How my site traffic climbed to 35,459 monthly unique visits

I've been reading these forums and learned a lot, and now I'm making another post to explain what I've done to get here. I've attached a pic that shows the traffic of my game producer website in July - it climbed to 35,459 visits.

Check out also "part 1"
Bit over half years ago I wrote a thread named How my site traffic went from 37 monthly visits to 14,657 monthly unique visits - I really recommend reading it as well, since that post is sort of like "part 1" and I've continued doing all the stuff I mention in that post. I'm not selling anything there, and got some positive feedback (thanks for that) about the thread - so take a look at it.

PART 2 - How my site traffic climbed to 35,459 monthly unique visits

I already had a site getting 10K+ visits per month, so the obvious next step I did was setting a bigger goal. I took a goal of getting 100,000 unique visits per month, and so far about third of that goal is completed - and I'm pushing forward. The key here - I think - is not to think what's possible or how to get there. The key is to simply take some darn big goal (for example, 10 or 100 bigger than you currently have) and take action. I chose to figure out the "how" part later.

The other very important thing I did was listening to others. In the first article, I got a response from charlesartist who said "Now, you should try social bookmarking next to take your site to the 20k+ uniques/month level. Digg, Delicious, Myspace are all great places with lots of people interested in whay you have to offer.". Well, I decided to try that and got good results (more on social bookmarking in the next paragraph) - simply by listening to what others have to say. Sure, I'm free to ignore what people say - but I did my best to think "can I use this idea somehow?".

And then I did some social bookmarking. I admit I'm probably not the best guy to tell how it works, but basically I decided to put a big DIGG button that people could click. I managed to got some digg traffic, but after couple of months I saw that stumbleupon and reddit seem better to me. I decided to take away the digg button and simply put links that people could click. Sometimes I submited some of my articles, but not most of them. I'm sure there's lots for me to learn here - but by merely giving people chance to bookmark stuff and occasionally asking them to do that can help to get decent traffic with no much additional effort.

Social bookmarking is okay, but even more important lesson is experimenting. I want to see the facts and decided to test how the digg button would do. It didn't bring me extra traffic so I took it away.

As I was doing social bookmarking, I also bit accidentally got featured on one major gaming website. Basically I wrote an extremely simple article on a question that was posed by one of the readers. It was a simple article with really basic stuff - yet it hit the nerve. I learned to never underestimate the power of simple things. Thanks to that article the traffic eventually spiked to 4,537 unique visits in just one day.

I expanded the idea of interviews to group interviews. I decided to start gathering a group of high profile producers (worked in major gaming companies such as EA etc.) - and I got good stories. The producers liked doing them, I liked doing them and the audience liked reading them. Everybody wins. I mixed this with the use of promotional stuff (such as newsletter, press releases, social bookmarking, asking other diggers, announcing forums) to get the most out of this.

Then I also had pure luck with controversial topics. I wrote an article about piracy and it got some attention from other people. I've written an earlier DP thread (check out the links here) that gives the exact details - but the bottom line is: controversial topics can bring traffic.

Last tip for this guide is the use of newsletters. Newsletters are great way to get your visitors back to your website. You can find newsletter recommendations by simply checking out these forums (aweber seems quite popular, I'm using ymlp.com and recently checked out ezinedirector.com). You can send people monthly newsletters and give them "top stories of the month". You can use newsletters to tell people that you've published a new great article. You can inform about contests etc. Definitely worth having.

End of part two
As said earlier, I didn't mean to write "series of traffic building tips" but somehow people asked for more... and so I decided to give my two cents on the matter.

If you want to get informed about new posts, check out my mailing list
I decided to set up a mailing list on a website (where I also archive some "top posts"). So basically, if you are interested in hearing when part 3 etc. are available - then subscribe there. I must warn you that there's 2 things that goes with the mailing list:
1) It's not that affiliate stuff you see in every other mailing list - I'm not selling affiliate products there. I'm simply informing when new stuff is available
2) The mailing list is for you to get informed when I've written for example a new digital point thread like this. Bear in mind that the newsletter is very infrequent... it can be like 3 or 6 months before you hear anything from me

Naturally you are free to browse earlier entries on the website and simply get the info without subscribing - I'm simply sharing the free public stuff via email. It's your call.

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And here's a pic of traffic stats for Thomas the Doubter

 

Wow nice work. Congrats!

 

Good reading. I liked part 1 as well.

 

Good job , but the bounce rate is a bit high

 

Thanks guys.

Yep, one reason is that I'm giving 10 full length posts in the front page (instead of like having just 2 posts or giving summary and then link to the full post). I experimented with that LONG ago and some loyal readers hinted they preferred "many full posts in the front page".. and that's what I decided to do.
(for the same reason the pageviews is not as high as it could - I tested that too). But in the end... I'm not writing because of bounce rates or pageviews - I'm writing for people

 

As a newbie it helps me a lot. Thanks!

 

Nice article, very motivating (as well as the first).

Giorgio

 

Woohoo, it's part 2!

 

Excellent , have been looking forward to this , well written again!

 

Congrats man and I like your article it's very well written and informative

 

nice article.

 

Nice search engine traffic.

 

Good work! Keep Going!

 

Thanks everybody. I'll keep working on the site and reporting back when the traffic increases to the next level.

 

Great article Thanks . I'm with you SB sites send lots of traffic .

 

Very informative article.

 

Thanks guys.

Yep, although as I mention in the article: I could improve this for example by submitting more articles.

 

coool Great job man

 

Interesting post. Good work and thanks for the tips.

 

Thanks for a great useful article.

I have honestly not put links to social bookmarks on my sites, but after reading your article I did a bit of research. My main site has over 500 tags on delicious - and has hit the front page of digg about a year ago without any effort from me. I will be adding links on my site and see if it improves traffic!

+REP