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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
- Passive: You don’t go get traffic, the traffic comes to you via search engines, people linking to you, etc.
- 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?
Hmm, plateauing. I think you have to keep pushing no matter how big you get. Even the pros like Leo B and Darren R still write guest posts on other big blogs to build up their traffic and profile:) I can see that traffic/subscribers may slow down but maybe the opposite is also possible. The more you get the more will come. Fingers crossed:)
Annabel, good point.
I have a slightly different hunch:
1. Getting to a plateau takes a certain amount of work,
2. Getting past a plateau takes even more work, but
3. You have to do a certain amount of work to just stay on a plateau. The higher the plateau, the more work it takes to stay on it.
But that’s all a hunch. Let’s revisit in a couple of years!
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..How Julie Became Successful Without Even Trying =-.
I wish I knew how to break out of plateaus. At the moment my traffic spikes up once or twice a week, then drops down to about the same level as it ‘normally’ is; which is pretty small. I’ve noticed that the amount of commenting I do affects it, but also the time my posts go live. Apparently earlier is better.
Still very much in the trial and error stage of establishing my site; looking forward to hearing what else you have to say on the matter.
You’re doing well, Heather, I just looked up your numbers.
So many people jump into this and get discouraged when they write for a week or two, and don’t get any traffic or comments.
I wrote here for 6 months before I started building traffic. I had 150 articles published first.
It really does take time.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..How Julie Became a Published Writer (And you can, too) =-.
Thanks Dave :)
At the moment I’m just doing my best to keep to schedule and promoting as much as I can in the meantime. Pretty happy with it so far, but still very much at the beginning.
Encouraging seeing how long it took you though; nice to have examples of more ‘normal’ growth as opposed to some of the new bloggers that shot up in terms of traffic within a couple of months!
.-= Heather´s last blog ..Youtube vs Vimeo; What do you use? =-.
Heather, some of those folks would be in trouble if they stopped posting.
On the other hand, I could stop posting and commenting completely, and still get a fair bit of traffic related to my WordPress plugins.
And therein lies the difference. Sounds like a much better traffic base.
.-= Heather´s last blog ..Youtube vs Vimeo; What do you use? =-.
You’re in my RSS feed lady.
You might be interested in my friend Roberto Koci’s work as well. I continually pester him to write more on his blog, not much luck lately. He’s very talented.
Honoured :)
I’ll check him out, thanks for the recommendation!
.-= Heather´s last blog ..Youtube vs Vimeo; What do you use? =-.
Hi, Dave. Am curious to know which numbers you’re going by to assess whether someone is “doing well”. Are you talking Alexa, or other things, too? Thanks.
.-= Alison | Quest for Balance´s last blog ..OCD: The Pendulum of Caution, Risk, and Reasonable Doubt =-.
Heather has been writing for about 6 weeks and her Alexa rank is below 200k (iirc). That’s pretty good. It means she’s probably getting around 75 hits/day. Maybe more, but probably not more than 150, and probably not less than 45.
Alexa is relative, but still useful.
This is pure s.w.a.g.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Carlos Throws Down, and Closed Means Closed. Yep, the Week in Review =-.
My ears are burning… so I thought I’d come qualify the amount of visits.
The most page views I’ve had is 94, and at the moment the least seems to be between 40 and 50 unless I’m offline all day (then it drops to just under 30). So you’re pretty much spot on – colour me impressed!
.-= Heather´s last blog ..Youtube vs Vimeo; What do you use? =-.
;)
Pushing past the plateau eh? I’ve experienced this, but never had a goo label for it. Lately I’ve been giving a lot of though to what I could be doing differently to shake things up and consequently break past it.
If I succeed I’ll let you know. Don’t you wish there was a magic formula? Ah but where would the fun in that be!
.-= Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella´s last blog ..Blog Plagarism (Part 3/3) – Discourage, Detect & Respond To Content Theft =-.
Joella, I think you’re doing the right thing.
From my experience, a commenting campaign takes a couple of months to get going. It takes a while to find the right places to comment, then a little longer for people to recognize you. But it does work.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Carlos Throws Down, and Closed Means Closed. Yep, the Week in Review =-.
A naive question: If the same person visits your blog five times in a day, does that get counted as five hits or only one?
Shirls, the short answer is “It depends on whose counting the visits and why they are counting visit.”
The long answer would fill a good size textbook.
My advice is to use the most conservative analysis tool you can, which in my experience will be either Google Analytics or WordPress Stats.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Saturday Morning Surfing: How’s Your Blog Traffic Lately? =-.
Ever since my site jumped from PR3 to PR4, I’ve been noticing my traffic has been continually rising. Daily visits this month seems to frequently hit numbers that I would very rarely touch three months ago.
People that say page rank doesn’t mean anything are clueless.
When you’re page rank 0,1,2,3 it doesn’t mean a whole lot, that’s true.
But when someone who doesn’t do SEO for a living lands on Google’s front page (“Derek SEO”), who gotta believe his page rank 7 has at least some influence.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Caressing Alien Species, and, a (late) Valentine… Take cover! It’s two Weeks in Review =-.
Lot’s of ideas to mull around here. I have jumped from a plateau at about the level of the dead sea and not comments to something around 150 hits a day- most of whom bounce immediately. I do get comments now and feel connected to the commentors which is probably dangerous but, heck, it feels so good to be noticed. Nice to get some level headed observations and suggestions about pushing on.
Ralph, my take on your work is that you’re still finding your voice, your style and your niche.
I’m still struggling with all 3 issues myself, and I’ve been writing off and on for 15 years.
Look back in 6 months and you will shocked at how much you have improved.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..How Julie Became Successful Without Even Trying =-.
I can already see this so I am looking forward to seeing where I am in 6 months. I hope that it is beyond what I am able to imagine.
Don’t tell anyone, but “visualization” has never really worked to well for me.
What I’m doing these days is figuring out a process that will take me in the right direction, then accelerating very hard.
My vision for 6 months is to have another 150 or so high quality articles published here, good traffic, and a small suite of technically accurate, precisely targeted and (hopefully) entertaining products for sale. Beyond that, who knows?
Hey there Dave! I enjoyed your insight into the “plateau” and definitely believe that there is always a way to rise above it. However, I believe it takes an understanding of all of the tools you have at your fingertips to utilize in order to drive traffic.
For instance, if you feel as though you’ve exhausted your resources when it comes to driving traffic via social media tools like Twitter or social bookmarking — look to other alternatives such as guest posting, forum marketing or using article marketing to help bring in some traffic. Once those have ‘exhausted’ (which I doubt is possible), rinse and repeat by looking beyond your niche to those that are similar in nature to yours for a larger pool of potential new readers/traffic. The key is to diversify!
A plateau is only something to be concerned with if you decide that you don’t want to look for more fertile ground.
…that’s just my $0.02 pesos.
FC, totally agree with you here!
I have a few “secret” techniques myself that help me get a little more leverage.
And I’m in a good place right now. The main way I’m gathering readers is by commenting, and I’m pretty sure I can build quite a bit more traffic that way. All those other techniques I’m keeping in my hop pocket, will deploy in the future.
Thanks for stopping by!
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Carlos Throws Down, and Closed Means Closed. Yep, the Week in Review =-.
I’m not sure about the accuracy/relevancy of Alexa and using it as a reliable metric.
My traffic is growing, but not in huge amount but my global ranking isn’t moving alot. My Australian ranking though is around 10k.
Weirdly, I find my “time on site” stats are really quite long (between 5 and 15 minutes on avg) and my comment rate for a blog my size is beyond what the stats tell me it should be.
Interestingly, I’ve found that since I’m spending less and less time on my blog over the last month my subscriptions have nearly doubled (!)
.-= Josh Kohlbach´s last blog ..A Collections Of Tools For Creating Multiple Streams Of Income =-.
Hi Josh.
It turns out that Alexa is extremely reliable… at measuring what it measures.
The problem with it is that few pay attention to what it’s measuring.
I have an article brewing on how to use Alexa. I’ll finish it one day!
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Botnet Losing Steam (Under Attack! 2/17/2010) =-.
That’s definitely something I’d be interested in. Maybe my ill-formed opinion is just lack of education? Most likely!
.-= Josh Kohlbach´s last blog ..Expert Interview: David Doolin – Wanna Be A Web Hero? =-.
Oh, I really should add to that… I’ve basically had to rebuild my site from the ground up over the last couple of months after being booted from Google because of some weird redirects my site had (and I didn’t really know about until it was too late).
Basically I’m on a PR 0 now coming from a 2 (or 3 – can’t remember).
Anyway.. traffic completely dried up from search engines which pretty much killed my blog.
Can’t wait till I get my PR back.
.-= Josh Kohlbach´s last blog ..A Collections Of Tools For Creating Multiple Streams Of Income =-.
You’ll get it back pretty fast. Just keep after it!
I’m also looking at Alexa stat… However, it seems like Google Analytics is more accurate… I am receiving good traffic on the past weeks until now with some targeted keywords… I still need to go back to my old posts that don’t drive much traffic. I want to ask you personally Dave if it’s right to just delete them, and update those articles that link to it. I recall your article about pillar contents, and it looks like my pillar contents are the one driving much traffic to my blog.
.-= Cebu Tech Blogger´s last blog ..iControlPad for Jailbreak iPhone =-.
Rewrite, don’t delete!
Sometimes, articles just don’t drive much traffic.
Other times, articles you think are lame get a lot of traffic.
But don’t delete anything. That permalink is valuable.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..How a 9 Day Denial of Service Attack Affected Blog Traffic =-.
Okay I’ll try… What I’m suppose to delete are those that are off-topic. Maybe I can tweak those contents to make it relevant to my niche as a whole… One online tool I used says that overall contents rating of my blog is approximately 80% relevant. Am still researching about it though…
.-= Cebu Tech Blogger´s last blog ..iControlPad for Jailbreak iPhone =-.
Send me some of those links so I can see what you’re talking about.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..How a 9 Day Denial of Service Attack Affected Blog Traffic =-.
Hahaha… Those articles are really really poor in quality. I’ll send it to you anyway… thanks
.-= Cebu Tech Blogger´s last blog ..Update Facebook Status Via Twitter =-.