Hi All, I am writing a blog for almost a year and currently have a traffic of 16k/month. I have never paid for advertisement and i have no intention to do so in the future as i am not in rush. I did seo quite well and blog is listed on the front google pages. Last 4 months traffic growth was very impressive as i was posting a lot of good and unique quality content. But recently i noticed that traffic "froze" and currently is growing very slowly. I searched on google and i've red a lot of articles by experienced bloggers, but none of them was much helpful, because most of their articles are dedicated to beginners. So i decided to post my question here. And hopefully some of you can give me good advise how to keep growing and what techniques to use? what are the common ways to grow when you already have solid number of monthly visitors? Unfortunately i can't post my website link , because i have been banned once by doing so. I am new here and i have no idea why I was banned. I did nothing against forum rules and i didn't spam.... well anyway your comments would be highly appreciated. Thanks!
HI, i will recommend you to reply to almost every comment made by visitors. your this action will builds your community and begins to establish relationships. Replying to comments is a marketing activity and is important. As your blog grows, decisions may need to be made about where to spend your time but as you grow your traffic, I am in “the replying to every comment” camp. Having too many comments is a good problem to have.
My wife and I are using twitter quite effectively in this regard (for two different projects). My twitter account has 10k+ followers and I tweet daily up to 10 times a day. I see about 100-500 visitors coming from there almost daily.
I agree with mike.. Upgrade to video's and start replying to every ones post or queries. Start expanding your research, link building. Try getting your blog and name mentioned in other peoples blogs.
Have you thought about building a mailing list and sending a summary from your posts, ie. once a month/week? What about social media? On FaceBook you can promote all your posts and get quite a nice traffic.
Look at non search engine traffic if that's where most of it is currently coming from. You can drive traffic by guest posting or syndicating your content to other authority blogs in the niche. Also blog commenting and posting a relevant link where possible. Forum marketing, i.e. being involved in niche forums where you have sig links. Being a useful contributor will drive traffic to your site as people want to find out more. Video marketing on YT. Create great videos that hep your readers and point them to your site for more. Social media on where ever your target audience hangs out. Don't just build up your own groups but join hubs and groups in your niche and contribute. Most won't mind the odd share of content every now and then if it's useful. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Stumbleupon, G+, Instagram etc.
Hi Happster, My suggestion is to dig into LinkedIn (if appropriate)...let your connections know...dig into the Groups where your blog may be of interest...certainly find groups with lots of members and do the same there (e.g. eMarketing group). Have you considered guest bloggers? You can find many at BlogDash.com. This would be a paid service, but you can do so with limited engagement in which these guest bloggers use their large network to create interest in your blog. I agree @dean1122 to comment on all comments in the blog. Most blog owners are quite engaged with comments. @Stuart Walker is right on to not rely on search engine traffic. Hope this helps. p.s. this forum is very touchy. I've been reprimanded 2 or 3 times over the years and in each case it was me asking for feedback not trying to promote anything. Believe me if I was promoting myself it would look a lot different than what I posted. Just makes me shake my head.
Is the reason that you want to increase traffic because you believe that more traffic = more money? That's not the way to look at it instead focus on improving your conversions first then when you have them locked in and as high as can be then work on ramping up traffic.
Focus on your design. The first thing people notice when they visit your blog, is the way it looks. And although the old adage goes that one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, the same isn’t always true for a blog. You can also try SEOclerks, many freelancers on this site provide blog traffic at a cheap rate.
Hello its gonna be really good to put an email form in your page to let people put their emails there and subscriber that's gonna keep people updated when you post new article, because if someone found your website today in google he may will not come back again because he found what he was need, anyway this will help you keep in touch with your visitors and also as other member mention reply to people comment is a very important way to keep in touch with people
I know you say you don't pay for advertising and don't have any intention on doing so, but it just may be the solution to your question. In fact if you want to get more traffic to any website, just run more ads.
Dig into the analytics for your site and see if there's an opportunity or pattern that jumps out at you.
With 16k a month you seem to be doing something on the right track. Surely this is scalable? Could something on your website be out of date - not popular any more? how about your audience do they search this time of year? I would search through your analytics chances are Google has done something to your rankings they may have lowered. They cut mine again in half in May at the latest update down to nothing even though I do nothing wrong so now I don't care about rankings and am going to focus on gaining traffic through forums, commenting, social, videos, sharing etc.
at the moment I just suggest to keep those 16k visitors stable and improve conversions. 16k after one year is a good result, so you are doing well, indeed! You can invest in advertisements but if you keep 16k/month with no money spent for ads is even better.