Brent Hodgson, Copywriter

I set myself a goal this week - I wanted to grow the number of visitors to my blog..

More specifically, I wanted to increase the number of visitors to my blog - and beat last months’ figure.

I was running behind time - there were only a few days in the month left, and I would need to actually work (*groan*) at it if I was going to hit the mark.

I started posting franticly. I needed fresh, new content (and quality content too). I was waaay behind where I needed to be if I wanted to beat January’s stats.

The good news - I made the mark!

I would have missed my target it this month if it wasn’t for the leap year - a few nice things that happened on the 29th of February which pushed me over the mark.

1. James Brausch gave me a really nice compliment, specifically mentioning my blog in a post of his. (He has some pretty strict standards on who he links to - which you can read here.)
2. And Ed Dale came by and commented on my blog too - and where Ed goes, the people follow.

Thank-you again guys!

Both of those things boosted my February Stats (unique visitors) up above January’s level.

Here are my actual stats:

February unique visitors: 493
(January unique visitors: 428)

You’re probably wondering about that big spike in April last year? (2,178 unique visitors) How did that happen?

Well.. that’s around the time that I was last blogging consistently.

Fresh, quality content, and a regularly updating blog will grow your traffic stats - there’s no doubt about it.

…But once you stop writing new content, the traffic will gasp for a while, and then die (see traffic death in October).

If you’re wondering where, specifically, I was getting traffic from in April…

…Here’s where the traffic came from:

Search Engine Optimisation - What can I say? It’s the big kahuna. Even while I wasn’t blogging, people were still finding my blog through Google. Searches on Viral Marketing, How Twitter Makes Money and Google Adwords Quality Score are consistent referrers - but it’s all long tail stuff.

StumbleUpon - This was (and still is) one of my biggest referrers to date. Long story short, I wrote some good content, and asked some people if they’d leave honest reviews of my site - and I ended up with a steady stream of traffic (which is still going - even if it is now just an occasional trickle rather than a big rush).

Web Pro News - I had an article on Google Adwords Quality Score featured in WebProNews - almost one year ago today! That was great for credibility, and gave me a nice bunch of traffic.

Technorati Tags - This was one thing I did early in my blogging which immediately made a difference to my traffic levels. I installed the (now defunct?) SimpleTags tagging plugin, and started tagging my posts. Almost immediately, I started receiving visitors from Technorati blog searches.

Official Adwords Blog - Because I keep up to date with the latest Google Adwords news, I occasionally blog about changes to Google Adwords Strategy. In those posts, I generally link to the Official Adwords Blog - which gets me a trackback (link) from that post.

I’ve found that if I have an interesting title in my post, if I’m one of the first people to blog about that post on the Google Adwords blog, or if I’m one of the last people to blog about that post on the Google Adwords blog, I end up getting a bunch of visitors from the Google Adwords Blog.

Shoemoney - For a while, I was featured as a top commenter on Shoemoney’s blog. That gave me a few dozen visitors, but I wouldn’t recomment people spam the poor guy’s blog. Spend time there if you’re interested, by all means, but don’t go just to spam comments.

Blog Comments - Just keeping an eye on what’s happening in the world of Internet Marketing, and commenting on other peoples blogs, invariably gets a few visitors. These are usually other commenters, or the blog owner themselves.

Trackbacks - Similarly, mentioning other peoples’ blog posts in your blog post, and getting trackbacks, will give you a bit of traffic.

In one post I made, I was catching up on my RSS feeds and decided to make a post on the interesting posts other people had made that week. I linked to a stack of posts, got a lot of trackbacks, and ended up getting a lot of traffic.

I’m sure hosting Blog Carnivals would have a similar effect.

I hope this has given you a few (free) strategies to boost the traffic levels to your web-site.

Brent

P.S. - I know I said StumbleUpon was great for traffic… but James Brausch’s post mentioning me is catching up quickly… It’s been around for just a few hours, and already it’s my #4 referrer. (Thanks again, James!)

P.P.S. - Goes to show the amount of traffic James Brausch must be getting… If he can leap from nowhere to my #4 referrer in just a few hours…

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