Just looking for a little feedback - be brutally honest please. I started this self-improvement/personal development blog in March 2009, so it has been live for about 5 months. While my traffic profile has increased some, I'm still only getting about 100-120 uniques a day, more when new posts are submitted to Stumbleupon (about 300 then). I post 2 articles per week and have about 500 feed subscribers. I also have an interactive tools page with some cool flash tools for users. The blog is built on Wordpress, Google is crawling well and ranking ok for some keywords. Google is showing a pagerank of 2 and Alexa ranking has moved from about 1.3 million to 600,000. My marketing focus is some article marketing, link building through blog comments, and blog carnivals/guest posts. I need to know what, if anything is holding me back: 1) Is the design OK? 2) Is the content OK? 3) Am I just being impatient and do I need to just keep plugging away? What other advice or criticism can you share? Here is the link to the blog: Revive Your Life
Personally, and what I would do - I would open a youtube channel and start posting your own home made videos. Then embed the videos into your site and use them as content. All text blogs are ok, but they are not the wave of the future, they are a relic of the past. To make your blog stand out, you have to offer something different. Also, if you want to discuss traffic - on my main forum, traffic from google has a 50% - 55% bounce rate. Youtube traffic has about a 23% bounce rate. So think about that for a little while. Traffic from youtube has a 30% lower bounce rate then traffic from google. But that is on "my" site, your site might be different.
The design and the content are pretty good. Maybe you could have a list of '10 most popular articles' down the right hand side. This may keep people on your site for longer. You are actually getting quite good traffic for how long you have been running, and that is probably largely down to regular updates of quality material. If you want more traffic then I would suggest you focus your link building strategy more. I see that you do a lot of blog posts, which can help traffic a little, but doesn't usually make that much difference in the long term. You need to decide what search terms you want to rank well for, and pursue them. You can check the popularity of various search terms on the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. A more popular term is obviously more lucrative potentially, but also generally more competitive and difficult to rank high for. Once you have decided on your keywords (pick at least 2), perhaps you could submit a handful of your articles to various article submission sites, preferably niche article sites. You can include a link to your site with an anchor text of the keyword you are aiming to rank high for. This will help you receive search engine traffic. But be a little patient, you are actually doing very well, and you will probably continue to grow if you continue to do what you are doing. Best of luck to you. By the way I have submitted an article to you about self hypnosis - I hope it's OK!
First off, just know that very, very few go to boards and blogs, so it is that much harder to get traffic. After 5 months, you should be doing much more than 100-150. I'm sorry, but that sucks. Noobs with dead sites think that is great, though. You are not working hard enough and or smart enough. Having a lot of subscribers mean nothing, as you already found out Example: You have 500 subscribers yet have only 100 or so daily visitors??? Like newsletters, squeeze pages, most sign up, but then don't go back. People are screwy that way. The design looks great, so that's not it. The content may be boring. I don't know, I only read this page reviveyourlifedot com/inspiration-and-wellness/how-to-boost-your-self-esteem-and-happiness/ In this one, you are not showing them enough on how to do it. You have the tips on the bottom after all of that fluff, but that is not enough. It's like the readers would be saying: "Is this it?!" Even I would not come back to that one. About.com has lost a lot of repeat readers due to no-substance shit articles. Don't follow suite. The picture is boring, too commercial. Try to use real people and or totally different pictures, like these: littlemansmom.files.wordpress dot com/2009/03/self-esteem.jpg bkmarcus dot com/blog/images/comics/selfesteem.gif Do a google image search for your pictures. If you are not much of a writer, you can contact "authors" of such articles who submit GOOD articles to sites on a weekly basis. Ask them if they would like to submit to your site as well. Many do it if they can post their url. Do a search for good sites that have such people. Monitor such sites as Yahoo and MSN as they post many articles on a daily basis. Look in their archive. You want eye-opening articles, that are also NOT short. As for getting traffic...JohnChow dot com and Shoemoney dot com got their traffic mainly through advertising. Word of mouth then took over. They got it up to around 10,000 daily visitors. Now it is less, but they still have impressive traffic. If you want the same, or, hell, even half that, I am afraid you are going to have to advertise it. Nothing else will work for you in the initial period. It's like that with all sites. Your rss feed page needs to be idiot proof. There are a lot of dummies out there. I went to this page, and many will not understand it. Make it idiot proof so MORE can subscribe. feeds2.feedburner dot com/reviveyourlife You say you started 5 months ago? So, a small part of your 100 to 150 daily uniques are comng back, say, 20%, you should have at least 3,000 loyal readers. It's like that with your average blog. Not all come back. Most just aren't blog readers. Do you have those loyal readers? If not, then it is your articles. Improve them before doing any more promoting. Whate percentage are reading your old articles? There's a clue right there. How long are they staying? At least 7 miutes? Again, your desing looks just fine. I think, anyway. I would put pictures next to your "ten of the most inspiring, motivation-bolstering, and just plain useful self-improvement articles I’ve come across." I would put that in a semi-dark red, and in bold. Make it stand out. Many are not much for reading. They skim read. So.... Throughout all your pages, use bullets, bold, semi-dark red text, appealing pictures... Rule of thumb: Make the pages look as if a ten-year old can follow it with ease. Because, unfortunately, most people on the Internet read like one.
100 visitors a day for a 5 months-old website is pretty good, if you haven't used any paid marketing like Adwords. Global design is fine, but more pictures could help. I would also suggest to update more often, like every working day.
100 to 120 unique visitors perday is not bad as per the age of your website. Keep continue doing the same promotional methods. don't be hurry. wait to see the results.
I took a quick blink at your site, don't think that is your problem. I see a curiosity though in regards to your post here. You say you only have about about 100-120 uniques a day, yet you say you have 500 plus subscribers. All I can say about that is that you must be very good at getting subscribers. I'm also guessing they are not big fans of the content. Just looking at my feed stats for yesterday's posts on BWI I found 21% saw the feed update, and averaged two clicks for everyone that saw it. If you had stats like that, you would have had at least 75 visitors from your feed alone, generating at least 150 pageviews. Could it be the case of boring content? Talk to your readers, ask them questions, get them to comment, blogging is not a one way channel, though it often is at start. You should be getting 100-120 uniques every time you update your feed.
@Camp185 - I agree, the subscriber # seems odd. The reason is that we ran a contest where entrants had to subscribe to our feed to enter the contest. Of course, many suscribed just as a chance to win the contest with little or no interest in the site content. They have yet to unsubscribe I guess. I am working on making the content more interesting going forward as I think that may be part of the problem. Thanks to everyone for their thoughts!
You have all those subscribers to your content. Do you take advantage of them by sending out email newsletters or anything of the like to entice subscribers to return to your blog?
I agree with the youtube thing, having video posts will definitely enhance your site and also give you nice backlinks!
There's a couple of things you could do to make it better: 1) Focus on SEO and SERP. From the sound of your post, you don't have any keywords that you're focusing on and therefore all your traffic is coming from Stumbleupon/Social Media. 2) Get on the blogroll of some other related blogs. You can use their traffic to increase your traffic. 3) There's always article marketing.
I see you copy and paste in many threads.. you will get banned if u keep doing it... please read the guidelines, this is for ur own good