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In this episode of the Growth Machine Podcast, Nat Eliason talks about growing a blog from scratch using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Content Marketing. This is an audio version –not a transcription– of the post Growing Cup a Leaf: 0 to 150,000 Monthly Organic Visitors in 8 Months. Nat talks about points to consider before starting a blog, how to grow traffic to it and steps to rank on top of Google. Mentioned in the show Cup and Leaf [00:46] Bluehost [5:20] WPEngine [5:40] CloudOptimus [5:40] WordPress [5:50] Webflow [6:03] Mangools [06:56] Ahrefs [07:06] The Writer Finder [11:09] Upwork [11:14] Clearscope [13:30] Reddit [15:00] Facebook Groups [18:40] Cup a Leaf on Pinterest [20:40] Nat Eliason Blog [21:30] A Clean Bake [21:40] Made You Think Podcast [21:45] 100,000 Visitors: A 7-Part Series [26:10] Articles mentioned Growing Cup a Leaf: 0 to 150,000 Monthly Organic Visitors in 8 Months Does Your Blog Have SEO Potential? [4:54] How to Find 100+ Great Keywords in Less than 1 Hour [7:29] Show Topics 0:45 - Cup a Leaf is a property born as a side project at Growth Machine. It’s a blog about Tea, types, benefits, etc. It started out of interests with the aim to create, hopefully, a case study about SEO well applied. By today it has hit the 150.000 monthly visitors mark in just 8 months, appearing at first position for most tea related searches. 2:00 - How to create a 100.000 monthly viewers site? The 3 criteria your chosen niche must meet to attract that many people. Why ‘tea’ is better than ‘hamster sweaters’. An article can rank #1 on Google but nobody is clicking; how to avoid that. The niches you should avoid. How to assess competition.    5:04 – Setting your blog for SEO success. Which CMS to use, and which host you should totally avoid. Recommended hosts for your site. WordPress vs Webflow. 6:22 – Finding your target keywords. How to write your posts to make them SEO-driven. Tools for keyword research. How to choose the first articles to write and rank. The metric to prioritize articles writing. 09:07 - Creating content. How many posts/week? The #1 reason people fail when creating a blog. How much you will have to wait until you see results. Detailed timeline of visitors per month for Cup a Leaf. How much you can expect paying a writer. 11:45 - Tips for those who write their own articles. How to make a better articles than the competition: adding more information, providing up-to-date info, making it more actionable, making it more readable. A tool for accelerating article writing. 14:00 - Promoting the article. How much should you spend on promotion. Tips on how to promote on Reddit, Facebook Groups and Pinterest, keeping in mind each platform idiosyncrasy and rules. 21:00 - More on promoting: how we want with the first backlinks. How to get links with ease. Podcasts, broken link building, guest posting. 23:37 – The biggest ingredient for SEO. Areas where people fail. 26:04 – Go to growthmachinepodcast.com/freecourse to get the 7 part, in-depth series about building a blog to success. Go to growthmachinepodcast.com and subscribe for future episodes. Lookf for growthmachinepodcast.com on iTunes and Stitcher. If you are enjoying the show, leave a review!