Sant Qiu’s Speed Profit Blog

This is the last part of my “Traffic Generation Challenge” where I document my efforts of driving massive to this brand new blog from scratch, with little technical knowledge.

October had passed and as promised I’m sharing with you the statistics of the traffic generated since the start of the challenge, 20 days ago (from 11th October). Since then I’ve used my brand new blog as an experiment to apply those traffic strategies taught by various people online. I’m interested to see whether the strategies really deliver great results or are they just hype. In this post I’ll share with you the results I got from what I did and my personal views on the various traffic generation strategies.

The context of this challenge is to get:

• Targeted (quality) traffic

• FREE ‘organic’ (non-paid) traffic

• Maximum result with minimum effort

Here’s the result:

As you can see from the images above, my blog’s Alexa ranking jumped from 2,641,133 to 581,119. But as my friend Andrew Wee of www.whoisandrewwee.com mentioned, Alexa ranking is not one of the most accurate ranking tool out there, so you’ve got to take it as a rough gauge.

My awstats shows that my unique visitors jumped from 20 in September, to 378 in October. It also shows that visitors who arrived at my blog in average visited it 3.4 times within the last month and 15.3% of them stayed more than 30min. I also noticed that visitors from US and Australia have been growing, soon to eclipse my previous almost 100% Singapore visitors.

Frankly, while the result is encouraging, it is far below what I was expecting. To be fair I was doing this part-time and with limited efforts. In the past 20 days since the start of the challenge I posted only 11 new posts, out of which only 8 are articles. Based on that maybe the result I got is not too bad. Moreover, from the 3.4 visits/visitor stats and the fact that 15.3% stayed more than 30min on my blog I know that the traffic that visited my blog are relatively targeted and are not just once-off visitors.

Could I have done better? Absolutely. Much better. If fact, now that I’ve experimented various strategies to drive quality traffic to my blog and know which ones are suitable for me, I’ll be focusing on using just a few strategies and do those on a regular basis. I strongly believe that by doing that the traffic of my blog will explode this month.

So which traffic generation strategies gave me the best results?

While I do believe that web 2.0 social networks are getting more influential and will be an important in part of my marketing arsenal, at this moment they are not generating me good targeted traffic. Social networks such as BlogCatalog have massive members. And the immediate thought would be if you can drive only a minuscule percentage of those members to your blog/site, your traffic would be massive. It is similar to thinking if I can get only 0.01% of the population of China to buy my product I’ll be a multi-millionaire. That is just superficial, simplistic… wishful thinking.

Personally, the biggest problem I have with social networks is that the most active people within those networks are not my target market. And I think this is because of the nature of social networks itself. Majority of people who join social networks are people who wants to make connections, get in touch with their friends & families, play games, etc and most importantly have fun. These people are general browsers looking for new interesting things online.

They regularly spend a lot of time in their social networks just interacting with each other. For example, when I joined one of the popular social networks I noticed that most of the discussions are posted by the same people. The same names keep popping up again and again. From the topics discussed, I can see that they are not my target market.

Then there are those people who try to drive traffic from the social networks to their blogs. They have a variety of ways to do this such as blatant link exchanges; “I’ll link to yours if you link to mine”, “I’ll comment on your blog if you comment on mine”, “What’s your blog I’ll visit and review it, here’s mine.”, “Stumble me and I’ll stumble you” and many similar proposals. The main idea is to get other members to visit your blog by offering to visit theirs. Interestingly such topics are extremely popular and keep appearing regularly.

I also tried a few of such techniques to see the results. Such posts will always attract a lot of responses and a lot of people because you’re offering to visit/comment/link/drive traffic to their blog. There are many people who does this just to increase their ranking and get more traffic. However as expected, those type of traffic are rarely qualified traffic. Most of these are just once-off traffic that visited your blog for the sake of getting you to visit theirs. Their statistics might look good but their actual loyal readers might be much smaller than their numbers. So personally this strategy is not my favourite one.

Following are a few strategies that worked very well for me:

• Posting articles with relevant keywords and pinging

• Article marketing

• Submitting to blog & RSS directories

It seems that the golden rule is still ‘Content is King’. Using this basic strategy I’m looking to increase my unique visitors to the 1,000s and subscribers to the 100s this month. I’ll let you know how I did at the end of the month.

Keep on moving!

Tags: Andrew Wee, BlogCatalog, increase web traffic, quality traffic, sant qiu, traffic for new blog, traffic generation challenge

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Web Traffic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.