fog of eternity

I've been writing the Traffic Growth series for ten weeks now. The first question was "How much traffic can I get through viral methods?". The answer to that is "a lot more than before". I've demonstrated that it doesn't take a huge amount of work. I've shown that actively socially networking, and providing decent content, can have a very positive impact on your profile and popularity.

Ten weeks isn't very long to develop site traffic. In the week preceding my first post, the site had 149 visitors. That's 21.3 a day, and most of those from Google search.

In the nine weeks since that first article, the site has had just under 13,000 visitors, at an average of 207 a day. The growth in numbers has been pretty much tenfold.

Here is the main lesson I've learned:

It's all about relationships

I could submit this article to something like StumbleUpon myself. It'd get several hundred visitors in a few minutes. It'd look good for my figures, at least on the surface, but might not provide much value.

Submission to sites like StumbleUpon, or more focused and niche sites like Sphinn, is secondary. Building relationships is prime. Ten good relationships with other bloggers might not show up immediately in your site statistics, but over time they'll generate a huge amount of traffic.

People who like your stuff, read your stuff, and appreciate your contribution...they generate traffic for you. They generate traffic because they talk about your site on their blogs. They generate traffic by visiting and revisiting your site. They generate traffic by talking about you on FriendFeed. And they also generate the big traffic spikes by submitting your work to other sites.

Somewhat tongue in cheek I said a while ago that I don't want to be your friend. But that doesn't preclude relationship building. I wanted to highlight four examples of relationship building that built valuable traffic.

James Duthie (Online Marketing Banter) - Demonstration of how just a single "fan" can make a difference. He's my early adopter. Encourages, submits material, boosts traffic. One individual from whom I'd say a huge percentage of my traffic growth stems.

Corvida (SheGeeks) - She wrote an article about Twitter apps on the same day as I wrote a similar piece. We both found out about Twitter apps the other person didn't know about. A couple of comments on each other's blogs and that got picked up elsewhere by someone who tried to start a "Twitter app tag" idea. Drove traffic back to me.

Mark Dykeman (Broadcasting Brain) - Another of my earliest adopters. I think because I followed him on Twitter because of his cool avatar. I comment a lot on his blog, and so my name is always highlighted at the top of his "Top Commentators" list. But he's also pimped me out elsewhere - one of my most encouraging moments was seeing myself described on another blog as "must read" - and highlighted this site as worth visiting on his own blog.

Louis Gray (louisgray.com) - A demonstration of a less active relationship. I (still) consider Louis a "big name" in the blogosphere. He didn't think that was the case and commented on my blog. Which provoked a humorous article from me comparing bloggers with celebrities. Louis talked about that on FriendFeed, and he has a lot of subscribers. It demonstrated to me for the first time the power of FriendFeed as a traffic driver.

This sounds like a farewell post for the series...

In the last couple of weeks I've felt that the weekly update to the series has been less valuable. Things have a less significant and less noticeable impact once traffic's reached a certain level. That's not to say that there's not a great deal to learn. But it suggests that a weekly update might be somewhat redundant. I'm going to switch to adding to this series on a more irregular basis, focusing on lessons learned rather than periods of analysis.