I feel you David! I'm constantly seeking other bloggers to compare:
- blog age (for me: 6 weeks),
- number of posts (for me: 30),
- and average post length (for me 2000+ words).

If I find other bloggers at the same progress stage as me, that have the same traffic results, it is very encouraging to know things are going as expected!

All we have to do then is trust the process... easy to say, but takes discipline to truly live it on a day-by-day basis when things are moving slow :D

Cordelia, if you can make time every day for Pinterest, I highly suggest you do it! I wouldn't tackle multiple strategies at once. Instead, building them up one at a time. So if you go with Pinterest, don't worry about Twitter - and vice versa.

I don't know why, but somehow I always get better results if I focus on just one thing until that grows into steady traffic. Even if I do less work, just the fact that I focused on one thing only, lead to better results. It's like a weird magic haha :D

Really good advice and have just read a new post from Mcraspery , saying similar, who was letting us know how she has gained huge traffic from Pinterest this week and how she did it.
I think the messages are too many to ignore.. 👍

And it's free & easy to try out, I say go for it :D

Hey Steve, for Pinterest I suggest the following:
- Create a picture at 600 x 300 px dimensions for every pin, using bold large letters for text.
- Create as many infographics as you can for your pins.
- For every pin that promotes YOUR blog, re-pin 5 pins from the community. Meaning, keep a 5-to-1 ratio between self-promotion and re-pinning.
- Re-pin something every day. Pin your own stuff as often as you can (while adhering to the 5-to-1 ratio).
- Organize your pins in boards.

That's exactly what I do and I'm seeing steady growth in the 4 weeks since I've started, my account is now at almost 17k monthly views. I might write up a separate post about it when I find the time.

One more thing: I've heard from several others that leveraging group boards is essential. However, for this to work you need to get accepted into a group board first. They don't want self-promoting spammers of course, so you first have to prove to be valuable, which is why adhering to the 5-to-1 ratio is so important in my opinion. Having beautiful pins is also important, of course!

But once you're in a group board, you can pin your own posts once in a while and benefit from the exposure.

Thank you very much. So many things, so little time. I keep telling myself I need to carve out some time to learn Pinterest. I didn't know anything about group boards, etc, so I have a lot to learn here. Thanks again, this is a great start.

If you have limited time, the best thing to invest your energy in is content creation. Every blog of mine that failed was due to me creating too little content, and focusing on allllll the rest >.<

However, if you're already creating content, then yeah Pinterest is pretty much second highest priority - or YouTube, depending on your niche, personality, time, etc.

Re-pinning doesn't take much time, if you're following people inside your niche. Just search for people who are already pinning on related topics, or even the same topic. Be generous with re-pins, don't be scared of "helping the competition".

My point is: Re-pinning is an easy daily task that, once you're following enough people in your niche, takes literally 1 minute to do. To be efficient, you can complete this task every day on your phone from within the Pinterest app (i.e. bathroom, waiting in line, etc.).

And for creating your own pins, that takes time yeah... I'm still struggling to find time to create beautiful infographics. That's the first thing I will outsource for sure haha :D

But for your "bread-and-butter" pins you can use http://canva.com, once you've learned this tool it goes much faster to create basic pins (not full-blown infographics). And you can also do this on your phone!

Best of luck! Keep asking if you have questions.

I have spent the lions share of my time on content creation and that is the "easiest" thing for me to do right now. Taking time out to learn Pinterest will be something I need to do, but you are right, maybe now is not the right time.

I have over 180 posts on my website, and as I mentioned 20 months old. I can continue to create content and that will never hurt.

I will take your advice on re-pinning and yeah, my concern has always been helping the competition. I am in the health niche (back pain) and also focus on fitness. So, yeah it's super competitive.

Thanks again for your input, I am always interested in learning new ways to drive traffic. Youtube is also on my list!!!

Oh wow 180 posts!! That's a massive blog!!

Don't forget that content creation also means going back to old posts, and improving them with more content.

One great strategy is:
- Re-visit all the blog posts that are responsible for 80% of your overall website traffic.
- Then check Google search console to see which kind of keywords are bringing traffic to those posts.
- Add new subheadings, paragraphs, media etc. to include those keywords into the top-performing posts.

The point is: Oftentimes, Google is bringing you traffic for keywords that you haven't even targeted yet. Include them inside those posts, and you can bolster your rankings, increasing traffic.

That's a very efficient way to do more of what already works!

I have been afraid to mess with the posts that are performing well, like if it ain't broke don't fix mentality.

I have been meaning to update old posts that do not perform well and see if I can improve ranking.

Thanks for all of your input today, I appreciate it.

Good thinking, I understand! Keep up the great work Steve, I hope we talk again in the near future!

Agreed! If I needed a new blog to perform fast, I wouldn't go into this niche. On the other hand, I also understand when people want to be passionate about the topic, so that they can find the energy for daily tasks. I guess everyone is different :D

It's going as expected, but deep down inside we always hope it goes better :D