Have you recently started your own parenting blog and are struggling to gain traffic? Or maybe you’ve been blogging for a while now and can’t seem to figure out this whole blogging thing?

I hear this all the time from mom bloggers. And actually not very long ago, I was one of them. I felt so aggravated and couldn’t figure out where I was going wrong.

Of course, since I wasn’t getting traffic and therefore wasn’t earning much money with my blog, I knew there had to be some mistakes I was making somewhere.

And truthfully, I was making several mistakes with my mommy blog. But once, I made a few changes with the help of another mom blogger, I finally turned my hobby blog into a profitable business.

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This page may contain affiliate links, however, I will never recommend anything that I do not believe in and use myself. You can read more about my disclosure policy here. 

Why Does Blog Traffic Matter?

First of all, let’s talk about why your blog’s traffic really matters. 

I have seen countless pins on Pinterest where bloggers talk about how you can earn an income without having hardly any traffic. And that is completely true. But for those of us who’s blogs aren’t focused on selling products or courses, higher blog traffic is necessary for making money.

So if your blog is anything like mine be sure to take out your notebook and start taking notes. 

Parenting blogs are there for readers to come to for information, not to buy things. Now, of course, you may get an affiliate sale here and there, but to make a full-time income off of affiliate sales, you would have to either have lots of traffic or be an affiliate to a very pricy product with a great commission.

How Do I Make Money With My Parenting Blog?

Different types of blogs earn money differently and that’s ok, but here is how to do it if you are a parenting type blogger.

First of all, you need to start thinking about your blog traffic goal. For example, if you want to join an ad network like Mediavine and get paid just for having readers come to your site you have to have 25,000 sessions (which is usually around 30,000 pageviews) to apply.

And once you’ve reached that amount of sessions in a month you don’t have to wait until the months is over. Apply right away.

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Since my main goal was to build my blog’s traffic to start earning more money from ads, I focused on ways to bring in more readers and keep them coming back. As you can see in the snapshot above, I really started to implement my tips in October of 2018. 

That was the first month I earned over $1,000. And when that happened I finally felt like I had cracked the secret code to blogging as a parenting blogger. 

Now keep in mind that at the beginning of the year, page views decrease for everyone so what happened to me in February of 2019 above is normal. But I kept with my tips and grew my traffic every single month and gained over 185k pageviews in the month of July 2019.

And as far as my earning, I made $2,624.89 in July 2019, just from ads with my blog’s traffic. This is my personal best and I still can’t believe it.

So now the answers to the question you’ve been asking – “How do I get more readers to my blog?”

1. Ready, Set, Blog for Traffic Course

Okay, if you have been blogging for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard that you need to take a blogging course so that you can learn all about setting up your blog to make money.

But not all blogging courses are created equally. I personally have taken a few that really weren’t worth a dime – and they were not cheap.

But for me, this one course changed my blog forever. 

It’s called Ready, Set, Blog for Traffic by Elna Cain

When I took this course I had been blogging for two years, and I was about ready to quit my mom blog and admit defeat. My blog wasn’t growing and I was lucky to get 20,000 page views per month. 

I had followed so many other mom blogger’s advice on how to make money blogging and how to increase my blog’s traffic but nothing worked. That is until I took this course.

In October of 2018, I reached out to Elna Cain who is a very successful mommy blogger and asked for her advice. When she told me about her course, I just knew I had to give it a try – and now I am so happy that I did.

Elna’s course breaks blogging down to an entirely new level. In her course, she has a video for each chapter and listening to her made learning so much easier.

And since Elna owns a few different blogs with different readers and followers, she also teaches how you can make money from different types of blogs like parenting blogs, which is something that I haven’t ever seen any other blogger do.

For me, this was like getting a personal instructor to teach me exactly how to make my blog profitable.

So number 1, if you want to increase your blog’s traffic, enroll in Elna’s course Ready, Set, Blog for Traffic now!

2. Write New Blog Posts More Frequently

My second tip for how to generate traffic to your blog is through writing and posting new high-quality blog posts more frequently. 

Once you have started your blog, your goal is to get more readers to view your newest blog posts. However, if you are only posting once a month, you are less likely to get lots of viewers compared to other bloggers who are posting new blog posts once or twice a week.

Think of your blog in terms of fishing. When you only have one hook with bait out, you may catch one fish, but when you have numerous hooks with bait out, you may catch a whole lot of fish. 

This is what you want with your blog – to catch the eyes of more readers by constantly sharing new blog posts.

Now the frequency of writing new blog posts is different for every blogger. You have to figure out exactly what works for you.

Back in October 2018, when my blog traffic started increasing, I had just started writing and sharing two new blog posts every week. And now I try to put out 3-4 new blog posts every week. 

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3. Make New Pins Daily

If you want to know how to increase blog traffic for free, Pinterest is your secret weapon.

Pinterest is absolutely free to join and is the best place to share your content if you are a parenting blogger. This is because Pinterest is where young moms can be found.

In fact, most of my parenting blog’s traffic comes straight from Pinterest. And in the past few months, my secret to gaining way more traffic has been creating and pinning new pins to Pinterest every day.

As you will learn, Pinterest loves NEW and Fresh content to be shared often and this even works when you are making newer pins for older blog posts. Pinterest only cares that the image is new and high-quality.

Now once you have started to share new pins more often to your Pinterest Boards, you will then be rewarded because Pinterest will see that you are sharing value and will put your pins in front of more viewers.

So for my profile, I aim to create 3 – 5 new pins each day and share them to my relevant Pinterest Boards.

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4. Scheduling With Tailwind

Next, let me talk about my favorite tool for scheduling my pins to Pinterest so that can actually have a life.

Since over 95% of my blog’s traffic comes straight from Pinterest, that’s where I spend the majority of my time promoting my blog posts. But the problem is that Pinterest wants you to be active 24/7 and sharing your pins at all times to get the most readers to see your pin and therefore click through to your blog.

Now I know that like most moms, I have a husband, two kids, and a whole household to take care of so there is no possible way that I can spend my entire day sharing my pins to Pinterest.

This is where Tailwind comes in to play.

The Tailwind app allows bloggers to schedule their pins for different times throughout the day and then Tailwind takes care of the realtime sharing for you. But it doesn’t end there. Using Tailwind for your Pinterest account also comes with some really handy benefits such as:

• it is backed by and trusted by Pinterest
• keeps track of when you last shared a certain pin and where
• you can work more efficiently
• getting better engagement using Tailwind’s Smart Schedule
• SmartLoop feature that allows you to reshare your best pins
• measure your progress on Pinterest
• it comes with an awesome sharing community called Tailwind Tribes

So with all of those awesome benefits, you are sure to love you can start using Tailwind to grow your blog traffic now for less than $10/ month.

And if you’re still not sure you can give Tailwind a try for FREE for the first month

5. Tailwind Tribes

Along with Tailwind comes the Tailwind Tribes.

Now while your Tailwind account shares your scheduled pins to your group boards, using the Tribes can take your blog’s traffic to a new level.

Unlike group boards, Tailwind Tribes are communities where you share your new pins instantly. And in return, you schedule other members’ pins from the same tribe to your Tailwind scheduler to be shared to your personal boards.

And with tribes, your pins’ likelihood of being clicked through is much higher.

6. Focusing On Topics My Audience Loved

Once you have been blogging for at least 6 months, you should be able to see what your particular audience responds to and loves to come to your blog to read.

I spent over a year writing about whatever I felt like and to be honest, it was a complete waste of time because viewers come to blog posts to get an answer to their problem. 

So for example, my viewers love parenting topics. And once, I started tracking my most viewed blog posts, I began to write more and more about parenting rather than other topics.

Of course, I still write a few other lifestyle topics every now and then, but I don’t expect them to go as viral as my parenting posts do. Another popular type of blog post that does well on parenting blogs is list posts.

In conclusion, check out your blog’s stats and watch for trends to see what your readers come to your blog to read and run with those types of posts.

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7. I Kept Sharing My Most Popular Posts

Another one of my tricks to increase blog traffic has been resharing my most popular posts.

Many new bloggers seem to be under the impression that once you write a blog post and it does well that it cannot get better traffic. But that really isn’t’ true.

I have a handful of blog posts that bring in over 70% of my blog’s traffic each month and they are mostly posts from months or even years ago.

Part of this is all in how you are sharing each blog post. So if you just share your new blog post once after it’s been published, you aren’t likely to ever get more traffic from it again in the future.

But if you are consistently making new pins for it with different enticing titles to get viewers to click through to your site you can continue to gain traffic for a long time to come. 

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8. I Changed The Look Of My Pins

Now that you know how I used Pinterest to gain more traffic, here is how I made better quality pins to get more readers from Pinterest to click through my pins.

In the picture below there are two Pinterest images. The one on the left is a pin I made over a year ago when I was getting hardly any click-throughs and the pin on the right is one of my newest pins that is much more eye-catching.

Now tell me if you were scrolling through Pinterest on your phone and were looking at these pins side by side, which one would you click? The right one right?

So to make my pins more likely to get clicked on, I made a few adjustments to the pictures that I chose and my wording.

Here’s what I did. I chose to use better royalty-free photos in Canva (which is where I make all of my images) and also started using photos from Deposit Photos.

And once I chose the photo that I wanted for a particular pin, I would stretch it out to make the image much larger to catch the eye of Pinterest users that were viewing from their phones.

Now with the words, I used titles that made my viewers want to click on my pins and also used big bold letters rather than script letters that are harder to read on cell phones. I also made sure to use very bright colors that catch your eyes better than old dull colors.

9. Manual Pinning

Once you see this chapter about manual pinning you may think that I am contradicting what I said earlier about scheduling your pins but hear me out.

Of course, I did tell you that scheduling your pins though Tailwind is a much better use of your time than spending all day on Pinterest manually pinning each of your pins, and that is definitely true.

But the one time that I choose to manually pin is when I am adding a new pin to my boards for the first time.

So when I create a new pin, I first add it in the “create a pin” tab on Pinterest and then pin it to one of my relevant boards. Once it is added, I then manually pin it to my “Very Anxious Mommy Blog” board which is basically my best of board of pins from my blog. 

Finally, I manually pin the new pin one more time to my “VeryAnxiousMommyBloggers Group” Board that I run.

*Just make sure if you are manually pinning to be careful and space out your pins because if you keep pinning the same pin or even different pins all in a short period of time, Pinterest may think you are spamming and suspend your account.

• How I Used Pinterest Strategies to More than Triple My Blog Traffic

10. I Used Pinterest for Ideas

No matter what type of blog you write, you’ll need plenty of ideas to create new blog posts to publish.

For me and many other parenting bloggers, Pinterest is the perfect place to find tons of ideas for blog posts. I actually regularly scroll through on my phone to look for new ideas to write about.

Another great way that I use Pinterest is for new wording ideas for new pins. When you are trying to make new pins for an older blog post, using the same wording on the pin, will likely not get you more readers. But if you change the wording on the pin, you may catch a few different readers’ eyes than before. 

So for example, like in the images above where I was talking about how I changed my pins, you can see that each pin has different wording.

The first one says “11 things that actually happen when you have a C-section” and the newer one says “11 things no one told me about having a C-Section.”

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11. I Quit Sharing In Social Media Sites That Weren’t Bringing Traffic

When you first start a blog many veteran bloggers will tell you that you have to share your new blog posts everywhere to get “real traffic” to your blog. And while this may seem like a great idea at first, taking the time to share your posts everywhere is not the best use of your time. 

For one, your particular blog’s readers are not everywhere. So sharing in certain social media sites are a complete waste of time.

Secondly, instead of trying to find readers to come to your blog where they are likely not hanging out you could be writting a new blog post or learning more about how to manage your blog better.

This definitely happened to me when I first started blogging. I was told that I needed to be everywhere and so I created social media profiles for my blog in places like Twitter, Google+, and more that have never brought me any traffic.

My advice is to learn where your blog’s viewers hang out and make sure that your blog is being shared there as much as possible. For my blog, Pinterest is my go-to for gaining blog traffic. 

Are you a mommy blogger who hasn’t started getting real traffic? If so, let me know how these tips help your blog to grow.