Case study: 12000 visitors without much posting and promotion

Again I’m a bit late with the monthly traffic post, but this time its more than just the sources and amount of traffic I generate to my blog. As you all can see I was completely off from blogging from the past one month due to my exams and I didn’t get the time to post a single comment to drive traffic, but fortunately I was happy to see a constant flow of traffic everyday and on the end of my exams when I checked out my traffic for the particular month I had a shock of my lifetime, as my traffic had increased by over 40% to 12000 visitors.

As I own a new blog there were actually no chances for me to get more traffic from search engines, so if I’m not active for a few days my traffic would usually drop, but in this case it is not like that, and neither can I say that I’m generating passive income, because the traffic I’ve got currently happens to be the fruit of my long term promotional methods.

My post went viral on Twitter

On February 21st I wrote a post named 10 plugins to twitterify your blog, I wasn’t expecting much results from this post, but it turned out to be one of the most popular posts on this blog. 12 Days after publishing this post it got retweeted about 40 times in just one day, leading over 246 people towards my site. Many of my other posts have received more retweets than this one, so I feel that this one was picked up by some power Twitter users.

That just made my day seeing my post going viral on Twitter and the traffic didn’t stop for days and to add on to my dream run, that post was featured on Tweetmeme’s front page for a few minutes, I didn’t really get to know how much traffic I got from there, but I expect it was around 200 users.

Tapping into my StumbleUpon audience

I’ve heard many bloggers boast about their success on StumbleUpon, but I never got good and quality traffic from it, and even today I don’t have an influential StumbleUpon profile and none of the posts I stumble seem to have any effect, but I successfully triggered a viral chain on StumbleUpon leading to hundreds of visitors. This does not mean that I was the one to Stumble my article, I think I was right about that content is king, as you see I’ve spent huge hours on writing good quality posts, but very less time in promotion. (Learn more :  A bloggers guide to StumbleUpon)

On 8th of march somebody stumbled a few of my posts and I received 30 visitors on that same day, on the 9th I got 145 visitors from StumbleUpon and on the 10th the number increased to 248. Even after that I kept getting traffic from StumbleUpon which slowly faded away.

Links from various other blogs

The popularity of my blog reached its highest levels in the middle of March when some lesser know blogs with decent amounts of traffic started noticing some interesting articles on my site. Firstly a blog named ViperChill linked to my article on StumbleUpon advertising campaign and it generated over 200 visitors on the first day and kept generating traffic for that particular week. On the same week Enterprise marketing and Weblogbetter linked to some of my articles which gave me around 400 visitors altogether.

There were also some other blogs which did generate traffic but not as big as the above ones, they include WPmash, thebestwebhost and Twitter gadget. That is why I recommend that you mail webmasters about your latest updates and try to maintain good relations with webmasters in your niche, though I didn’t do anything in this case, I’m sure that it’ll help.

Effective keyword research

I never took time to study effective keywords and post on such topics as I felt that the value of my blog would be lowered, but recently a friend of mine forced me to do so, but instead of writing on incompetent keywords I started writing posts on subjects I favored and titled them according to my keyword research. As I mentioned above many of my traffic sources are the fruits of my long term promotional plans and keyword research comes under this.

It took a lot of time for me to master this skill, but currently I’m pretty successful at it. You must have noticed that the last 25 posts on this blog contain different and unique headings, although the contents and topics are similar to other blogs, these techniques take a hell lot of brainstorming, but you can achieve a lot success. Currently I get about 33 visitors a day on a average from Google which results in good amounts of profits, they keywords which I rank well for are as follows,

• ’31 Days to build a better blog’
• ‘Promoting a killer article’
• ‘Biggest photoshop mistakes’
• ‘StumbleUpon advertising’
• ‘monetizing a porn site’
• ‘benefits of interlinking’

Blog commenting – My favorite hobby

From my very first reader till today the only method I rely on for consistent and quality traffic is blog commenting. I currently generate over 100 visitors a day only with the help of comments. I usually comment on big mainstream blogs such as Techcrunch and Mashable, I also get good traffic from some relatively smaller blogs such as Shoemoney, Problogger and Dailyblogtips.

Although there are many other blogs which can lead to enormous amounts of traffic, I use the above 5 as they have comparatively less restrictions and I usually post a signature link below my comments through which I get plenty of traffic.

Now, how did I get traffic from comments with commenting for an entire month? You see my traffic from comments had dropped comparatively to my previous month, but what kept it generating traffic was that I usually comment on big blogs which are more likely to go popular, there were some articles where I was in the first five to comment on and these articles kept generating active traffic and my link was getting good exposure for a long time.

Another reason for this was that due to my heavy commenting in the previous month I started ending up on the top commenter list of many famous blogs, this not only gave me some link juice, but also some consistent amount of traffic. (Learn more : Attracting traffic through comments)

Switching to lowly saturated social sites

Before march each of my post had bookmarking buttons of only big sites such as Digg, Reddit and Delicious, what I failed to realize was that I had literally no chance of going viral on any of these sites. It would take up to 500 diggs to end up on Digg’s front page, up to 200 delicious bookmarks to end up on their front page and hell lot more for Reddit.

So I decided to use social bookmarking sites which were less saturated such as Blog engage, Sphinn and Twittley. All of this required relatively less amount of feedback to go viral, though the traffic I would get by going viral wasn’t much, it was still better than other big sites through which I couldn’t get a single visitor.

Yaro Starak writes about big and small communication methods in his ebook, he says that every blogger must make the full use of smaller communication systems in order to enter big communication platforms. So I believe that if your blog gets less than 20,000 visitors a month, its well and good to tap into small social networks.

On to our readers

March has been a big month for me, though I was sick of writing my exams, my site has shown significant growth without my presence, due to which I’m really happy. The above methods are easy to tap into and anyone and everyone has a equal opportunity to make the best of it. For more free blogging tips subscribe to my feed or follow me on Twitter.