Category Archives: Traffic Building

Know Your Traffic And Make The Best Of It

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Website Traffic

  • Do you know what pages are the most popular on your site?
  • Do you know what keyword(s) bring you the most search engine traffic?
  • Do you know what IP’s hit your site most often?
  • Do you know how many visitors are at your site at any given moment?

 I do.. and a whole lot more – and this is probably one of those secrets to my success that so many people ask me about.  Since day-one, I have always obsessed on my traffic.  Where it was from, who it was, how/why they came, how long they stayed, what they did, etc – to this day, I still spend more time looking at and sifting through traffic stats than anything else.

In the early days I looked through my raw-logs and mostly paid attention only to the referral strings.  When raw logs got too tedious to fish through, I moved up to using the information that the Drupal Statistics Module provides.  The Drupal stats module is actually much easier to use than raw logs, and provides real-time info like top referrers, top visitors by IP, hits/referrers by page, and more.  Not long after that, I also started using Google Analytics which really lets me drill-down through my visitor data, but it also has a ~3 hour delay before I can see the information that it collects.

What I Do With All That Data

As with most things, I keep it pretty simple.

The metric I watch the most is what pages are moving up in the SERPS and starting to bring in traffic.  If I see that a particular page is beginning to rank well for a term I may “optimize” that page a bit by adding a bit more text with the high-ranking keywords in it, changing the keywords in the page to bold, or modifying the title to include the keywords, etc.  If the page starts to bring in a lot of traffic I might throw in an additional Adsense unit (with a channel so I can track it) or I might put an afilliate link on the page if appropriate.  I may also add more pages with similar content and keywords.

When I first started the website, and noticed traffic trickling in from a few specific keywords I did these things (above), particularly adding more related content – doing this made my traffic jump from a few hundred visitors per day to over 4,000/day in just a few weeks.  This was a huge accomplishment and the funny thing is that the keywords and content that we started to focus on (and get traffic for) had nothing to do with what we had in mind when we first created the website – but “following the traffic“  has helped to get us where we are today.

Another metric I like to watch is referrals (who’s sending me traffic).  I can easily view referrals in either the Drupal stats or Analytics, but I prefer Drupal’s ‘Top Referrers’  becuase it’s fast, simple, and always current (no delays).   There isn’t a lot I can do with this info, but it lets me know who’s linking to the site which tells me what other people find interesting or helpful.  I also use the Drupal stats to watch what IP’s are hitting the site most often.  This lets me see what members are the most active and also tips me off to scrapers that might need to be blocked from the site (they are the anyonmous IP’s that have 10x more page-views than anyone else, and tend to originate from other countries).

I also dive into Analytics to see things like browser type, country of origin, time of day/day of week trends and about a million other things, but none of these are as helpful to me as just knowing why people are coming to the site – and building on and capitalizing on what is already working.

Do YOU know what your most popular content is and more important – are you capitalizing on it?

How Can I Increase My Website Traffic ?

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The owner of Finance-Maker.com contacted me with a few questions:

I get roughly 30 unique’s a day from google. My question is how can I increase my traffic but before you answer this question I would like to say please don’t tell me to submit articles and link build and leave a footer on forums and do press releases and so on.

I can only tell you what’s worked for me, which was a combination of link building, SEO and a bit of creative forum-posting and blog-commenting.  When I first started GrownUpgeek.com I sent out hundreds of link-requests to webmasters of websites with content related to my site.  I sent these requests the ‘old fashioned’ way, with a personalized message including why I thought a link from that site would benefit his visitors.  I sent several of these requests each night for months – and the ‘hit rate’ was very low, but the links I did get were from quality sites with related content (which is important).

I didn’t know much about SEO back then, but I knew enough to know that I should cross-link the site heavily – which I did.  Virtually every page had links with my keyword anchor-text to two or three other pages on the site, and I also added one outgoing link to a very high PR website with content related to that particular page.

I also went on a comment and posting spree at blogs and forums.  I was always careful not to “spam”, but to only post comments on blogs or forums that were related to my site and the posts/comments were always genuinely helpful.  On most of these comments I left “deep links” into specific pages on the site, not just to the home page.  I also watched the “upcoming” stories on Digg.com looking for upcoming stories that were related to the content of my site – I went to every site, and if it was a blog that allowed commenting I left a comment with a link.  After dropping hundreds of comments on these blogs that had been submitted to Digg, ONE of those blogs hit the front page of Digg.com.  That very helpful comment that I left on the blog sent hundreds of visitors per day for months and I noticed very soon after that my Google ranking for searches related to the anchor text I left on that comment skyrocketed – maybe coincidence, but I doubt it.

Early-on I read that leaving signatures with links in forum-posts might be considered ‘spammy’ by Google so I never did that with my site – and only recently started doing it with my blog, and only on ONE forum.  I would be careful about over-doing it with forum signatures.  As a matter of fact, for a new site I would recommend not doing it at all.

Article submission: Now with Article submission why would people come to “your” “my” site if your articles are posted on another site and ranked in the SERPS higher than you and then on top of that WHY wouldn’t google just punish “you” “me” for duplicate content.

I have never submitted an article – partially because I’m just not good enough of an article writer, and partially because I don’t see how it can be very helpful as you’ve pointed out.  I suppose that if you can write an awesome enough article to get it posted on a high-traffic, high-PR site and you are able to give just enough information in the article to get people’s interest, then give a link to your site it might work – but I am the king of lazy-webmasters and that just seemed like too much effort with too-little (guaranteed) return on my investment of time.

In general if you keep your content unique and update it often you will give people a reason to visit, and hopefully come back for more.  I also noticed that you had a finance forum, which is a great way to build some user-generated content.  I would suggest building your forum by seeding a few interesting posts, replying to other posts, etc.  You might also consider allowing anyone to post without having to register.  I have found that if someone has to take 30 seconds to register before they can make a post they just wont bother.  The first few months after creating our forums we left them open to anonymous users to create new topics and post comments, then slowly locked it down over time.  Opening the forums this way generated a lot of posts & comments (food for the Google bot), but it was also a lot of work to delete the spam which slowly began to crop up.  Do everything you can to make the forum look as busy as possible.  Increase the window of time that shows how many people are online, show a (big) number of members, be creative – make it look like a place that people want to be.

Good luck and I hope you don’t mind the free links I gave you.. Maybe a few of my readers will check out finance-maker.com and post a few additional comments/suggestions.

From Nothing to Something in 30 Days

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If you’re like me, you have a million ideas bouncing around in your head and on Post-It notes everywhere you go. For people like us, it takes a lot of motivation to stick with anything for an extended period of time. I’m going to show you how I’ve taken websites making no money and with no traffic to something sustainable in 30 days.

First of all I should let you know that I’ve never sold anything online, not a get-rick-quick eBook nor a training course. Since I don’t have anything to sell, you have no reason to see if these steps might be able to help you make some money online. Without further ado, make money online using these 7 steps in 30 days.

I’ll be skipping the basics like buying a domain and finding a niche. You should be able to register a domain, get, or have, hosting and write at least as good as a high school student.

1. Content. Content is the bread and butter on my strategy. Good content always beats any form of scam and/or spam. Good content is lasting and creates defensible traffic. Great content on the other hand does everything for you. Marketing, sales, everything. If you can write a great piece of content that other people like and want to link to, the job is 80% done. This great content is commonly referred to as linkbait.

Before you write that great linkbait article, you want to make sure that the foundation of your website is created. To do that, you need to have articles on your website. I would suggest 10-20 general articles about your niche. My current project is related to the call center industry. My first articles that were just filler pieces included, “Why Outsource to a Call Center, “Call Center Supervisor, and “Call Center Basics. As you can see, those aren’t exaclty interesting articles, but they provide filler and content for the website and give Google and the other bots something to look at while you working on your linkbait.

When talking about content, it’s important to consider your method of delivery. Working the way I suggest includes a lot of writing. If you plan to do a lot of writing, nobody wants to copy and paste code into a text editor and upload HTML pages. Not to mention if you want to change something on your website, it means spending a day making manual changes. WordPress can change that. Download and install WordPress, that’s the end of the boring basics.

Throughout the entire month you’ll continue adding content. If you can get 30-50 posts up in 30 days, you’re doing good. For the current project I’m working on, my partner and I are going for 150 posts total. It’s not an unreasonable goal at all, it just depends on who you are and how quickly you can write.

2. Design. Depending on the niche you’ve chosen, a free WordPress template will probably work fine for the first year, depending on your growth and income. As income rises, you should invest in Continue reading →

StumbleUpon Is Still Good For A Few Hits

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Internet usersI’ve used StumbleUpon a few times in the past to generate traffic for GrownUpGeek.com and it’s worked moderately well for some pages, but for “run of the mill” pages it generated virtually no traffic at all. After the last several (failed) attempts at using Stumbleupon I finally gave up on it.

A few days ago, after writing my rant about Continue reading →

10,000 Members And Still Growing

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I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time, and watching the member-odometer slowly go up since noon. Finally, tonight at 8:14PM we did it, we broke the 10,000 member barrier. It’s been a slow road, but compared to many other community sites 10,000 members in only a year and a half is extraordinary. Out of these 10,000 members approx 1 out of 10, or just over 1,500 are also currently PAID members – meaning they either donated $25 or more, or subscribed for $5.99, and then $1.99 more each month.

Here are screenshots of the big moment:

7:50PM8:14PM after we joined the 10k club

How I Did It:
I think the biggest reason we’ve been so popular and able to gain so many members is because we fill a niche – we offer a place for newcomers to come and feel comfortable. We maintain a family-like atmosphere where members help each other with very little flaming or drama, zero spam, and no advertisements (after they join). I guess you’d say, we’re not your average website – and perhaps this is the key.For more info on how I built the site, have a look at my free eBook.

Note that because I use the Drupal Inactive User module to delete inactive accounts, all 10,000 of these members are actually active or at least semi-active members. If it weren’t for deleting accounts inactive for over 90 days, we’d have almost 20,000 members..

GuG Reaches 8000 Members

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In yet another milestone for GrownUpGeek.com, today we reached the 8,000 member mark. As I was browsing through the site, I just happened to notice the member-odometer roll over from 7,999 to the big 8k!

How did we do it?

Simple! (not really)
We created an easy to use, non-threatening place where members can ask questions and get help on virtually anything. We maintain a family-like atmosphere that members enjoy, we don’t jam it full of advertisements (we don’t even display most ads to members), and we reward members for making new posts and helping other members by answering questions. This user-generated content makes Google love the site, which brings in 10k unique visitors per day and more new members by the hour.

Next goal:
10,000 members and 15k unique visitors per day!