Bloggers Journal

I have only been running my blog for just over 5 weeks, and I have seen increases in my web traffic, resulting in massive increases in my Alexa rank.  At the end of my first month I wrote a summary of things, as I will do again at the end of month 2 (around August 10).  But what have I done that has resulted in such an increase?

The goal of any budding internet entrepreneur is gaining as much traffic as possible.  Without traffic, your ambitions will not be realised.  Web traffic is the life blood of any website.  From here we can use the traffic to start mailing lists, and earning money through our sites.

There are many different ways to increase our traffic,

• SEO
• Blog commenting
• Blog communities
• Guest posting
• Social media
• Advertising

What methods did I use?

I have used a few of the popular methods.  I have tried out some of the SEO suggestions I have read about.  I don’t pay as much attention as maybe I should – but that is something I’m still working on.

Looking at my analytics, the majority (45%) of my traffic is from referring sites.  Many of these include the sites that I comment on.  They are also social media sites and updates such as Twitter.

A month ago, my Alexa rank was some 17 million.  It was pretty woeful.  As I write this, my rank has improved a massive 15.8 million positions.  It’s currently just under 1.2 million.  I’ve still a long way to go, but it reports as an increase in reach of 4700%.  I’ve been quite impressed by the change, and it keeps me motivated at this important early stage whilst I try to find my blogging feet.  I recently have started to rank for national traffic ranks on Alexa.  Currently I rank for the USA, Australia, India and Japan.

What does this mean?

The Alexa rank traffic information is based upon user information, obtained from those internet users with the Alexa toolbar installed.  The results are based on three month and one month averages, representative of visitors and page views.  Whilst it’s not a very definitive measure, it provides a good measure of the site’s popularity – at least, whether it is improving or not!

Can you be more specific about your sources?

Yep!  So far I’ve commented on blogs, and participated in blog communities – specifically Blog Engage.  More recently I have put more effort into Twitter, and I have found myself being retweeted more frequently – thank you!

In particular, I noted that the traffic I got from other sites were the owners who received my comments.  It’s good proof of it working.

The best advice I received, and acted upon, was to engage in the blog communities.  Social networking is a powerful tool when trying to promote your blog.  It’s a reciprocal thing – I promote one person’s blog and they return the favour.

It also pays to be polite, and courteous.  I recently posted an article at Blog Engage, and I thanked the voters for taking the time to read my article and voting on it.  Brian, who owns Blog Engage, saw this and promoted my article.  Since then I have received 10 so more votes which I probably wouldn’t have got otherwise.

How to improve upon this?

Over the next while I will be aiming to get more visitors, using the same means as well as other methods – particularly guest posting.  I used to have a widget at the side of my site listing some of my goals for 2010.  One was to have an Alexa rank below 1 million.  Obviously this will need to change as I should pass this point by the end of August.

Your turn…

I have tried hard to boost my traffic juggling a full time job.  I’m pretty pleased, and have a lot to learn still.  What experiences have you had in promoting your blog?  How successful has it been for you?  Are there any methods that you used that proved more successful than others at bringing you traffic?  I look forward to your feedback.