5 Ways You Can Measurably Increase Your Traffic

Posted By: Josh Kohlbach - August 12, 2010

When a small website starts to get a little traffic it can be quite exciting. I’ve been lazy since I started this website. From day 1 I’m sad to say it’s probably been more about me than about you. The reasons is because like many others I write to learn and therefore it’s sometimes hard for me to put that into words every day and because of the breadth of material I’ve wanted to learn about it’s not really focused enough to be successful in the search engines.

Recently though, I found the urge to change it up a bit and see what a bit of focus could bring to this website. I put my tasks here into rotation on my tasks list – this is something that was long overdue as running a blog can be a bit of a time sap. It was definitely time to put some measurable effort in around here.

Mmm... spikey. Getting some regular visitors and seeing my subscriber count, newsletter subscriber count, and daily traffic numbers edge ever so slightly skyward means a lot for what I’ve been doing.

This website is small. It’s small, but I liked it that way. I had a few regulars, most of which I email personally and get along with really well on and off the site, we chat like friends even though we’ve never met. In a way I’ve been afraid of losing that. But it also feels equally good to see my articles being read by more than just a small circle.

In the past I was lucky (and happy) to receive 10 or so visitors per day – something that’s not too unfamiliar to a lot of new website owners.

Over the last month or two I’ve been working on these figures by employing a few strategies – most of which have been successful and some I can still work on.

5 Reasons Why My Traffic Has Measurably Increased In The Last Month

Write Daily – I’ve feircly avoided doing this because I hate being tied to a schedule. Sometimes I don’t feel creative, like right now for instance my scheduled posts have dried up because I haven’t felt like writing in the last week or two. Don’t even get me started on what happens when you get ultra busy. If life gets hectic, writing a blog doesn’t tend to take priority.This all said, writing daily has been very rewarding for me for a number of reasons:
- I get more stuff in the search engines.
- I can stick to a topic for a while (lately talking about lowering bounce rates has been a fun past time for me).
- By sticking to a topic I can draw more people into a conversation than a one off piece.
- By sticking to a topic over time I can saturate a niche. Not many folks are writing about bounce rates with any regularity.
- Writing daily brings daily visitors, fresh content keeps your subscribers happy.
- Did I mention the search engine benefits? Not only does it mean more content in their databases (more entry points to your site if you want to think about it that way), but the keyword intensity for the articles you’re writing on your topics is multiplied even faster.
To make it slightly easier on myself I’ve taken to a schedule that involves writing Tuesday through Saturday. This means I can write a fun post on the weekend and only have to find four days worth of content for the week. That one less article means a lot to me time-wise (I’m a busy dude with my projects)
Use Your Influence Wisely – I’ve never been huge on social media, I went through a phase of adding everyone I could to twitter. Then subsequently when through another phase of culling all the hype driven crap these guys were trying to ram down my throat.My twitter account therefore is mostly people following me, it’s about a 1:2 ratio and that’s the way I like it. I follow the people that truely interest me (when I remember to go back and add them, don’t feel hurt if you’re not on my list) and therefore my following isn’t that big (only around 500 last time I checked).I am bigger on StumbleUpon however as some people know. So I’ve been working on using my influence there for the better. Even though traffic has a higher bounce rate from StumbleUpon due to the nature of the service, it’s still a good people mover for a small site like mine.Because I’ve built my StumbleUpon account up over time I’m able to shoot through spurts of 100-200 visitors at a time as you can see in my graph above for popular content. The bad side of this is that if you’re recommending your own content all the time you really have to work on discovering new content that’s not on your website and stumbling other folk’s stuff – good for them, but time consuming for me. It’s been worth while though.
Comment More – I’ve always loved the idea of commenting frequently to get lots of return visitors to your site and the amount of success I’ve had with it so far is inspiring. One of my bigger traffic sources is ProBlogger because I went through a phase of commenting on Darren’s articles quite regularly. If you have something important to say and stand out, then commenting is a great strategy for increasing traffic as a lot my regular readers would agree with.I’d say 40%+ of my non-search engine traffic is coming from comments I’ve left around the net and I’ll be working on doing this more often especially for those who leave a comment on my website as it’s a great way to connect with people and go that extra mile.
Zemanta is a great referral tool – I’ve been blogging about Zemanta a little bit lately because it’s really taken my fancy and is one of my favourite new blogging tools.The way it works is by giving you valuable references to content around the internet you can link to, images you can use in your posts, and tag suggestions based on your content. You can no follow the links to blog posts you choose to put at the end of your posts, but I think it’s a nice gesture and enticement for people to visit and link to me in return and it’s already working.My traffic sources have increased over the past month simply by linking out more. If you’re afraid of linking out to other sites and your blog is still small (ie. receiving less than 100 visits per day) then you should really drop the facade. You’re not popular enough yet to hold all your links to yourself – share some of the love and you’ll get much more in return than you would gain by holding all that link juice to yourself.Look out for an experiment write up in the next month or two discussing my findings on Zemanta.
Even if you don’t join Zemanta, joining some sort of referral group can really boost your influence in the blogosphere. Getting those natural links is hard work – it can mean lots of hours writing guest posts, building relationships, etc. This is a way to shortcut the process and it works.
Design – Finally, the last point is to have an enticing design. This is more about keeping people on the site and turning them into visitors than increasing traffic. But it also increases that sharability of the site if it looks good and more importantly looks legitimate. This is really true for those giving advice.The design of Code My Own Road was something I just threw together in a few hours one weekend as a temporary design. I didn’t really put any of the effort into it that I should have.While it’s still not perfect (look at that ugly comment form down there) it’s a damn sight better than it was. At least I have a proper menu, a sidebar (sort of) and can feel okay about saying to my friends “Hey, check out my website”. In this way design is important for traffic building.

Well that’s it folks, I’ve got a lot of work still ahead of me, but I felt it was time to give a little update on what my plans are here and reassure you that I’m in it for the long haul.

I’ll be going on holidays next week for a week (it’s my first wedding anniversary – can’t forget that one!) so hopefully I’ll be able to line up some content for you all to enjoy while I’m away.

In the mean time, tell us what you think about my traffic strategies above. Do you do any of these? Can you testify to their traffic building powers? I’m especially interested in those people who get a lot of benefit from time consuming activities like commenting and stumbling. Let us know in the comments!