Traffic : my blogs traffic and its sources

This article is a bit delayed as I planned to post in the end of the January, but this isn’t a time sensitive article, so the presentation will have the same effect. January has been a month of great challenges, productivity and achievements and I feel that the previous month will be one of the most memorable in my blogging career. Its been one month since I stepped out of Blogspot and started to blog on WordPress and there have been many changes in the traffic, traffic sources, readers, content and revenues.

This post is detailed case study of my blogs traffic and its sources from the past one month, it includes tips and tricks and lessons from the same. The below methods are free and are effective for blogs in every niche.

In January my total traffic stood at 7559 with 79% unique views, 45 feed subscribers and most traffic coming from the United States and India. Direct traffic to my blog increased 45% due to the recent newspaper article featuring my blog. I had totally made 10 posts and almost all received a positive feedback.

Mashable, Techcrunch and Problogger – Blog commenting

As you all know I’m a big fan of blog commenting and I’d give the same advise for any newbie blogger, and being a newbie myself I preferred commenting on bigger blogs in my niche till I can build up some good amount of search engine and social media traffic. In one month I received about 3000 visitors from comments I had left on other blogs, so this makes up almost half of my total traffic.

Other than Mashable, Techcrunch and Problogger I also leave comments on various other blogs on a daily basis, they include DailyBlogtips, JohnChow, Copyblogger and Chris Brogan. I didn’t mention this because these blogs work mainly for the make money online and blogging tips niche.

Being on the other side of the world, I have a clear advantage as most bloggers publish there post between 5pm to 7pm (Indian Timing) allowing me to be on the top 5 comments on each post. I strictly keep that time for blog commenting and engaging with other bloggers. (Learn more : Attracting traffic through comments)

Forums and bulletin boards

Another place where I was very active is forums and online bulletin boards, I created accounts in 100s of webmaster forums and tried to use all of them to fullest extent. I had been banned many times for spamming, but I still continued, this did teach me to be cautious and to think twice before spamming again.

Forums also helped me gain many backlinks and helped me in my blogs rankings. I’m usually active on Digital Point and Warrior forums as they are my target niche. I could have generated thousands of visitors to my site everyday through this, but I kept getting banned.

To find a target forum for yourself I’d recommend you to use BigBoards, which is a directory of forums, choose some from there and be active on it to build a reputation and community. Many forums allow you to link to your posts directly inside your thread, try to take full advantage, as this way you’ll get targeted traffic, but be cautious when you do so. Forum posting is really essential for generating traffic for newbie blogs.

StumbleUpon

All the other methods in this list requires great hard work and are very time consuming, and it required me spend time on it everyday, but StumbleUpon helps generate constant traffic for a long time and you have great chances of going viral with it. StumbleUpon doesn’t have the potential to send millions of visitors such as Digg or Reddit, but unlike Digg with just a few positive ratings you’ll end up with a huge amount of traffic and exposure, but many people struggle to get those first few positive ratings, so try to build a network and optimize your site for onsite exposure.

StumbleUpon users are very frickle, so you’ll have a high bounce rate and very less conversion rates, so you’ll have to make some changes in your posts and blog. As any social media site patience, hard work and networking is the key so it takes a week’s hard work to get StumbleUpon traffic. (Learn more : Generating traffic via StumbleUpon)

I recently went ahead with my first StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign and I had great success with it, it costs you $0.5 per view which is pretty expensive compared to Adwords, but the beauty of StumbleUpon Advertising is that it helps spread your blog virally in StumbleUpon and other networks, that is why I kept getting traffic even after my campaign ended. If you have a small budget I’d advise you to go ahead with StumbleUpon.

Twitter –  my next big source

I created my Twitter account 7 to 8 months ago, but I underestimated it and neglected it in my blogs promotion, it was just 2 months ago when I started to fully use it and get active on it. Just one hour of active twittering gets me around 45 to 50 visitors. Though I believe that Twitter is longer good for internet marketing I’ll have to admit that its one of my top traffic sources.

Usually whenever I create a post I write more than 10 tweets about it with a shortened url, most bloggers make just one or two tweets about their latest post. Just break up your post and tweet interesting points and tips in that post with the link. This has worked really well for me and I’m sure it’ll be effective no matter how many followers you have.

Your main goal on Twitter should be to spread your links and make them go viral through many users, this can be very tough when your new to Twitter, but you will have a steady increase once your follower count increases. Until then you can try some methods such as putting up a retweet button beside your post, joining retweet clubs and try your best to make your tweets interesting. (Learn more : How to increase Twitter retweets?)

Digg, Reddit and Delicious

None of this sites send me much traffic, but I still am very active in them because I know that if I work hard I may end up with thousands of visitors. Most of the above sites work well only if you give some onsite exposure, so its of no use until you build up a good traffic base, but many people still say that your successful in forming a network on Digg, every article you submit has chances of going virally into the front page.

Sometimes I get a small amount of traffic through these sites, which is really useful for me, but its rare. Digg helps in generating links to my site as it is well indexed by Google. So my advise will be to optimize your post to spread socially and generate traffic for some onsite exposure. (Learn more : Digg this! Creating a Digg friendly post)

On to our readers

All the above factors contributed effectively for my blogs traffic and will work for any type of content in any niche, in case you find something to disagree with in this post or have an opinion on this topic, please do share it with us below. If you find this blog useful please do subscribe and follow me on Twitter.

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