Starting from scratch?  You’re at the bottom of the mountain, and the trek looks daunting.

There’s good news:  effort, time and persistence is all you need.

Let’s break that down:

• Effort:  This one is really about making good content.  You should be posting an article on your blog at least 3 times per month, and ideally twice per week (at a minimum), to get off to a good start.  This should be content that is better in quality on average than other similar websites.
• Time:  It takes time for search engines to pick up your work, and it takes time for your website to be noticed by others.  When the search engines see that you are posting on a regular basis and have good content, your page will occasionally appear on searches where the search terms match your content.  At the start, it would be helpful to write about topics that are niche in nature.  Most-commonly searched phrases are already well-covered by major platforms in any field of work.  Some are more easy to achieve rankings than others.  The important thing is to start with something, and let the work you’ve done yield its result.
• Patience:  This is where you will have an advantage.  Going beyond average in content creation and – most importantly – consistency over time will yield the best results.  All you have to do is do something more than the average and longer than the average.  It will take about a year to start seeing needle-moving results.  Do a search and look up websites which cover a similar topic.  You can almost be guaranteed that when you look at the blog dates, you will see an intensive period of writing (maybe a year), and then after that, nothing.  These are the sites you’re looking to beat.  Play the long game. 

Barriers to entry:

• “Not good enough”:  If you’re concerned about your content not being better than the rest, and are waiting to find time so that you can really do a good job, forget it, you’ll never get it done.  Just start by writing decent content.  Make sure whatever you write follows the 3 Cs – Clean, Clear and Concise.  Be a little bit critical of your content after you have posted it, and compare your work to others.  Over time you will naturally get better, with a little bit of effort.
• “Don’t have time”:  If you don’t have time, then forget it, you’ll never get it done.  If you genuinely want to market your products or services online, then you have to find the time.  Fortunately to get started and to have at least a modest result in building an audience, a few hours per week is sufficient.  Of course you can pay someone to take care of your social media marketing. 
• “So much to learn”:  No there isn’t.  If you know anything about your line of work, then you should be able to write an article about what you do.  If you can write one, you can write another.  Break down the topic into its individual components.  Search the internet to find out what is interesting to others.  Add your own style and views on the matter, and with consistent practice in writing, you will get faster and more proficient. 

For internet marketing, traffic growth is related to revenue growth.  Like anything in life, practice makes perfect.  Unlike some skills in life, for social media marketing, you do not need 10 years to become a pro.  You can start now, with the skills you have.  You will only improve over time.

How many daily visitors do you want to reach your blog?  Pick a number… any number…

Let’s say, 100,000.

Let’s say, for example:

• 50 blogs:  this would be a reasonable target to achieve by the end of the year.  Ensure that your articles have keywords that are relevant to your target audience.  More than just “key words”, but think of phrases that are relevant, which may receive at least 500 searches per month.  Check ads.google.com for potential keywords to target.
• 50% CTR:  this is your click-through rate.  Clearly your end-goal is not just showing up on a search engine.  You want an audience to see your blog, and to eventually see your online offer.  If you are achieving a CTR from the search page of 50%, that is a good result. 

At this point you should be getting some noteworthy traffic.

Example formula:  50 articles x 500 searches x 50% CTR = 12,500 visitors per month, or approximately 400 per day.

By this time you are essentially a “pro” at social media content development.  Let’s break this down into what it means to achieve the higher goal of a mass audience. 

If you can get 10% of your readers to share an article on Facebook (for example), then at this point you’re generating 1,250 shares per month, or around 40 per day. 

If we assume that a Facebook account has 200 friends (actually, 500 is not an unreasonable assumption), and let’s assume a modest 10% click rate from your social media reach, then your additional daily visitor rate would be 800 new visitors per day.

Example formula:  40 x 200 x 10% = 800

Each month you will increase your visitors by ~24,000, and increasingly over time. 

But, if your target is 100,000… is that total?  Is that per month?  Daily?

The factor at play here is how much more content development do you need to reach your target?  Calculate your multiple, and apply that multiple to all the audience-development work that you do already. 

Track the time and cost of the work you do.  Where you are getting a positive result but it is taking you a long time to do it, you can hire out the work (from blog writing up to total campaign management).  Because at this point you will have a good view as to your return on investment, you will be able to calculate the value of external support with authority, and negotiate accordingly. 

Now on to next steps:

• Measure your results in detail.  This will show you what you’re doing right.  Focus on that and do it over and over again.
• Increase the amount of content you post – pay particular attention to which pages are getting the most views and comments, and focus on these topics, adding something different occasionally to test the response.
• Invest in paid traffic – ensure your content, headers, phrasing and other variables are optimized to elicit conversions.  Optimize your content to fit the audience and motivate traffic.
• Include email marketing, to follow up on existing and past customers.
• Double-up where you see success.