If you’ve been a visitor to my blog for the last 12 months you will have noticed some changes.
Upto about July 2010 I had posted very little, and was mainly focussed on Adsense. Since August I have been more regular and now that I am looking back 12 months I can see the difference it has made:
From 33 visitors a week, to 629 in the last week.
And I did this without blogging every day and without extensive link building.
What Changes Did I Make?
Rather than provide low value high volume blog posts – my aim is to be less frequent but offer significantly more content and value.
The graph above shows when I made big jumps in my traffic at 4 points in the last 12 months:
- 11 January: Blogger Adsense Profits Template resulted in a 220% increase in visits
- 8 August: Quoted a tweet from Ryan Eagle (@ewanetwork), posted a tweet with the link which Ryan picked up and retweeted. This resulted in a 580% increase in visitors.
- 31 August: Guestposted about PPV, Jquery and Landing Pages on PPV Playbook & linked back to a post on my blog about building landing pages. 279% improvement in visitors. I am still getting a steady 30 new visitors referred from this guestpost each week.
- 28 October: Guestposted about PPV Url Scraping on Jonathan Volk’s blog. This resulted in a 235% increase in visitors.
Whats The Result?
Comparing traffic from the week before the first change in January to the last week, the 4 changes/actions above resulted in the following improvements:
- 1806% increase in visitors, from 33 to 629
- 2859% increase in pageviews, from 49 to 1450
- 2.3 pages/visit rather than 1.5
- Bounce rate reduced by 28%
- Average time on site from 2m 22s to 6m 53s
- Increase in regular visitors by 63%
But What Does That Mean?
3 lessons:
- Guest Blogging Wortks: It works incredibly well if you are very targeted in which blogs you approach. I approached 2 blogs and got a guest post opportunity on both. The second one (Jon’s) as a result of the good press I got out of the 1st one.
- Quality rather than Quantity: As a new blogger you dont need to blog each day. Blog once a week, or twice a month but give 200% more value to your users and the traffic will follow.
- Engagement is Key: Embedding yourself into a community and a market is more important than Search Engine Rankings. Engaging with your market gives much longer term value and the rankings will take care by itself over time.
