Becoming An SEO Beast: How I Grew My Blog By 800% In Less Than 4 Months

5 min readAug 12, 2021

One day I went to checkout my stats on medium and I saw that my reads were going up. I hadn’t even realized that my post Flutter User Authentication Part 2: Storing Users With The Cubit was BLOWING up, on top of all that my YouTube channel and Corey’s Corner Podcast were growing FAST. Months after I published the story it was still accumulating a ton of views and reads. In this post I’ll show you all of the SEO wizardry I used to massively increase the number of views on my content. Stay tuned!

Corey’s Corner Podcast: https://anchor.fm/coreys-corner
Gardner App Development: https://gardnerappdev.com
Get Yoked 🍳 -> https://thoughtsandfitness.com

What is SEO ?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a series of steps we can take to improve the traffic that our content/website receive from search engines. Basically we want to make it so that our content ideally pops up on the first page of any search engine. There are two components to SEO the psychological and algorithmical ie. the user side and the machine side.

Psychological SEO

In my opinion way to many SEO “experts” focus on the algorithmical side of SEO way to much. Don’t get me wrong getting your content on the front page is great and all but it is really really difficult.

At the end of the day the algorithms won’t make people click on your content. The best way to get people to click on and enjoy your content is by understanding human psychology.

Think about all of the times you went to find a web article, video or whatever. Did you ever click on anything that had a horrible cover photo? Probably not. Our mothers lied to us we do judge books by their covers, it’s an evolutionary defense mechanism.

For whatever reason great cover art makes our content more interesting to us . Cover art is like the appetizer to our content, it gives the user a little taste of what is to come. Once I started doing real cover art on my medium articles and YouTube videos I noticed at least a roughly ~50% increase in views. My favorite tools for creating great cover art are Canva and UnSplash , they’re both 100% free.

Good Cover Art = More Impressions

Another important aspect for getting users to view your content is its title. Your title needs to be descriptive. It has to tell your audience the value provided by your content in one sentence or less. A good title hooks our audience whilst a bad one repels them.

Assume you have a target audience, put yourself in their shoes and figure out what they’re looking for. For example I do programming tutorials and I was doing a 3 part series on Authentication with Flutter .When creating a title I asked myself: “ If I was trying to learn Authentication with Flutter what would I be searching for?”. That’s simple enough I’d hope on over to Duck Duck Go and punch in something along the lines of “Authentication With Flutter” or “Flutter Cubit Authentication” ( I now own the top StartPage and Google result for this query).

When considering the psychological factors that get people to click on your content it’s important that you don’t stoop so low as to make your cover art or title amount to click bait. The whole purpose of being a content creator isn’t to get views, it’s to help people.

The number of views you get are just an indirect measure of the number of people who are enjoying your content or finding it useful. Is it really getting 1 million views really worth it if every one of those viewers felt as though they were having their time wasted?

The number one way of getting people to view your content over and over again is by creating high quality content. This takes effort but so does everything else in life. You need to put in the time to reap the rewards, Rome wasn’t built in a day. I spent an hour and a half trying to record a six minute Beginners Dart Tutorial and after a week it has less than 5 views, regardless of the view count it was still worth it.

Algorithmical SEO

On the algorithmical side of SEO we are trying to get your content on the front page of YouTube, Start Page Medium or whatever.

If I were to summarize Algorithmical SEO in three words it would be “links, links, links”. Drop links EVERYWHERE. I don’t care where you are or what your doing drop links like a heavy sack of potatoes. If your at a family reunion have everyone sub. Hire a plane to drop paper certificates with links to your Programming Tutorials. If you’re at a bar Air Drop your podcast.

If you’ve been paying attention I’ve already dropped a whole lotta links for my Controversial Blog , Programming Tutorials and The Corey’s Corner Podcast. There’s still more links to come.

The truth is no one really knows exactly how all of these tech companies algorithims work but we don’t need to because we already know enough. Every search engine has a “spider” that crawls through websites counting the number of links. The more links the better your ranking will be, it’s as simple as that.

Content hosting platforms like YouTube and Medium will collect a lot of information from their users to determine what content to feed them. Who cares how the algorithm works! We all know that if a lot of people are clicking on your post and viewing them for a long time you’re going to be prioritized which equals more views for you. It’s a positive feedback loop where more views = more views. All you have to do is gain some traction.

Working Together

How is anyone going to see your content if you don’t share it? They’re not. Post your content wherever, just don’t be a spammer about it. The only (anti)-social media I have is LinkedIn ( a completely useless website ) and I try to share either my YouTube or Medium articles there once a week.

Why don’t I share my The Corey’s Corner Podcast on LinkedIn? Because it’s not the right market. Why would I try to sell something interesting and fun to a bunch suits?

Medium offers publications which are a great way to find your target audience, they’re a great tool for getting more views. For example every time I post a programming or app development tutorial I submit it to Codex.

Have your friends share your content. After I did an iconic podcast with 🐐🐐 Rhys Humphrey 🐐🐐 he was kind enough to share it all over his social media. His army of cult followers took the bait and entered the deep dark abyss of Corey’s Corner.

Before Rhys started sharing my podcast I was getting between 10 and 20 views. He topped me off at 70+ views and still after a couple of months holds the view PR for Corey’s Corner.

That’s it for this post, I’m sure by now your an SEO Beast too, thanks for reading !!