Traffic Growth #1 - How much traffic can I get through viral methods?
There’s a lot of material out there in the blogging world that talks about methods of driving traffic to your site. One of the most common pieces of advice is that an active presence on social networking sites such as Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook or LiveJournal can all make significant impact in bringing visitors to a blog.
www.fogofeternity.com isn’t really a traffic heavy site in terms of incoming links, and only picks up about 15-30 visitors a day. But in its current format as a professionally focused site and blog it’s also a reasonably new site. Working with Google Analytics I can see that only about 25% of its visitors come from incoming links, with around 60% coming from search engine queries and the rest coming from direct traffic (i.e. those who know the address and type it into their browser to visit). At the moment, limited traffic is not a particular concern for me - I’m not relying on this site for income or work, and I enjoy developing it and working on the site and the blog.
But conducting some research into traffic drivers is something I’m interested in doing. So I’m going to start taking a close look at the impacts of certain actions, and see how they alter (if at all) the number of visitors that come to the site. I’ll then publish the results and have a talk about what I’ve learned.
I’m going to approach this in two main strands:
Analysis of the impact of social networking sites
Most specifically, I’ll be focusing on the impact of:
By this I mean actively using these sites, commenting upon the forums, submitting new material, but not actively pimping www.fogofeternity.com. The aim is to evaluate the value of being an active and (hopefully) interesting user of these networks.
Active commenting on topic related blogs
Fog of Eternity as a blog focuses on web design, accessibility, usability, seo and other issues. It’s obviously not the only blog on the internet that examines these topics. So I’m going to start making myself a far more active participant in blog comment discussions on related sites, and examine the impact of traffic from these sources also.
I’ll post a weekly update on this each Monday, using Google Analytics to examine the statistics and traffic sources, and hopefully by doing so we’ll have the opportunity to learn a little bit about viral methods of driving extra visitors to a site.
April 8th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
This will make interesting reading. Keep up the good work!
April 8th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Many thanks. Hopefully by starting from a relatively low visitor base it’ll give a better idea of how to make those early moves towards increasing traffic.
I know that a lot of the other posts that I’ve seen focusing on developing traffic are talking about increasing things past the “several thousand hits per day” level, which is already a site that’s at a well developed stage.
May 20th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
[...] 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. [...]