How we increased Design School’s traffic to 1 million visits [and download the templates we used to do it]
Let me guess— you’re keen to give your blog that extraboost?
Let’s get real, it doesn’t need much. You’ve already done the hard part— you gave it life, and now it’s maturing nicely.
What it really needs is nothing more than a tweak here and there, to take it to that next level.
When I joined Canva in August 2015, I picked up the gauntlet to drive 1 million sessions to the Design School blog in a calendar month.
In this article, I’ll share how we finally achieved that goal.
A look at the Design School— from launch to now
We’re fortunate that Canva’s blog has been successful since its launch, in November 2014. In its first six months, it clocked up 2,457,779 sessions, at an average of 409,000 a month.
Executed by Anna Guerrero, it was a strategy that turned a new blog with no reputation into a publication with a global following.
The screenshot below, taken from Google Analytics, tells our story:
Design School growth
Now, after a six-month concerted effort from our small content team, and a talented team of freelance writers, we can proudly say that we’ve built upon Andre’s initial strategy and Anna’s hard work.
And, for the first time in the blog’s history, we’ve recorded over 1 million sessions in a calendar month.
This growth is pretty significant and we’re proud of it, so we thought we’d take stock and share some of the things we learned/did to get there.
Disclaimer: We should mention that this post won’t help you start your blog or get from 0 visits a month to X. This is about taking an established blog to the next level. If your blog is still in its very early stages and you want to read how we achieved early growth, you should go back and read this and/or this.
The changing guard— from social to search
In the GA graph above we’ve identified August 2015 as the month our traffic from search overtook our traffic from social, for the very first time.
This evolution has been key to the million.
For context, a year ago in February 2015, organic search contributed 51,000 sessions, or just 12%, of the total session for that month, whereas social contributed 169,000 sessions, at 40%.
Fast forward to February this year, and things are much different. This year, organic search contributed 434,000 or 42% of our total sessions for the month, and social contributed 236,000 (now just 23%).
Why you should pay attention to SEO and evergreen content
We pay a lot of attention to organic search traffic because, in our view, it’s more self-sustainable than the traffic we get from social.
To explain this, consider two articles we published in July 2015.
We published both articles in July 2015 and distributed them in the same way, across ours and Guy Kawasaki’s social channels.
The creativity article imploded on social, racking up over 8,000 shares. The social media icons article still did well on social, with just over 2,000 shares, but nowhere near as well as the creativity article.
Fast forward seven months to February 2016…
The creativity article — despite dominating on social at the time it was published — contributed just 525 sessions, whereas the social media icons article recorded 8,200.
Here are GA screenshots showing the session stats for each article, inclusive of their date of publication in July 2015 until the end of February 2016. You can just see how significant the difference is between the sustainability of the traffic from the socially-geared morning rituals article (the first graph) and the traffic from the search-geared social media icons article (the second graph):
Morning rituals
Social media icons
The difference?
This is what we mean by search traffic being self-sustainable.
Publish an article geared for social and it will hopefully implode. But because it’s not a topic people search for, it delivers a limited traffic life.
On the flip side, publish an article on a topic that people search for regularly, and that group will continue to find it months after its published, which gives you an enduring supply of monthly traffic.
Extrapolate this theory out to 50 or 100 articles a year, and you’ve got 50 or 100 self-sustaining articles.
Don’t get me wrong, we still appreciate the value of social, and continue to publish articles geared to succeed on those platforms (like this one, which has clocked up 19k shares since it was published in January).
But, we generally tip the balance in favor of SEO geared articles, which means, for the most part, we let our keyword research and backlink analysis guide our editorial calendar.
To learn more about our search strategy, read here.
Optimizing for SEO— The importance of an audit
Another important thing we did on our path to the million was an SEO content audit. If your blog has been active for some time (and has a body of content), we suggest you start here.
A content audit is like a spring clean of your blog, where you review every article published and determine which should be kept, which should be trashed and redirected, and which should be improved.
The reason for the audit is to avoid keyword cannibalization, which can hamstring your SEO pulling power. It also just tidies up your blog — your home — which, we think, delivers a better user/reader experience.
In a nutshell, the steps we took to do our content audit were:
Scraped a list of all the articles we’ve published on the blog and dumped them into a ‘master list’ tab on a spreadsheet;
Added four other tabs to the spreadsheet:
New— for articles with great content that just need a new URL slug, optimized for SEO.
Combine— for multiple articles on the same topic that need to be merged into one super article to centralize the reader value and to avoid keyword cannibalization.
Keep— for articles that meet a good standard of SEO optimization and content quality, and don’t need any extra love.
Improve— for articles that partly or fully need to be re-written, because the content is poorly SEO-optimized for the topic they’re about, and/or because they fall short of the blog’s content quality standards, to the point where they deliver a negative-value experience to the reader.
Went down our master list and added every article to one of our four tabs, per the criteria above.
Executed on the changes/improvements needed for each article.
Actioned any redirects required so there were no dead-end URLs as a result of the changes.
SEO audits might seem difficult, but they’re not. And they represent the concrete slab of session growth— the foundation upon which all your efforts from then on can be built.
Here’s some GA screenshots depicting the immediate effect the audit had on three of our articles (click to read the articles):
While these tweaks to how we approached SEO were crucial, they weren’t the only thing we changed. Another important change we made was to our editorial cadence.
Editorial cadence: Going from blog to publication
Towards the end of 2015 we realized that our numbers for the year, while inspiring, were stagnating and we needed to do something more.
So in December, 2015 we decided we needed to improve our editorial cadence.
Editorial cadence is the rhythm a publication needs to publish regularly and reliably. For us, it was another major contributor to our steep growth.
To build our cadence, from December 2015 we decided we needed the following:
Publishing consistency — Ensuring an article is published every US work day, without fail. Publishing consistency is a staple feature of any publication striving to be the best;
Depth to the editorial calendar — always having articles scheduled at least 6 weeks in advance;
Editorial consistency — Ensuring each article goes through an editorial process so each is consistent and meets a publishable standard; and,
New writer onboarding — The hiring process of new writers is now a structured process with email templates, a review process, and an article trial process.
Publishing consistency — Ensuring an article is published every US working day
We’ve always used CoSchedule to plan our editorial calendar, but we’re now dedicated to scheduling at least one article per US work day.
The difference in consistency can be clearly seen when you compare what our calendar looked like in late November/early December last year:
With how busy it looks now, in Mid-February to Mid-March:
While this move to be more consistent and to publish more regularly is a long way short of blogging rocket science (and wasn’t something we haven’t known for years), it took some time to set in stone, and was largely helped by our second area of focus:
Depth to the editorial calendar — scheduling article 6 weeks in advance
The reason we’ve been able to achieve our editorial consistency and regularity is that we’re now committed to having the calendar scheduled for at least six weeks in advance, at all times.
Before then, we were generally two or three weeks ahead at any one time, meaning in week 1 we commissioned articles to be published in week 2 or 3, but no further.
Taking into account the time it takes for writers to produce the articles and for our design team to create the artwork, the 2/3 week advanced scheduling often put us in the stressful position of having to edit and prepare articles for publication days before (or the day of) their publication, and if we ever needed to push back an incomplete article, we rarely had a backup ready to take its place.
After some big team efforts, we now commission anywhere between 6 and 10 new articles every week and we work together to ensure that our six week advance schedule is maintained. Again, this isn’t rocket science in theory, but it took some collaborative planning and hard work to execute it in practice.
Adopt an editorial process and use it consistently
For a long time, we’ve recognized the importance of editorial consistency — making sure all articles are edited according to the same internal standards and requirements.
So, in December we built editorial checklists so we could logically edit every article submitted to us.
Some of the items on the checklist include:
Keeping the number of words between the article headline and the first image in the article to 150 words (because images are SUPER important to the success of our articles);
Making sure all paragraphs are short and readable;
Making sure article subheadings are numbered correctly;
Making sure all images are displayed correctly;
Making sure all images are cited properly;
Increasing the number of internal links in each article to other Design School articles; and,
Making sure all links included in the article go to the right destination.
Before we built out this checklist, we were editing articles on a case-by-case basis which left the door open for every article to be edited differently from any other. The checklist takes the guesswork out of achieving editorial consistency, and has become a reliable feature of our growth.
New Writer Onboarding
We’re fortunate to have an amazing team of freelance writers hailing from all over the world. To ensure we maintain the quality and quantity of writers in that team, we now have a regular monthly review process, aimed at assessing whether we need to top up our freelancer stocks.
If we do, we have a reliable process in place (with email pro formas and testing procedures) to ensure we onboard new writers that meet our quality standards simply and quickly.
These mechanisms ensure we never experience any downtime in article production, which trickles down to ensure we maintain our editorial depth and consistency.
Again though, this isn’t all we did…
The importance of our blog artwork
Facebook has always been the number 1 social traffic contributor to our blog, and we don’t think that will change.
But on 1 August 2015, there was a change of the guard to our second biggest social contributor for the first time since our blog launched in November 2014: Pinterest overtook Twitter.
You can see the daily rise of our Pinterest graphic in the GA graph, below. We’ve marked the day traffic from Pinterest overtook traffic from Twitter.
Our daily Pinterest growth, from launch to February 2016
This evolution from Twitter to Pinterest is indicative of another crucial ingredient in our growth to the million, an ingredient we seriously suggest you include in your own blogging recipe: supporting your content with top-quality blog graphics.
To see the real-world effect of our efforts to do this, check out how much people love to pin the graphics we feature in our articles.
We’ve always been extremely proud of our writers’ abilities to curate the best graphics from around the web to include as examples in their articles. Here’s a couple from an article we published in February:
You can imagine how much value these graphics add to an article’s aesthetic. And in 2016, we’re planning to create a lot of custom graphics ourselves in Canva, like these from an article we published in April:
The value of creating our own custom graphics is that we retain complete control over those assets, the brand, and the impact we want them to have.
Want to create your own?
Each of these graphics took no longer than an hour to design ourselves inCanva. If you’re new, design your first blog graphic now (and perhaps a social media graphic to help promote the article), and if you get stuck here’s an article to get you started.
Blog banners
Besides blog graphics, our other artwork focus is on blog banners.
From the experience we’ve gathered over three or four years blogging with the Design School, we’ve categorically found that our articles that include an impactful banner are shared far more than those without one.
So, we’re committed to designing a banner for literally every article we publish (and, if you’re serious about your blog, you should be, too).
You might think this is expensive and/or time-consuming, but it’s really not. Here are five of our best in 2016, each of which took less than an hour to put together in Canva:
To reiterate, each of these only took about an hour to design, but they set the Design School apart from other blogs in our space (and other blogs in general), because they draw readers into our articles.
This, we think, is fundamental.
The simple technique of dressing each of your articles with an eye-catching banner will help the appeal of your blog, and will help in its growth.
All of these efforts have led us to achieving our goal of bringing in 1 million sessions a month to the Design School.
But they weren’t easy. And they won’t be for you.
We suggest you break all of the tips we’ve included in this post into bite-sized pieces.
Start by designing a simple blog banner for each article you publish. They don’t have to be elaborate, and you can rely entirely on the pre-made Canva templates for as long as you need. Just get started, and build in that cog to your publishing machine.
Then, introduce some blog graphics into the content and design a social media graphic for every post. Again, you can rely heavily on Canva’s template library to get the job done before you have the time and resources to create more original ones.
Graduate to a content audit, then get to work on your actual publishing machine — be consistent with the editorial quality of your articles and publish regularly and plan ahead, and put measures in place to hire freelance writers regularly (if, of course, you have the resources).
But, above all, have fun. If your readers can see you’re invested in your work and your message, the business side of things will take care of itself.
Good luck on achieving your big blogging goals for 2016 and, as always, happy designing!
Need a professional writer? Fiction and non-fiction? contact richard.nata@yahoo.co.id Let me introduce myself. My name is Richard Nata.I am an author, novelist, blogger and ghost writer. My articles, including short stories have been published in magazines and newspapers since 1994. I have written a lot of books, both fiction and non-fiction. So I was a professional in the field of writing, both fiction and non-fiction.
I was born in Jakarta, August 17, 1968.
In 1988, at the age of 20 years, I started working as an accounting staff. Age 24 years has occupied the position of Finance Manager. Age 26 years as a General Manager.
In 1994, my articles published in magazines and tabloids.
In 1997, I wrote a book entitled "Buku Pintar Mencari Kerja". This book is reprinted as much as 8 times. Through the book, the authors successfully helped tens of thousands of people get jobs at once successful in their careers. They were also successful when moving to work in other places.
In 1998, I started investing in shares on Bursa Efek Indonesia (Indonesia stock exchange). As a result of investing in the stock market then I can provide consulting services for companies that want to go public in Indonesia stock exchange.
Jika Bapak/Ibu ingin konsultasi mengenai perusahaan Go Public, dikenakan fee. - lewat email Rp. 300.000,- ( per 1 atau 2 kali email ). Email ketiga dan seterusnya d...
In theory, in 10-20 years into the future, my startup income, amounting to hundreds of million USD annually can be obtained easily. AND IF FOLLOWED BY MANY COMPANIES IN THE WHOLE WORLD WILL THEN BE A NEW INDUSTRIAL worth trillions USD.
To be honest. Currently I'm not having a lot of money. So I start marketing my startup with blogspot.
My STARTUP :
A story with millions of choices in it - looking investor like you.
Try to imagine this. When you're reading a story on the web or blog, you are given two choices. You can choose the next story based on your own choice. After selecting then you can continue reading the story. Shortly afterwards you will be presented back to the 2 other options. The next choice is up to you. Then you continue the story you are reading. After that you will be faced again with 2 choices. So onwards. The more stories you read so the more options you have taken.
If you feel curious then you can re-read the story by changing your selection. Then you will see a different story with the story that you have read previously. The question now is why is this so? Because the storyline will be varying according to your choice.
I, as the author is planning to make tens of thousands of articles with millions of choices in it. With tens of thousands of articles then you like to see a show of your favorite series on TV for several years. The difference is while watching your favorite TV series, then you can not change the story. Meanwhile, if you read this story then you can alter the way the story according to your own choice.
You might say like this. Sounds like a book "choose your own adventure". Books I read when I was young.
Correctly. The idea is taken from there. But if you read through a book, the story is not so exciting. Due to the limited number of pages. When a child first you may already feel interesting. But if you re-read the book now then becomes no fun anymore because you don't get anything with the amount of 100-200 pages.
Have you ever heard of game books? When you were boy or girl, did you like reading game books? I think you've heard even happy to read it.
A gamebook is a work of fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making effective choices. The narrative branches along various paths through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages.
Bantam Books with the Choose Your Own Adventure series has produced more than 250 million US dollars. While I offer you more powerful than the Choose Your Own Adventure. Because of what? Because the story that I made much more interesting than the stories created by the authors of Bantam Books. You will not get anything just to 100-200 pages. While the story that I created is made up of tens of thousands of articles with millions of choices in it.
Based on the above, then you are faced with two choices. Are you interested in reading my story is? Or you are not interested at all. The choice is in your hands.
If you are interested then spread widely disseminated this article to your family, friends, neighbors, and relatives. You can also distribute it on facebook, twitter, goggle +, or other social media that this article be viral in the world. By doing so it is a new entertainment industry has been created.
WHY DO I NEED STARTUP FUNDS FROM INVESTORS? I NEED A LOT OF FUNDS FROM INVESTORS BECAUSE I HAVE TO LOOKING FOR EXPERT PROGRAMMERS(IT).BECAUSE THE DATA IS HANDLED IS VERY LARGE, IT MAY HAVE TO WEAR SOME PROGRAMMERS(IT). I CAN NOT WEAR SOME FREELANCE PROGRAMMER BECAUSE THE DATA MUST BE MONITORED CONTINUOUSLY FROM VIRUSES, MALWARE, SPAM, AND OTHERS. IN ADDITION FUNDS FROM INVESTORS IS ALSO USED TO BUY SERVERS WITH VERY LARGE CAPACITY. FUNDS ARE ALSO USED TO PAY EMPLOYEE SALARIES AND OPERATIONAL COSTS OF THE COMPANY.
FUNDS CAN ALSO BE USED FOR ADVERTISING AND OTHER MARKETING STRATEGIES.FUNDS CAN ALSO BE USED TO ADVERTISE MY STARTUP AND OTHER MARKETING STRATEGIES.
IF I GET A VERY LARGE FUND, THE PART OF THE FUNDS USED TO TRANSLATE THE STORY INTO VARIOUS LANGUAGES.With more and more languages, the more readers we get.
WITH MORE AND MORE READERS, THE MORE REVENUE WE GET.
AS AN INVESTOR THEN YOU DO NOT HAVE TO FEEL ANXIOUS ABOUT YOUR FUNDS. BECAUSE YOUR FUNDS WILL NEVER BE LOST BECAUSE IN 3-5 YEARS YOU HAVE RETURNED THE FUNDS COUPLED WITH PROFIT.
THIS BUSINESS IS ONE AND THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD.
If we can make a good story, so that the readers will come again and again for further reading the story then our earnings will continue to grow and will never diminish. This is due to new readers who continued to arrive, while long remained loyal readers become our customers.
So that the number of our readers will continue to multiply over time. With the increasing number of loyal readership then automatically the amount of income we will also grow larger every year. The same thing happened in yahoo, google, facebook, twitter, linkedin, and others when they still startup.
Deuteronomy {28:13} And the LORD shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath; if that thou hearken unto the commandments of the LORD thy God, which I command thee this day, to observe and to do [them: ]
Try to imagine this. If I give a very unique story. It was the first time in the world. But the world already know this story even liked it. Because the world love the game books. While the story that I made is the development of game books.
Do you Believe ifI dare say if I will succeed because my story will be famous all over the world as Harry Potter?
I believe it. Not because I was the author of the story, but because of the story that I made is unique and the only one in the world.
Income from my startup :
1. Ads. With millions of unique visitors, the price of the ads will be expensive.
2. Affiliate marketing. In addition to advertising, we are also able to put up some banner from affiliate marketing.
3. Contribution of the readers. If you have a million readers and every reader to pay oneUS dollarper year then you will get the income of one million US dollars per year.
If you have a million readers and every reader to pay one US dollar per month then you will get as much revenue twelve million US dollars per year.
4. Books and Comics. After getting hundreds of thousands to the millions of readers of the story will be made in books and the form of a picture story (comics).
5. Movies. If we have a good story with millions of readers then quickly we will be offered to make a film based on the story.
6. Merchandise related to characters. After the movies there will be made an offer for the sale of goods related to the characters.
7. Sales. With millions of email that we have collected from our readers so we can sell anything to them.
Each income (1-7) worth millions to tens of millions of US dollars.
Because each income (1-7) worth millions to tens of millions of US dollars. Then in 10-20 years into the future, AI will be earning hundreds of million USD annually.
So how long do you think my story that I made could gather a thousand readers? Ten thousand readers? One hundred thousand readers? A million readers? Five million readers? Ten million readers? More than ten million readers?
But to get all of it of course takes time, can not be instant. In addition, it takes hard work, big funds and placement of the right people in the right positions.
By advertising, viral marketing, strong marketing strategies and SEO then a million readers can be done in less than a year. Ten million readers can be done in two to three years.
This is the marketing strategy of my startup.
When hundreds of thousands or millions of readers already liked my story then they have to pay to enjoy the story that I made.
If you are a visionary then you will think like this.
With the help of my great name in the world of business, my expertise in marketing, advertising, marketing by mouth, viral marketing, then collecting a million readers to ten million readers will be easy to obtain. Is not that right?
The question now is what if people like my story as they like Harry Potter? You will get tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of email addresses from readers. With that much email, we can sell anything to the readers.
Since April 2013, Wikipedia has around 26 million articles in 285 languages are written by 39 million registered users and a variety of anonymous people who are not known from other parts of the world. Web ranked by Alexa, Wikipedia is a famous website number 6 which has been visited by 12% of all Internet users with 80 million visitors every month and it is only from the calculation of America.
resource : http://www.tahupedia.com/content/show/136/Sejarah-dan-Asal-Mula-Wikipedia If no Wikipedia then need hundreds of thousands to millions of books required to make 26 million articles in 285 languages into books. With the Wikipedia then people started to leave to read a book or books to seek knowledge about a subject or many subjects. The same thing will happen. Read a story in a book or books to be abandoned. Read a story with millions of choices on the web or blog is far more interesting than reading a book or books. So what happens next? In 10-20 years ahead then read a story in a book to be abandoned. Otherwise my startup will grow and continue to develop into a new entertainment industry. New entertainment industry, where I was a forerunner startup will continue to evolve. Therefore, in 10-20 years into the future, my startup will be earning hundreds of million USD annually.
So do not delay. Invest your money immediately to my startup. Take A Look. There are so many advantages if you want to invest in my startup.
WHY YOU SHOULD INVEST YOUR MONEY RIGHT NOW? .
IF YOU INVEST YOUR FUNDS IN ONE, TWO OR THREE YEARS INTO THE FUTURE, YOU MAY BE TOO LATE. BECAUSE IN 1-3 YEARS INTO THE FUTURE THEN I'VE GOT THE FUNDS. THE FUNDS CAN COME FROM SOME INVESTORS, LOANS FROM BANKS OR FROM ADVERTISEMENTS POSTED ON MY BLOG. IF I'VE GOT A LARGE AMOUNT OF FUNDS THEN I'VE NO NEED OF YOUR FUNDS. SO INVEST NOW OR NOT AT ALL.
My BLOG started to be written January 11, 2015. TODAY, MAY 30, 2015, THE NUMBER OF CLICKS HAS REACHED 56,750. SO FAR SO GOOD.
If I get big funds from investors then with a quick story that I wrote will spread throughout the world. So I got acceleration because I can put ads in a large variety of media such as Google AdWords, Facebook, and others. I also can perform a variety of other marketing strategies.
If I do not get funding from investors then my story would still spread throughout the world. But with a longer time, Slow but sure. So either I get funding from investors or not, the story that I wrote will remain spread throughout the world. Ha ... 7x So don't worry, be happy.
My advice to you is you should think whether the data that I have provided to you makes sense or not .
If my data reasonable then immediately invest your funds as soon as possible.
Then we discuss how we plan further cooperation.
Thank you.
Lord Jesus bless you.
Amen
P.S. The offer letter I gave also to the hedge funds and venture capital and other major companies in the entire world. So who is fast then he will get it.
While these tweaks to how we approached SEO were crucial, they weren’t the only thing we changed. Another important change we made was to our editorial cadence.
You can imagine how much value these graphics add to an article’s aesthetic. And in 2016, we’re planning to create a lot of custom graphics ourselves in Canva, like these from an article we published in April:
The value of creating our own custom graphics is that we retain complete control over those assets, the brand, and the impact we want them to have.
Want to create your own?
Each of these graphics took no longer than an hour to design ourselves inCanva. If you’re new, design your first blog graphic now (and perhaps a social media graphic to help promote the article), and if you get stuck here’s an article to get you started.
Blog banners
Besides blog graphics, our other artwork focus is on blog banners.
From the experience we’ve gathered over three or four years blogging with the Design School, we’ve categorically found that our articles that include an impactful banner are shared far more than those without one.
So, we’re committed to designing a banner for literally every article we publish (and, if you’re serious about your blog, you should be, too).
You might think this is expensive and/or time-consuming, but it’s really not. Here are five of our best in 2016, each of which took less than an hour to put together in Canva:
To reiterate, each of these only took about an hour to design, but they set the Design School apart from other blogs in our space (and other blogs in general), because they draw readers into our articles.
This, we think, is fundamental.
The simple technique of dressing each of your articles with an eye-catching banner will help the appeal of your blog, and will help in its growth.
Get started by signing up to Canva and dive into the design of your first blog banner now. Need help? Here’s an article to get you started.
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