Qualifying for Mediavine is one of the most important steps you can take for your blog. Not only is this a sure sign you are on the right track with your blog, but it is also possible to earn a full-time income from Mediavine alone!
To be eligible for Mediavine, you now need a minimum of 50,000 sessions a month (which is roughly 60,000 page views). This used to be 25,000 sessions, but in June 2020 Mediavine doubled the requirements in order to accept fewer applications. However, there is a lot more that goes into qualifying for Mediavine besides just session numbers.
I currently have my We Are Travel Girls website on Mediavine, and there are some very useful tips that can help boost your chances to qualify for Mediavine that I wish I knew before applying a few years ago.
In this article, I will break down my top 5 tips that you can do to boost your traffic and qualify for Mediavine, so you can enjoy the income boost that comes with it!
What Is Mediavine?
Mediavine is an ad network that is only available to bloggers who get a certain amount of quality traffic each month. I have personally had only great experiences with Mediavine which is why I strongly recommend them if you are interested in running ads on your website.
Why Choose Mediavine?
Mediavine has excellent customer support and also offers you a lot of control over how ads appear on your website.
Unlike other ad networks, Mediavine gives you access to set the frequency that ads appear, where they appear on your website (such as in content, sticky sidebar and bottom, video ads, and more), and they will work with you to get ads running smoothly on your site.
They also have a brand new dashboard where you can see detailed breakdowns on how much money you are earning and tips to improve your website revenue in one place.
Mediavine also knows how important site speed is to your SEO, so they offer several options to optimize your ads for site speed, in addition to only running ads in the most optimized way to minimize the impact on your sites loading time. They are even building their own WordPress theme called Trellis with a focus on site speed and maximizing your ad revenue.
Speaking of ad revenue, Mediavine pays significantly more than most other ad networks. Many people report earning 4x as much from Mediavine as they do from Google Ads!
The jump in earnings is so much that I recommend bloggers skip Google Ads or other ad networks and instead focus on getting their blog on Mediavine as soon as possible.
How Do I Get Accepted To Mediavine?
As mentioned, Mediavine recommends you have 50,000 sessions before applying. While this isn’t a hard cap and I have heard of people being accepted with slightly lower numbers, this is a good benchmark to aim for.
Page Views vs Sessions
Most bloggers rely on page views as their target metric because this is what many plugins and Google Analytics track. However, the more important number is unique sessions and not just page views when qualifying for Mediavine.
What’s the difference between unique sessions and page views? An example will help:
- If someone visits your homepage, reads a blog post, checks your about page, reads a different blog post, then fills out your contact form, this would be 5 page views. However, it all takes place in the same “session”, so it would only count as 1 session.
- If someone finds a blog post from Google, because your SEO is great and you are ranking well, then leaves, this would only be 1 page view and also 1 session.
Don’t worry too much about maximizing for sessions versus page views. As you build your website views using the tips below, you will naturally increase both your page views and sessions over time.
Quality Traffic
Another important factor Mediavine will look at for your application is the “quality” of your traffic. Unfortunately, not all traffic is created equal! See below.
Traffic Location
First, Mediavine will request access to your Google Analytics to see important data about your traffic.
If you don’t have your Google Analytics set up yet, then stop and go do that right now following the Google Analytics section in my Complete Guide To Starting A Blog! Think of Google Analytics as your website’s resume, so get that tracking as soon as possible.
Mediavine will look through your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. They strongly prefer traffic to be US and European based because these are the audiences that advertisers are willing to pay more to reach.
More US traffic on your site means Mediavine can charge more for ads, which means you get paid more!
Take a look at the Acquisition section in Google Analytics to see which countries your traffic is coming from. This will likely depend on your niche, but as long as your site is in English you will likely have a majority of US and European visitors, which is what Mediavine wants to see.
Which Articles Get The Most Traffic
Mediavine will also look at the distribution of traffic to your website.
What they don’t want to see is 90% of your traffic coming from a single blog post. That means all your eggs are in one basket, and if you stop ranking for that post for some reason then your traffic will fall dramatically!
Instead, Mediavine will look to see a good distribution of traffic throughout your site.
You will most likely see that your top articles bring in more traffic than others which is completely fine (most websites get 80% of their traffic from the top 20% of posts), you just want to avoid having one single article that accounts for almost all of your monthly traffic.
If this is the case, then it’s time to work on some of your other articles, either by publishing new content or updating old content, and you can link from your top articles to start boosting traffic to your lower-ranked articles (assuming they are related to each other!).
Top 5 Tips To Qualify For Mediavine
Now that you know why you want to qualify for Mediavine and what they are looking for, there are some specific things you can do to qualify. One important thing to keep in mind here is we are looking to give your website a big traffic push in one month to hit that magical 50,000 session number. Once you hit that number in 30 days, send in your application!
Even if your traffic drops a bit after you’ve been accepted Mediavine won’t immediately kick you off, so the goal here is to push as hard as you can using the below tips over a 30 day period to hit the minimum and give your application the best chance it has to be accepted.
Tip #1: Update Old Content
My first tip for boosting your blog traffic quickly is to update your old blog posts.
Many bloggers think that new content is the key to traffic, but it can take a new post a long time to reach it’s ranking potential. According to a recent Ahrefs study, the average post on the first page of Google is 2 years old!
Only 5.7% of all newly published pages will get to Google Top 10 within a year. – Ahrefs April 2020 study
Instead, we are focused on giving your blog a big traffic boost now. This is why updating old content is the way to go for faster results!
Google has already seen your content and has it in its database, and they are constantly crawling your site for new and updated content. Once you update your post, Google will automatically crawl it, see that there are some good changes, and (hopefully) bump it up in the rankings!
This can all take place much, much faster than writing a new piece of content that can take months to even start ranking.
How To Choose Which Old Posts To Update?
The big question is what posts should you update first? This will depend on your website and how many posts you have, but a good strategy is to see which posts are currently on page 2 of Google and try to get them to page 1.
75% of people never scroll past the first page of search results, and the fact you are already close to Page 1 means these are the posts you should prioritize.
To find these “close but not quite” posts, I use the following strategy:
- Go to Google Analytics – Acquisition – Search Console – Landing Pages.
- Set the date range to the past 6 months
- Filter on the Average Position metric of Greater than 10 and Less than 21 (these are your posts on page 2)
- Note: You can change this to Less than 31 for pages on page 3 if you don’t have many results on page 2
- Note: You can change this to Less than 31 for pages on page 3 if you don’t have many results on page 2
- Sort this list filtered by most Clicks
Done! You now have a list of your top posts appearing on the 2nd page of Google ripe for a makeover.
One note: You might see some of your top posts come up in this list. I would recommend that you do not make changes to your top 5 posts if they are already bringing in a lot of traffic because you might accidentally reduce the traffic they are bringing from a related keyword!
Updating Old Content
How do you update old content? Simply make it the best possible version of the article it can be!
Go through it and look for places you can expand on or add information that has changed. Add useful information like operating hours or location (if applicable), or go into more details on things that have changed since you first wrote it.
Your goal is to make your article better than the posts currently ranking above it, so feel free to look at posts ranking above you by Googling your keyword and see what information appears in posts above yours, then improving on that information in your own post.
Updating your old content is the fastest way to boost your SEO and improve your website in the long run, which will help you get accepted into Mediavine as quickly as possible!
Tip #2: Optimize Your Site Speed
Have you ever visited a website only to have it take forever to load, so you clicked the back button to find a different website? This happens when a website loads slowly, and Google absolutely hates when people click on a search result only to back out and find a different site.
This is why it’s super important to have your site load as quickly as possible!
Site speed can be an entire course in itself, but there are a few (relatively) quick things you can do to make sure your site is loading as fast as possible:
Correct Image Sizing
The number one culprit of slow-loading sites is large images. Especially with today’s high-resolution cameras, some photos can be 10+ megabytes each, which you definitely do not want to load on your website!
Make sure you resize all your photos, ideally before loading them onto your website.
You can use a website like tinypng.com to compress your photos while maintaining quality. You can also use plugins like ShortPixel to automatically resize and compress your images to the exact right dimensions (this is what I use on We Are Travel Girls and Becky van Dijk).
Choose A Quality Host
Your hosting provider is another important part of your website speed. You can build the fastest, most optimized website in the world, but if you are on a budget host that takes forever to load then your website speed will be poor no matter what you do.
For beginner and intermediate bloggers, I recommend Siteground. They are very well priced and have great customer support, in addition to loading sites quickly! They also include important features that some other hosts charge for, including free SSL certificates and daily backups.
Both my Travel Girls Getaways website and this site are on Siteground, and I’ve always been happy with the service and speed (Note: I wouldn’t ever recommend a host that I don’t personally use)
For more advanced bloggers with bigger blogs (100,000+ views a month), I recommend BigScoots. They are more expensive than Siteground but are great at handling large websites.
I use BigScoots for my We Are Travel Girls website and it has been up to the task of heavy traffic days without breaking a sweat!
Reduce Your Plugins
WordPress plugins can be great, but the functionality added by each plugin comes with the risk that it can slow down your WordPress website. It can be tempting to go on a plugin adding spree to add cool new features to your website, but you really want to only use plugins you absolutely need!
Take a look at your plugins and disable or delete any that you don’t really need. This is a good practice to add to your monthly checklist, because sometimes plugins go out of date or WordPress adds the functionality to WordPress itself so you don’t need a separate plugin anymore.
Tip #3: Get Pinning
Pinterest is one of my favourite tools for website traffic, especially if you need a sudden push to help you meet the minimum to qualify for Mediavine. While 80% of my traffic comes from SEO, the remaining 20% is Pinterest which can really add up!
It’s important to implement a proper Pinterest strategy so you are not aimlessly pinning and wasting time. Also, certain niches perform better on Pinterest than others, in particular visual niches like food and travel, so decide if Pinterest is worth it for you.
To leverage Pinterest to boost your traffic, go through your top articles and make new covers for each of them. Pin these articles to your favourite boards and some new boards, and with any luck the Pinterest traffic will start rolling in to help you qualify for Mediavine!
I also highly recommend that you sign up for Tailwind if you want to take your blog and your Pinterest strategy seriously. Tailwind is an approved Pinterest partner and will help you to schedule out your Pinterest content as well as leverage the power of Tailwind Tribes. Tribes are the best way to get other people pinning your content to their boards boosting your chances of getting a viral pin.
I detail everything that you need to know to start rocking Pinterest and making it a traffic magnet in this complete guide to Pinterest – seriously this blog post is over 8,000 words of Pinterest goodness and will really help your chances of getting traffic to your blog in a short time period.
Tip #4: Leverage Your Email List
If you’ve been following my advice for a while, you’ve hopefully been working on building an engaged email list. Your email list is your most valuable asset to build a personal relationship with your followers and also your most engaged audience when selling a product.
However, many people overlook the impact that your email list can have on your blog statistics! When you email your list, include a call to action to read related posts on your blog when you are working on qualifying for Mediavine.
You don’t want to always only promote your articles on your list, because your subscribers will see through this and feel like you are only promoting yourself.
Instead, aim to offer pure value to your list 80% of the time, so when you do a promotional push for a product (or to generate blog traffic like now!) they will be more receptive and happy to help you out.
Depending on your list you can even be more transparent with them and tell them your goal of this month is to qualify for Mediavine, and you would really appreciate it if that could check out some of your blog posts that you share in the email!
If your email list isn’t where you want it to be, make sure to read my 8 Simple Ways To Grow Your Email List blog post. Plus, if you like what you are reading here you can sign up for my email list below and I will send you my free Blog Monetisation eBook.
While I think your blog and email list are the most important ways to monetize your website, that doesn’t mean you should ignore your social channels!
If you have a good social following, leaning into your followers can be a powerful way to get a short term traffic boost which is exactly what we are looking for to qualify for Mediavine.
You might not regularly use social media for blog traffic because it is very difficult to convert, especially from platforms designed to keep you in the app like Instagram, but it still can be a valuable tool in your traffic arsenal.
Share some of your top posts on whichever social networks you have the largest following. Post them to your Instagram stories to remind your followers of that great post you wrote last year, or share it to your Facebook group to generate some good discussion about a relevant topic.
While these are more manual methods to drive traffic (which is why I love the more long term growth methods like SEO and Pinterest), using your social following can give you that great short term boost you are looking for to hit the minimum sessions number in a given month!
Bonus Tip: Seasonal Content
Just in case those 5 tips weren’t enough, I have a bonus tip that you can use depending on your niche and time of year!
That tip is to time your Mediavine qualification push with your seasonal content.
What do I mean by seasonal content? In virtually every niche, you’ll find that certain posts perform better at a specific time of year. For travel, this could be Italy content during summer, or for food bloggers it could be pumpkin pie recipes around Thanksgiving.
Whatever your niche, you will probably see that certain articles predictably do well at a particular time of year, and your entire website might get significantly more traffic based on the season.
If possible, use this to your advantage to apply for Mediavine during one of your high traffic months.
If your highest traffic month the past 3 years has been August, then plan your Mediavine traffic push for that month! This will also help in sharing your content around that time when that seasonal content is most relevant, which will increase your traffic numbers even more!
Mediavine Wrap Up
I hope this article has outlined some actionable ways you can push your blog to get onto Mediavine. Once your application has been accepted, you can keep pushing using some of these tactics to watch your earnings grow every month!
For even more useful information and tactics, I don’t share anywhere else, be sure to check out The Blog Elevation Program.
The Blog Elevation Program is the one place I’ve condensed all my blogging knowledge into an easy to follow plan to help you get your blog on to Mediavine and beyond!
Do you have any questions or tips for boosting your blog traffic? Or have you already qualified for Mediavine and are looking for ways to increase your earnings on the platform. Let me know in the comments below!
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