them and make them feel like they are a part of the success of your blog. And you’ll see the magic for yourself. They’ll start promoting you as now their name is connected to your blog.

3. Have a Memorable Personality

Treat you blog as a person. Treat your visitors as people.

In the early days of his blog Derek used to write on his blog himself. But after some time he hired three people to this job to help him but this didn’t really help him. How? Each of them wrote in their style and not in the style that Derek used to write. The blog started loosing its personality and became more generic.

So what did Derek do this time? He gave his blog a personality profile.

What is a Personality Profile?

Assume meeting your blog at a coffeeshop. What would your blog tell you about itself? How would it introduce itself? Will it be cool-to-hang-out-with type or just plain-boring-geek type?

Give your blog a personality profile. Write a paragraph about your blog as if it were a real person and keep this in mind whenever you write a post.

Now it does not matter how big your blog grow or how many members are there in your team. Just keep your blog’s personality profile consistent and in the heads of your team mates and stick to this profile as long as can.

I’m sure there’s something going on in your mind right now. Take your time and give these three tips some deep thought and see what you can achieve by applying them.

Leave a comment below to share your thoughts.