Saturday Morning Surfing: How’s Your Blog Traffic Lately?

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Some high traffic blogs don’t earn much money, while some blogs with much lower traffic yield a substantial amount of revenue. But in general, more traffic is better.

There’s a lot of ways to increase traffic to your blog. Let’s make it simple and sort traffic generating activity into either

1. Passive: You don’t go get traffic, the traffic comes to you via search engines, people linking to you, etc.
2. Active: you go get traffic by commenting on other’s blogs, actively acquiring backlinks, purchasing advertisements, etc.

Passive traffic is really cool. I get a few dozen hits per day for a handful of articles that are really popular, and I estimate about 30% of my traffic is coming in from search or links.

Most of the rest of my traffic is a result of active effort. Commenting and posting on forums really works.

But no matter how you’re generating traffic, there comes a time when your efforts are not rewarded. You reach a plateau.

So, what to do…?

How your blog traffic reaches a plateau

Let’s back up for a few minutes, and read Mike CJ’s article on The Traffic Plateau and the One Dimensional Blog. Recapping, Mike claims most bloggers go into a feedback loop where writing for a self-selected audience stymies growth. You start writing what your audience wants to read, then your traffic plateaus.

This seems reasonable.

Consider Weird Al, or the Aquabats. Both have a certain audience that resonates with them; neither are likely to produce strings of hits doing what they currently do.

They are making a living, but they have reached a plateau.

On the one hand, having nice, stable traffic with nice stable income seems desirable. On the other hand you don’t want your blog to get stale.

Here’s my take (pure S.W.A.G.): once you have an operational system for running your blog, that system will inevitably take you to a plateau, and no further. You will find working harder doesn’t pay off.

This is good.

The key is put your system in place, then work like stink until you hit refusal. Then pull back until your effort matches your return.

Sometimes, you get the experience of pulling back imposed upon you.

Lessons from denial of service attack

If you don’t already know, Website In A Weekend was under a denial of service attack from February 11 to February 20.

This resulted in Akismet being non-functional, massive spam, and really slow load times.

I turned off commenting and stopped commenting on other blogs through that period of time.

I learned my audience measures about 100k on Alexa when I simply write, and do very little promotion. That’s a “natural” traffic plateau of about 175 hits/day (WordPress Stats).

If I spend time commenting, I can drive the long run average down. My Alexa 3 month moving average is back down around 60k now, and would probably be below 50k on Alexa had I not had (seemingly) half of February subjected to a denial of service attack.

Here’s what I found out over the summer of 2009: Once you have a plateau, it’s not difficult to twist the knobs and break out of it. Back in September, I started a commenting spree which broke Website In A Weekend into the sub-100k range on Alexa.

Another interesting thing, which seems to be true, is once you “build your audience” the first time, it’s easier to build it back a second time.

My end goal is acquiring a stable traffic base here on Website In A Weekend which converts at “ramen profitable,” so I can hunker down into some serious coding. That is, I’m working towards being a “self-funded startup.” Finding a traffic plateau which supports that would be very nice indeed.

There’s a lot left to learn acquiring and maintaining traffic. I’ll write more about it in the future, and I’ll have some traffic graphs and statistics covering the denial of service attack.

How’s your traffic? Have you reached a plateau? If so, are you going to try and grow beyond it, or is the amount of your traffic serving it’s purpose for you?

Tagged as: Saturday Morning Surfing