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.

Referral traffic is approximately 75% of the site’s total on a normal week. Even on a quiet week StumbleUpon is responsible for just under 40% of those referrals. But it’s clear that the number of referring links is increasing. And Google search traffic has recovered a little after the recent drop off.

Lots of small numbers add up to a much bigger one

32 sites last week brought traffic directly to the site. Take out StumbleUpon and Friendfeed traffic, and around a third of the traffic is made up from a wide selection of sites. Those sites don’t bring massive amounts of traffic on an individual basis, but they add up to significantly more visitors.

Worth noting that a lot of those 32 referrals are directly from blogs. Most particularly the blogs I focus my regular comments towards. Those are generally new visitors as well. The comments are provoking interest on those blogs and making people curious enough to check out the site.

…Though the bounce rates when they check out the site continue to be poor. Even though bounce rates in general still improve marginally.

Further Friendfeed value

I spoke on this at length last week, but think it’s worth highlighting again. Friendfeed traffic is less obvious than other social networking sites. It tends not to spike in the same way. But over a week it all adds up. For the second week Friendfeed was the second highest source of referral traffic.

It can be easy to be surprised when Friendfeed traffic grows. Comments occurring away from a blog make it more difficult to notice when a post has created conversation. A site like Yacktrack can be invaluable for working out what the buzz is about your blog when you notice your traffic spiking.

Biggest bonus = less bouncing

Overall, bounce rates are artificially inflated by StumbleUpon. I’ve talked about this effect before, and the impact is reasonably widely publicised online.

But general traffic to the root page of Fog of Eternity is up. And the root page has seen bounce rates significantly reduced. It’s now well below 70%, and hopefully will continue to improve. That makes a massive difference to long term traffic. It’s also personally pleasing to know that the main page of the site is getting better at grabbing new visitors.

That being said, I’ve still been able to develop some useful analysis. Particular trends are the continuing development of FriendFeed traffic, and an improvement in overall bounce rates. I touched on the growth of FriendFeed related traffic last week, but it’s been increasingly noticeable even in a week of low activity.

If it hadn’t been for FriendFeed…

Numbers would have been a big chunk lower. FriendFeed made up 20% of all visits to Fog of Eternity in the last week. Now it was a low activity week to be sure, but it was second only to StumbleUpon as a traffic source. The traffic also tends to remain on the site longer and bounce less than StumbleUpon.

Not that bounce rates from FriendFeed visits are wonderful, still hitting the 80% mark. But visitors do spend an average of about a minute on the site, which suggests they’re at least taking a moment or two to read. I imagine these stats could be easily improved on a more active week, with livelier conversation and more regular new content on the site.

FriendFeed is also acting as an effective driver for repeat traffic. Just under a quarter of FriendFeed traffic is repeat visits. That’s a higher proportion than any other traffic source and suggests to me that FriendFeed acts as an excellent method of keeping people interested.

Variable bounce rates by article

Bounce rates on the site are down generally. Even StumbleUpon bounce rates dipped below 90% this week, which was pleasing. But I was equally curious to note the big discrepancies in bounce rate from article to article.

It doesn’t appear to be random though. I had a look at the different bounces from the different articles, and came to the conclusion that there are three types of article common on the site.

The traffic growth series

Has a surprisingly high level of new visitors. I’d imagined that it might be something that would be bringing in return readers more. It also has high bounce rates, ranging from the upper 80% levels and higher.

Reviews, lists, social networking “staples”

The kind of posts that are often listed in “101 posts for when you have writers block”. Reviews of applications or services, lists of good blogs, etc. These have high bounce rates – perhaps because people think they’ve seen it all before.

Comment and opinion

The highest traffic in general and, when not overly influenced by StumbleUpon spikes, easily the lowest bounce rates. These are also the articles that tend to have the most original (and often least SEO friendly) titles. But if the title is the first thing people see, then something original or confrontational is likely to catch their interest more.

Getting a handle on this analysis

So we’re two months into the traffic growth series. In that time, assuming an active week of at least five or six posts, traffic has definitely increased. And the traffic comes from a much wider base of traffic sources (even if I killed Google temporarily by migrating to WordPress). What were previously busy weeks now look very quiet – like this week – when we’ve enjoyed days with more than 2,000 visitors.

I feel more comfortable now in understanding the traffic trends, and more critical of traffic levels vs traffic quality. I hope that this is starting to show through in these articles. Remember, we were starting from scratch on the traffic growth and social networking just eight weeks ago!

None of which should suggest I plan to stop the series any time soon. I’m still getting a handle on lots of aspects of traffic growth and viral networking.

An established audience of regulars, even if small, means that you can get away with inactivity beyond blog content. So long as there are regular new articles they in-effect are your social networking activity.

Independent recommendation boosts traffic

When you actively network, by commenting on other blogs or submitting articles, you’re in effect recommending yourself. That recommendation is not a case of “my site is great great”, but your activity acts as a “look at me” signpost.

But as in many walks of life, receiving a recommendation from someone else motivates people to take a little longer to assess the product. Fog of Eternity has been more reliant on such recommendations this week, because I haven’t been commenting on blogs, active on Twitter, etc. Traffic that’s come from such recommendations has tended to be of higher quality – with lower bounce rates and longer spent on the site overall.

FriendFeed as a traffic generator

I’ve been using FriendFeed on and off over the last few weeks, largely through the Alert Thingy application. I’m not the most active, though increasingly appreciative of the power of the app.

That appreciation has increased this week. I’ve noticed that it’s starting to develop decent and valuable traffic to the site. The numbers are still reasonably small at this stage, but growing. What’s important here is the way that FriendFeed allows for articles to be tagged as “liked”, and so again it’s demonstrating independent recommendation that’s more powerful than a simple submission to something like StumbleUpon.

Beneficial, but not enough by itself

This week my audience have been my social networking. It’s led to reduced bounce rates and more valuable traffic. But it’s also led to reduced traffic. Visitor numbers dipped below 1,000 a week for the first time in May. That traffic was of better value, but the loyal audience for Fog of Eternity isn’t big enough to really sustain a “nothing but content” approach.

As with most things, putting all your eggs in one basket limits your options. It’s been useful as an exercise this week because it’s demonstrated the value of underlying blog content. But its benefit is a result of previous social networking that’s helped me develop the readership in the first place. It’s a virtuous circle – the more you social network yourself the more that you also get people to network on your behalf. That’s probably the real definition of “viral” that I highlighted in the very first traffic growth article.

It’s been far and away the busiest week in pure numbers. That’s largely due to consistent and continuing traffic from the ‘Lost On The Internet‘ article that was stumbled at the end of last week. That’s brought in over 6,000 visitors this week, albeit with the same flaws that I highlighted in the last update – high bounce rates and low average time per visit.

Wider pool of incoming traffic

The majority of traffic has come from StumbleUpon. But more importantly for the long term is that traffic is coming to the site from a wider variety of portals. Google Analytics notes that there are 46 traffic sources linking into Fog of Eternity this week. That’s a significant increase.

The visitor numbers from each of those links may not be high at the moment, but it demonstrates a widening of the audience. It’s also clear that visitors linking to the site from other blogs, as opposed to social media, have much lower bounce rates (ranging from 40-60% instead of 80-95%).

Not linking just from comments

The commenting strategy needs to be looked at more widely than merely examining the figures of traffic from the targetted blogs. I think there are three significant advantages to the blog commenting strategy:

Direct linking from the blogs themselves

It’s very clear that the blog writers themselves appreciate comments and will visit the site of someone who comments on their blog. I do exactly the same if someone comments here. It adds value to both blogs because it extends the debate and discussion of our articles.

There’s also traffic that comes from visitors to those blogs who’ve (hopefully) found my comments worthwhile. They’ve been motivated to take a few minutes to visit Fog of Eternity to check out my wider discussion.

Developing a wider profile

Once the wider traffic starts coming from blogs elsewhere, your profile develops. Articles on Fog of Eternity have been cited in blog articles elsewhere. That sees people linking back to me from blogs where I’ve never even commented – but it’s a direct result of my comments elsewhere.

The discussion itself is important

Probably an overlooked one. The blogs I listed in last week’s article were blogs that I was interested in myself. I wasn’t looking merely at adding pointless comments. I felt they were blogs where I could make pertinent contributions to their debates.

So regardless of actual traffic numbers coming back to Fog of Eternity, there’s value in remaining motivated to comment on the discussion at various blogs.

Guest posting’s instant impact was limited

I also guest posted on sarahintampa.com this week, and thought the ‘Why Facebook Is Useless’ post was likely to provoke debate. On Sarah’s blog itself that was certainly the case, there was a reasonably lively discussion on the article. I was surprised, however, given the significant readership of that blog, how little direct traffic came back to Fog of Eternity as a result.

Not that it’s a particular issue. It again falls into the development of a wider profile, and was an enjoyable exercise to have a discussion with a wider audience of readers.

A quiet week upcoming

I’m in the United States for the rest of the week. As a bit of personal background – I’m British, my wife is American, and until we go through the drawn out US immigration process we live on opposite sides of the Atlantic. It means a lot of travel back and forth.

I still expect to be posting this week, if not every day, but the overall social networking activity is likely to be limited. This in itself is probably worth analysing. We’re in the sixth week of the traffic growth strategy, and have shown worthwhile benefits of social media strategies. So we’ll be stepping back and seeing how much of that profile can retain impact even if I’m not being strongly active on social media during this week.