Case study : how to grow your website from

0 to 10k visitors in only 40 days

There are 1,051,742,910 websites online as I write this.

And yes, a handful of those websites enjoy millions of monthly visits, but the sad
truth is that most of those websites see fewer than 50 visitors per day.

Most of those websites will take years to get to their first 10,000 visitors per month -
if they don’t give up first.

The competition for traffic is stiff. So is it even possible anymore to rise above the
crowd and build a popular website that attracts traffic? And more importantly, can
you do so quickly?

As far fetched as this sounds, I have good news for you:

The answer is yes. And I know because I did it.

I’m Frederic, and I’m the owner of Strasdesign a small webdesign compagny. Last
month I designed a website for one of my client and he asked me also to grow his
websiten order to get 10k readers. I managed to do that in 40 days.

I’ll show you exactly how I did it step by step.

STEP 1: SET A REALISTIC TRAFFIC GOAL
One of the biggest mistakes business owners make with their websites is that
they try to do too much at once, and therefore achieve nothing. There’s a
Native American quote that says:

"If you chase two rabbits at once, you will lose them both".

Business owners have huge lists of "priorities" they want to achieve, forgetting
what their original goal was. Throughout this entire process, you have to focus
on your number one goal:

10,000 visitors in 40 days.

Absolutely everything we were doing was meant to achieve this. If you’re

embarking on your own traffic challenge, you need to choose a singular focus.

Pick one goal that is SMART.

S - Specific: 10,000 visitors

M - Measurable: Google Analytics

A - Attainable: strategy to show exactly how to get there.

R - Relevant: Inspiring others is what I live for. So going for a crazy

challenge like this is very relevant to me.

T - Time-bound: ~40 days. You need a by-when date.

You can choose to follow along with our goal, or assess your time and
energy and go a bit smaller.

Just recognize that you can grow quickly even if you’re starting from scratch.

STEP 2: CREATE A BULLETPROOF

MARKETING PLAN
So once you’ve set a goal, you’re good to go out and try to achieve it, right?

Well, not quite. It’s not enough to just list out a couple of ways to reach your
traffic goal. You have to reverse engineer it.

Quant Based Marketing is a systematic and scientific approach to online

marketing that quantifies your expected results. It’s easy to follow, the
execution leaves very little up to chance or "what-ifs", and the exact same
approach is what:

Work backward from your desired result by taking iterative steps to break the
goal down into more manageable goals. Then create an action plan to
achieve your goal.

I worked backward from 10,000 visitors. That’s why you need a marketing plan
that will reach and engage your target audience. Our marketing strategy
included:

1. Giveaways
2. Engaging the target audience
3. Creating content

It wasn’t always this simple. My initial plan was far more complicated:
But then I re-focused on working backward from the goal and do more of what
is working to become more effective.

For example, I stopped posting on my Instagram because it took a lot of time

and I wasn’t seeing the return on investment. This gave me more time to
focus on other things.

If you’re assessing different marketing opportunities, we scored

the opportunities based on 2 simple criteria:

1. Ease of implementation
2. Potential impact

Once you’ve assessed these two elements, your priorities should be clear.
After scaling everything I could be doing, I focused on the highest impact tasks
to maximize the amount of time I had:
 I narrowed down on a handful of effective strategies to reach the total
daily traffic target of 567.

We used a quant based marketing approach to build the plan and

work backward from the 10,000 visitor goal.

STEP 3: START GENERATING YOUR FIRST

VISITORS
Before you get to 10,000 visitors, you need to get to 100.

1. Join those Facebook groups :

Digital Nomad Accelerator

Coffee With Dan
https://www.facebook.com/groups/473976206268263/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/OfficialEntrepren eurNinjas/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/amninjas/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/DigitalMarketing hacks/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/onlineceos/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/socialmediafunnelhacks/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/EntrepreneurInsid ersClubYeet/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/gorillajuice/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/REALLYSimpleOnlineCourses/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/LivingTheLaptopLifeCYLL/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1821420418134755/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/growthmarketers/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1428340887415620/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/rebelhead/
This one is very special, just in case you would like to find JV
partners https://www.facebook.com/groups/jointventuregroup/

2. Get noticed

Introduce yourself in a smart way like this under the pined post:
Hey xxx members ;) I’m totally new to this group and excited to be here. I was born
and grew up in Strasbourg France. Went to study in Vilnius, Lithuania and have lived
there for a year. I just quickly wanted to introduce myself and say Hi !! What do I do ?
I run 2 businesses : 1. A web design compagny 2. A blog called Blah Blah What’s
that ? I inspire top notch entrepreneurs like you with an unrivaled hand-picked
portfolio of some of the finest luxury hotels in Europe. I carefully select hidden gems
where fascinating people have created a unique atmosphere. I also would like to
share with you my list of stunning secret places in Europe most tourists don't know
about in order to help you to connect much more authentically with the region during
your stay. Anyway, if you know anyone who wants to add a new stream of incomes
with webdesign services, feel free to send them my way we have a wonderful
affiliate program for you ;) If you have any questions whatsoever about great places
and things to do in Europe, I would be happy to help as well and answer them
wherever I can. Regards,

3. ask friend request to those who answered/ liked

4. ENGAGE With YOUR NEW NETWORK show true interest for what they do,
where are they from etc and so o. This conversation will naturally lead to «
what about you ? »
5. Explain what do YOU do and ask this :

« By the way, I need a quick favor an outsider's pair of eyes on a new blog
I'm starting. Just need to know first impression what you understand and first
impression. Can you help please ? »

Protip: They want to support you, but you shouldn’t expect them to figure out
what the best way to do so is. To kick off your traffic, your best bet is to ask
them kindly to either share your website in order to give their opinion with one
or two people they think would be interested.

STEP 4: GENERATE MASSIVE

TRAFFIC WITH A VIRAL GIVEAWAY
Hands down the one thing with the biggest impact in my ability to get to
10,000 visitors in 40 days was giveaways.

With giveaways, I grew my audience from 173 to 3,220 in just 12 days:

Giveaways are great for building your list because they:

o Grow your email list extremely fast

o Supercharge your traffic if you embed the giveaway on your
site o Increase your brand’s awareness
o Grow your social media presence.
o Here’s exactly how to set up a giveaway to collect crazy amounts
of emails.

How to Work With Brands to Give You Stuff for Free

The more targeted your giveaway is the higher the quality of your
participants will be. So instead of buying an iPad to give away,
work with brands to give away something that’s aligned with your
blog or business.

You can do a give away with your product or service, buy something
outright or work with a company with a product that is desirable to
your list to give it away for free.

Yeah, I know. The last option sounds like the best, right? So, how
do you get companies to give you stuff for free?

You need to connect with the companies. And you need to do so on

a customer level and not as a company yourself.

Identify a few companies you’d like to work with that offer products
or services that are highly desirable to your target audience. Find
more than one to leave room for the company not responding or
wanting to work with you.

Once you identify the companies, start emailing them. Here is my

email template you can swipe:

Subject: Promoting [Company] to 1000+ people

 Hey [Company],
I LOVE your stuff and want to help get the word out.
My site [yoursite.com] has a growing audience of hundreds
of people.
Wanted to get y’all more exposure, for free.
Can you donate [x] in a giveaway that I’ll promote out to my
audience?
Be Awesome,

It’s also important to follow up. After all, they say the fortune is in
the follow up:

Check out the difference between engaging them as a customer rather

than a company:

Company to company approach

Me: Hey XYZ company. My name is X and I'm from X.com. I

LOVE your product and would like to know if you'd to be
exposed to 1000+ people for free.

Company: No thank you, please remove us from your list.

Customer to company approach:

 Me: Hey XYZ company. My name is X and I'm a customer in
LOVE with your product! I have a blog and I'd LOVE to
expose you guys to 1000+ people for free in a giveaway.

Company: Awesome! We love to hear from happy customers.

What can we do to help?
Me: Could you donate [specific number] of [product]?
Company: Of course. Where should we send it?

As soon as you mention your company, you’re not talking to them as if

you were a customer, and they try to blacklist you and ask you to stop
calling them.

However, if you engage with the company as a customer that loves

the product (and you should ONLY contact companies with products
you truly love), they’ll be far happier to work with you for the giveaway.

After I tested both approaches on the phone, I used email to close

the deal.

SETTING UP YOUR GIVEAWAY

One of the most daunting things about running a giveaway is how to

set it up and collect entries. You want to make it as automated as
possible so you don’t have to babysit your giveaway.

The best way to do this is to use a giveaway program.

There is one free giveaway program, and one paid that I’d recommend:

1 - Rafflecopter

Instead of going through a process when entering, users can see

all entry methods at once, so they can choose which entry option
they want.
Participants can enter via Facebook or by email, and you can choose
a winner or have Rafflecopter choose it for you. They also provide a
detailed report (in a spreadsheet format) of each user and entry
methods – making it easy verify the validity of entries.

2 - KingSumo

This is the giveaway software I used. It works great, and you can
create an AMAZING looking giveaway in 16 seconds, like the one I set
up for my giveaway:

KingSumo drives traffic back to your site by generating a unique short-

URL for every entrant. Participants are encouraged to share on Twitter
and Facebook to increase their entries. You can set how many entries
can be earned by referral.

When you are setting up your giveaway, plan to make the giveaway last
for at least four days.

Four days allows you to maximize the event and generate buzz
without dragging it on for too long such that it loses momentum and
the participants forget about it.

GETTING THE MOST EMAILS POSSIBLE FROM YOUR GIVEAWAY

There is a certain virality that comes with doing giveaways, and you
can bake that right in by incentivizing sharing.

Choose 1-2 social media platforms your audience spends time on, and
incentivize sharing on those platforms only. Don’t clutter their
trajectory by giving them 10 places to share on social media plus
entering by giving you their email.

I identified that my target audience spends a lot of time on Twitter, so I

incentivized Twitter sharing.
The best place to start to get the ball rolling with getting those initial
entries is your existing email list. Yes, even if you only have 5 people
on it.

I just told you how to contact new people to enter your giveaway.
But you should also send an email out to your email list about your
giveaway, and then don’t forget to remind them of it’s end date.

Send a reminder emails for when there are 3-4 hours left

Most people will find out about your giveaway and forget about it if they
didn’t enter right away, so let people know that your giveaway is ending
3 hours before it ends.

You get most of your rush at the beginning and at the end of your
giveaway, and sending a reminder email 3 or 4 hours before will
ensure maximum entrants (and therefore more emails):

Set up social media reminders

Tweet out reminders that your giveaway is ending every hour for
the last 3 hours, and then for 30 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5
minutes, and 1 minute:

If you have Hootsuite you can automate this. If not, schedule them to
go out via Buffer or another scheduling program.

CHOOSING A GIVEAWAY WINNER

When the giveaway ends, you get to choose a winner!

Here’s a small traffic tip, though. Don’t just email the winner to let them
know they won. Instead, build some buzz and send participants to your
website to find out who won through a post or update.
This drives traffic and makes it far more exciting for the winner.

Give a freebie to the others ;)

STEP 5: CREATE A CONTENT STRATEGY

TO MINIMIZE EFFORT AND MAXIMIZE
IMPACT
THIS IS BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP.

Content marketing is important to driving traffic to your website. Content

is what helps the search engines pick your website up, educates your
customers, and eventually sells your product.

So having a content strategy was important in helping me create

daily content.

And my main content strategy was to email

interview celebrities and people with large
networks.
Interviewing is great for a few reasons:

 It provides social proof as you feature influencers on your site

 It provides free, engaging content
 The interviews don’t take a long time to create.
o Interviewing influencers about their X problems helped me drive traffic,
because the interviewees would usually share with their audience
- plus I’d be able to build a relationship with them.

Make a list of influencers in your niche or similar niches that reach

your target audience and reach out to them with an interview request.
List a lot of people, because not everybody will respond. You can
expect a 25% response rate.

Send these requests every single day:

This increased my likelihood of landing interviews. Here’s what

I emailed the people I wanted to interview:

Hey [first name],

Huge fan of your work. Your thing about [x] really impacted me.
I run a popular blog about how to improve X.
Love to ask you 4 super short questions about your [problem] to
share with my 3k+ readers ? .
Coo if I send you 4 brief questions ?
Be Awesome,

Once the person responded to me, I’d send them the

interview questions:

With this template, I’ve been able to interview some

awesome entrepreneurs.

o Because I featured these influencers, they were also happy to share

the interview content with their audience.
 This drove even more traffic. In a normal piece of content, it would have
been very difficult to get these types of influencers to share it. But when
you quote or interview them? Of course they want to share it!

Here’s an email script of how I asked them to share it with

their audience:

Subject: Thank you SO much for this

Hey [first name],

I'm a beginner. Thank you SO much for this.
Here's your interview. [link]
If you have 3 seconds, it would mean the world if you
could share, [your clicktotweet hyperlink to the interview]
No sweat if you can't.
Have a magical day,

Twitter was the best way to promote the content of the interview and
to leverage my "guest" audience.

Content where you bring in influencers and other people into the mix -
either with a viral expert roundup post, interviews and expert
opinions, or even just quotes - has virality built right in. It ensures that
those people are far more likely to share your content with their large
followings.

Those interviews helped me to get my 7k other readers.

Conclusion

You can try every technique and strategy in the world, but if you don't
implement, you have nothing.

Say it with me, folks: execution and persistence.

Reaching 10,000 visitors was very rewarding. There was a lot my client could
actually do with that amount of traffic. For example:

o He went to companies and sell them ad space

o He also worked with a company for sponsorships
o He created his own product and sell it to his readers.

This technique works great but takes time and

a LOT of efforts. Expect to spend a lot of time
on Facebook Messenger, research for people
you want to speak with, send 60 emails per
day and of course, follow up.

Five Ways to Monetize Your New Audience

Though with soooooooo many monetization options to consider, it may
not feel simple when you don’t even know where to begin.

If you’re at all confused by the dozens of different ways to cash in on your hard work,
let’s un-confuse you by boiling it down to just five…

1. Rent Out Your Real Estate

Your online real estate is any web property that you own and control – like a blog or
website using your own domain name.

Your Facebook Page doesn’t count (same goes for your other social accounts, or for
any of the “free” website building platforms.) You don’t own it, you have limited
control over it, and you could be evicted if you fail to comply to the terms of your
“residency.”

The more visitors your real estate attracts, the more valuable it is within your niche.
The more valuable it is, the more income you can generate using methods like
these…
  Display third-party ads on your site. Add text-based or image-based ads to
your site and get paid every time a user clicks on one. Google’s AdSense
Program is the most popular solution for publishers. Others
include Infolinks, Chitika, and Media.net.

 Sell your own ad space. Why give a chunk of your profits to Google when you
can strike a deal with advertisers directly? Well, it’s a lot more work – work
that could easily outweigh any increase in revenue. But if advertising is
important to your business and you want to get more “hands on,” going it
alone is worth investigating. Services like BuySellAds make going it alone a
little less lonely.

 Attract site sponsors. Technically, sponsors give you money to support the
running of your business (in exchange for a nice shiny banner pointing back to
their site). In practical terms, there’s little difference between a regular display
ad and an “ad” from a sponsor. As your site grows, potential sponsors may
contact you directly. Or you can reach out to them yourself once you have
sufficient traffic to pique their interest.

 Host surveys. This won’t be for everyone but may be worth trying out if you
can’t find better ways to monetize. The idea? Hide the bulk of your content
from users until they have completed a simple survey. Once they have,
they’re free to read the article and you earn a few cents from Google.
Visit Google Consumer Surveys for details.

 Send your audience to related content on other sites. The idea is simple:
display other people’s content on your site and get paid for clicks. Think of it
like hosting ads, but instead of promoting products you promote other articles.
See Nster for more.

Bottom line? Renting out your real estate is attractive because it’s “easy money” – no
awkward customers to deal with, no products to develop, no worries about tight
margins.

On the flip side, income is rarely as large as publishers hope or expect (unless they
have gazillions of visitors in a commercial niche). And it’s easy to make your site look
tacky if you overdo it.

2. Promote Other People’s Products

There are two essential differences between this monetization method and the last…

1. With ads, you’re paid “per click” (or sometimes “per thousand impressions”).
When you promote products as an affiliate, you normally receive a percentage
of any sale (meaning if there’s no sale, you’re not compensated).
2. Affiliate recommendations are precisely that: recommendations. With ads,
you’re not endorsing the products, merely placing them in front of your
audience’s eyes.

Because you put your reputation on the line with affiliate products, it’s crucial that
you’re familiar with the products (and actually do recommend them!).

Familiarity also allows you to write about the product in an original and helpful way.
There are a lot of bad affiliate sites out there with product reviews copied straight
from the retailer. But that doesn’t mean that all affiliate sites are bad. Be original and
seek to provide tremendous value and you’ll be well on your way.

How do you find products to promote?

 Sign up with an affiliate aggregator. Aggregators bring together smaller

companies with affiliate programs. This not only makes potential partners
easier to find. You’ll also get paid faster, because commissions from different
partners will go into the same pot, allowing you to reach the minimum
payment threshold faster. Popular aggregators include CJ
Affiliate and ShareASale.

 Be an affiliate for an online marketplace. The “Big Two” here should come as
no surprise. You can make money by becoming an Amazon Associate or
an eBay Partner (or both). Smaller marketplaces often have an affiliate
program, too – here is Etsy’s, for example.

 Find individual companies in your niche with affiliate programs. Many small
companies use an aggregator, so you may have already found your ideal
partner. If not, search for products in your niche and look for a link to an
affiliate program on the website (it’s often in the footer). You can also try
searching for “your niche” + “affiliate” (with the quotes).

Here are some other ways to make money by promoting other business’s products…

 Finder’s fees. These are like the offline version of affiliate commissions. Let’s
say you’re in the travel niche and you know a local boat charter company that
doesn’t have an online presence to speak of. Making money is simple: talk to
this company, face to face, and negotiate a percentage of any business you
send their way.

Bottom line on being an affiliate? The more you put into it, the more you get out of
it…

If you slap affiliate banners all over your site and expect to get rich, you’ll be
disappointed (and you’ll make your site look spammy!) If you write engaging content
and only recommend products from quality partners in appropriate places, you’ll do
much better.

That said, you’ll still be a “middle man.” True, you won’t have to deal with pesky
customers directly. But it also ties your success to the success of your affiliate
partners (if they all go out of business, so do you).

And that’s why the best long-term business strategy is to sell products or services of
your own.

It’s safer, it’s more profitable and it builds equity. And it’s the subject of the remainder
of this article.
3. Inform, Educate or Entertain
Your free content already does all of those things, right? But there’s such a thing as
giving away too much.

For starters, free content tends not to be as valued as content that a person has paid
for. (If you doubt that, think of all those free reports you downloaded that you barely
glanced at.)

Plus, of course, if you give everything away, there’s nothing left to turn into an
information product.

A good rule of thumb? Teach people how to make money, save money or save time,
in detailed steps, and you have a product that can command decent dollars.

Once you’ve decided what information to sell, the next step is to figure out the best
medium to use. Here are just some of the options…

 A PDF ebook.
 Other downloadables (e.g., patterns or worksheets).
 A book for e-readers (use KDP to sell in the Kindle Store and Smashwords to
distribute the book to similar outlets).
 An audio book (if you’re not a born narrator, find someone who is at ACX).
 A physical book (reports of their death have been greatly
exaggerated; CreateSpace is a good option).
 Audio or video files (or CDs/DVDs if your audience prefers physical media).
 An online course.
 A membership site.
 A paid newsletter.
 A digital magazine.
 An app.

To some extent, the nature of your information will determine the best medium to
use. Stock trading tips, for example, are best delivered through a membership site or
a paid newsletter.

The nature of your audience counts, too. Do they prefer text, audio or video content
(or a mix of all three)?

Beyond that, the medium that takes the most effort on your part will probably be the
most profitable. For example, a dozen audio files will command a higher price tag
than a dozen chapters in an ebook. And a dozen videos, complete with transcripts
and worksheets, will command a higher price still.

4. Profit From Functional Products

If informational products allow you to learn something and are largely digital in nature
(paper books and shiny plastic discs being the exception), functional products allow
you to do something and are predominantly physical (the exception being software).

Software aside, functional products come in three flavors…

  used
 handcrafted
 manufactured

Once you’ve cleared out your attic, making money from used goods is tough. The
profit margins on common products like used books is generally tiny, meaning you’ll
need to sell them in industrial quantities to make a living. The best bet, then, is
to specialize – in rare first editions, say.

For handcrafted goods, you need to have skilled fingers or a strong artistic streak (or
both). Even then, it’s best to keep your inner-artisan well out of the way while your
inner-solopreneur identifies profitable gaps in the market.

Manufactured goods have wildly differing potentials for profit …

 At one end of the scale sits the humble widget that is indistinguishable from all
the other widgets out there.

 At the other end? The everlasting light bulb.

Competing on price is tough, so avoid those generic widgets. Universe-denting

inventions are even trickier to pull out of the hat. But somewhere between these two
extremes lies the perfect product for you.

Private labeling (that is, slapping your brand on a public domain product) is a good
entry point. Developing an original product from scratch is better still. In both cases,
you’ll make the biggest profits by sourcing from China (or similar low-wage
economies) using sites like Alibaba.com.

5. Sell Your Skills

If developing a product doesn’t get your neurons firing, why not sell your services?

How much you’re worth depends on what you do, the “going rate” for that skill and,
crucially, how talented you are relative to the competition.

An exceptional copywriter can charge a much higher rate than an average one. But
no one will know you’re exceptional when you start out, so you’ll have to settle for a
lower hourly rate until demand for you grows.

If selling your services is your sole monetization strategy, your blog or website will be
your calling card. Yes, it should offer value in its own right (with thought-leading blog
posts, for example). But the underlying message should come across loud and
clear…

HIRE ME… I’M GOOD!

Another option is to sell your services as part of a diversified monetization portfolio.

For example…

 If you sell high-end information products, you could offer one-to-one

consulting to customers with the deepest pockets.
  Or you could add value to an online course by making yourself available to
the community for the duration of the course.

The downside to being a service provider is that it’s not scalable. There’s no ceiling
on what you can earn if you sell a product. But if you sell yourself, you’re limited to
your hourly rate and the number of working hours in a day.

Still, if you’re worth a small fortune per hour, you can probably live with a lack of
scalability.

To you success !