Be Patient with Increasing Traffic to Your Blog
Author: MoneyNing | Categories: Marketing | Posted on August 10, 2008
Readers ask me all the time about ways to increase traffic. They see the success of a few of my sites and they believe that there is some secret to getting traffic that I’m not sharing. They want to know what I do to rank high on keywords within Google, whether I pay for advertising and how much time I spent marketing my blog.
To those readers, I often tell them that the secret to traffic building is time. There are many things you can do to increase traffic, but all of those things take time to build. Sure you can write a killer article that gets to the front page of digg and end up receiving few thousand uniques a day for a while, but that traffic is short lived and not sustainable.
In order to increase traffic for the long term, we should look at how people come to our site: direct traffic, referral traffic and search traffic.
Direct Traffic
This category consist of readers that regularly come to your blog, the ones that regularly comment on your post, people who you know and generally everyone that remembers your brand. It could be someone typing in your domain name in the address bar, the ones that have bookmarked your site or even those that have your page as their homepage.
In order to increase this type of traffic, it requires quality content that people value and creative branding to help readers remember you. At first, a casual reader might read a good article from your blog and not come back, but if he/she comes across your blog and reads articles on your blog again and again, that person will become a subscriber and keep coming back for more.
Referral Traffic
These type of traffic is the best and often the most satisfying to receive. Having other bloggers link to your posts is like others telling you that your article is one that they believe their readers will find interesting. Links on other sites will also helps you reach new readers because it spreads the word of your brand out to different people.
Unless you are very famous or you have major advertising budget, you won’t get much referral traffic at the beginning as it takes time for other bloggers to remember coming to your site. It takes time to build your network and it takes even more time for people to link to your articles.
The key is not lose patience in the beginning and keep writing good articles. Eventually, others will notice your great articles and links will flow to your blog.
Search Traffic
This is the area that everyone seems to spend the most time optimizing when time is actually the best optimizer. Since a search engine’s existence is to bring qualified pages to a search term, blog content eventually will rank high because we write blog content day in and day out on one particular subject.
Search engine’s ranking are complicated but it is somewhat based on:
- Other sources of traffic
- Number of links to that particular blog and article
- How long those links existed
- How long the blog has been in existence within the search engine
Most of the factors affecting keyword rankings like the ones mentioned above are directly or indirectly time dependent. There is no way to gain an incredible amount of inbound links naturally in a short amount of time (search engine’s actually flag your site if it happens), and unless you can manually manipulate the search engine’s ranking formula, there is no way to increase the time those links or your blog has been in existence.
Final Thoughts
You will always see some sites having a ton of visitors from day one, but if you are just starting out and don’t have the means of those people (connections, budget etc), you need to keep writing quality content. Instead of being impatient, have confidence that people will take notice the great content that you are writing. As they often say “If you build it, they will come”.
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I agree with you that referral traffic are the most satisfactory. However (just my opinion) no avenue should be left unexplored in search of traffic. Here is a nice little article on how to get traffic from non-English domains http://hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Get-Traffic-From-Non-English-Domains
Regards
Agree with your post above. It does take time. I think a blog’s age can also affect the visibility of the blog’s keywords in most search engines. The longer your blog is in existence, the more chances search engines will display your blog.
As for me, my only source of traffic is through commenting to blogs of same niche as mine. Wait! Mine is a personal finance blog, what I’m doing here!!
Sam
Sam: Time in existence definitely play a part in this but the links coming to your blog seem to weight quite a bit in terms of search engine rankings too.
This is a encouraging post because when you are starting you kind of sit in front of your computer and wonder when the fload of traffic will come.
It’s very difficult to keep writing knowing that only a few people will read you post … but I guess that’s the only way to become successful.
I have noticed that most blogs that were launched between 2003-2006 are now making over $15,000 per month via affiliate programs or ad programs … so it takes time.
For people like myself who are impatient by nature waiting around for your blog to grow in the eyes for the search engines it extremely challenging.
Thanks for such a great post!
Miss Gisele B.
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Miss Gisele B: The key really is to keep at it. When I started MoneyNing.com, there was no one coming either and slowly, people came.
I would say that definitely everyone who started before 2005 is making a ton of money but starting 2005/2006, the income level drops. There are some people that will do well but the ones you see are mainly the ones that are left.
It’s not easy but it’s definitely doable.
Good luck with the writing and I hope to hear from your progress from time to time!
I agree, steady delivery of good content is the key to getting and keeping traffic.
Doug
i agree for discussion. but everybody wants alot trafficf for site.
So you’re basically saying that if you hang in there long enough, you’ll make it…that’s kind of encouraging, I guess. Actually I remember reading a post by Problogger Darren Rowse awhile back and he seemed to be saying that it was a lot less competitive back when he started. Makes you wonder how some of today’s bigshots would fare if they were starting out now.
Doug and Mehmet: In time, traffic will come with good content
Rod: They will come as long as you have good content. It’s definitely much less competitive back in the days but it’s still possible. You just have to differentiate yourself.
Good list. Search traffic is always the most difficult to get, as it can take a long time to achieve. Thanks for the post.
agree ,content still the king and patience.Thank you for your post
Thanks for this interesting article. I dugg, stumbled and subscribed to your RSS, hope to get more soon
I am patiently waiting. Can someone please direct traffic?
Patience is not the easiest of virtues! People work so hard on their blogs and it can be very hard to wait for results. I feel content is number one, but a close second is achieving that fine balance between being an “expert” on a subject and coming across as an approachable, honest human being.
Connecting with your readers is what will make them come back. Thanks so much for this terrific post - it will help us all hang in there!
I agree never customize content to drive empty traffic. write to share
added some info to my knowledge thank you