How I Increased my Blog Traffic by 96.4% in 1 Month

If you have read my Traffic and Income reports then you will know that I have been working my ass off to increase traffic to my blog. Getting new visitors is not an easy task and I understand that a lot of you maybe struggling to grow your site!

 

During my 3rd month of this site going live I managed to get 1,176 unique visitors to this blog during January. Throughout February I worked at increasing this number and by the end of the month I reached 2,310 unique visitors.

That’s an increase of +96.4%. If it wasn’t for February only having 28 days, then I would have reached the 100%+ mark!!!

 

 

 

Let me show you exactly what I did

I did touch on a few methods in my February Traffic report. But in this post I am going to go into more detail on how I did it and also teach you how to increase traffic to your own blog.

 

Get your signature in the forums

At the beginning of the month I was contacted by one of my visitors who liked my blog. He introduced me to a forum called CPA elites and because he liked my content so much , he kindly offered to add my link in his signature!!

Now I know I relied on somebody getting in contact with me on this occasion but it should open your eyes to the many possibilities out there regarding forums! This signature link brought in 284 new visitors to my blog in one month.

 

So how can you take advantage of this?

First of all you can start by signing up to forums in your niche. Get involved and get a feel for how they work. Some forums will allow you to add your own signature link straight away, where as other forums only allow this after you have contributed at least 50 or 100 times!

Get other members to show your link in their signature!!

This is a great way to quickly build traffic to your blog. Imagine having a handful of forum members promoting your link every time they made a post.

Now you can’t just contact other members and ask them to promote your link….. you have to go about it the right way!

1) Make a list of members that are quite active and post regularly

2) Preferably we want members who do not currently show a signature

3) Contact your list of members and offer them something of value! maybe they have asked for help on something in a previous thread, or they are a newbie who is learning. You can offer them things like… free SEO consolations, SEO advice, help with their site, help building traffic, or whatever it is that is associated with your niche!

4) If you get some interest then you can jump in and politely ask if they would be willing to place your link in their signature, in return for the work that you will be doing for them!

I got 284 new visitors from 1 guys signature in 1 forum. If you can get 10 across different forums you can really get a boost in traffic

 

Facebook page and ads

I thought it was about time I set up a Facebook page for my blog! Now I am one of the few people left on this planet who does not actually have a personal FB account, I never have.

I hate the thing. If you use fb a lot, just think how much precious time you are wasting!! Want to grow your business, then stop talking shit and posting pictures of your breakfast on social media sites.

I dread to think what the next generation is going to be like! kids are going to grow up with no brain cells. I see it now, they walk around with their heads stuck in their phones!!

Anyway, rant over. Back to my Facebook business page. I set it up and added a few comments and links, I also experimented with FB ads which drove a bit of traffic to my site.

Im no expert on fb ads but you can use it to drive a steady flow of traffic if you are willing to pay!

Here are 2 ads that I quickly threw together…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The average cost per click was 0.16p

Now this was just a quick experiment but I will look more closely at this in the future when I know what my visitor/value is. Now if this figure is over 0.16p then it will be worth me pursuing with face book ads!

If you are curious, the ad with the arrow had a higher click through rate than the add with the blue/yellow box image.

 

Reached out to others and try to Guest post

One of my main reasons for my increase in traffic was the guest post which I got featured on Cloudliving.com

Guest posting is a great way to gain new visitors and to build your reputation, however it is easier said than done! I quickly found that blogs such as mine were looking for high quality information only.

If you want to guest post on a niche related blog, you better write some damn good content!!

Once you have written something of high quality then you have to go and pitch yourself and hope that somebody likes your article and are willing to post it on their blog.

How to go about it….

Here are a few tips to help you get your guest post accepted.

1) Find blogs that accept guest posts. Make sure they are well established blogs that achieve high levels of traffic.

2) Read through the blog and get to know it. See what they have already written about and try to find a gap that you can fill. Write something great that the blog does not already include.

3) Get a feel for the writing style of the blog. It’s no good writing a quality article if your style of writing is completely different to the blog owners. This is where you have to adapt!

4) Make your article better than the articles already published. If all of the other articles on the blog are 2000+ words and you send them your 700 word article, they will probably tell you to piss off! Write deep and useful information.

5) Tip – Include a couple of links within your article that link to pages on the blog you are planning on guest posting on. This helps because when the blog owner reads your post they will see that you have already linked to his own articles! and he will like that 😉

6) Use a compelling and eye catching headline! The headline for my article on Tungs Cloudliving blog is: ‘How to get your SEO strategy bang on every time and rank on page 1’

7) Sell yourself – When trying to get your post noticed, simply email the blogger with a short and straight to the point email. Here is an example:

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Hey,  My name is Jason, I’ve been following your blog for a long time. I run Doseoyourself.com and I have just finished writing my latest post. Before I publish it I was wondering if you would like to use it as a guest post on your blog? It’s a whopping 3200 words and your visitors would love it. I’ve attached a copy. Let me know. Jason

—————————————————————————————————————————-

 

Nice and simple and to the point. I tell them my blog so that they can check it out. Notice how I also tell them that I was about to publish this new article on my own blog? This makes it seem more like a quality article rather than something that was purposely put together for a guest post!

Notice how I also say ‘it’s a whopping 3200 words‘! This automatically increases it’s credibility, as we are so used to seeing the standard 500 word articles these days!

So there are a few useful tips for you to get your guest posts featured on other blogs and bring you a ton of new traffic!

I found this useful article on guest posting that covers everything: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-guest-blogging/

 

 

Tumblr/Reddit Some great Tips from the Lazy Ass Stoner

Whilst contributing to the forums I came across these videos on increasing traffic using Tumblr and Reddit.

 

Make money with Tumblr

 

These are 2 great methods to build traffic and increase the popularity of your site. I also signed up to Inbound.org and I now submit my links their too.

Although I found that the Tumblr method didn’t quite bring in the kind of traffic described in the video, it’s definitely worth creating a page to build a few links and gain a few visitors.

Whenever I publish a new post I upload the link on my Tumblr page

 

Google alerts

I set up a few google alerts for certain keywords that were related to some of the posts I had published. Each day I received an email that contained links to sites and blogs that had mentioned the keywords I was targeting.

I would then go to them and leave a comment and a link back to my blog.

Although I did get a few links from it I didn’t find it that useful to be honest. You are not going to get a load of traffic using this method, but it’s a good way of monitoring what people are saying about you and your site 😉

 

John Chow Tweet

As I mentioned in my Traffic report. I decided to use $100 of my profits to spend on sponsored tweets! I noticed that John Chow offered this service so I gave it a shot, because lets face it. He has a massive following with over 100,000 followers!!

John sent 3 tweets linking to my blog. I decided to link to my Ranking number 1 in google page as this is my most popular and it also is the best converting ‘Social locker’, which means people share this content the most!

 

 

 

He also mentioned it on his Facebook and Linkedln. Although they did not bring in a lot of traffic, it did expose my blog to other influential bloggers in my niche and more people shared my content which creates a small snowball affect!

Here are some click through stats from The sponsored tweets:

 

 

 

Optimise posts for long tail keywords

This is an interesting concept that I came across when reading this post by Jason acidre on how he increased his search traffic by 44% by optimising his pages for long tail keywords!

Basically here is what I did…

Firstly I explored my Google analytics and GWT accounts to display the search terms which my blog was picking up traffic for. I jotted down all of the keywords that people were searching for, but only the ones where my site wasn’t quite on page 1.

I then optimised the specific page for that particular keyword. Nothing fancy, I just included the keyword near the top of the page and maybe in one of the headings!

This is enough to jump that keyword phrases to page 1 🙂

It’s a great way to boost your search traffic and it’s something you should look at once your blog becomes more established!

 

Optimised posts using Googles search predictor.

Another on page optimisation techniques that I used to help pick up more long tail traffic was to use the Google search box.

Notice when you type something into Google it starts to predict what you are typing and it gives you a few different suggestions!

Well these suggestions are great for targeting keywords.

Why?…..

Because these are the most popular searches!

I like to use this technique to help find the Meta Titles for my posts. Try to use searches with at least 5 words because these are more specific keywords and will be easier to rank for!

 

 

 

More forum posts!

My biggest source of traffic since the blog began is traffic from the forums. in particular BHW, Traffic planet and Warrior forum. By spending time helping others on the internet marketing forums, I have managed to gain thousands of visits to my blog.

By having a signature in my profile, people can easily click through to my blog once I have answered their question. It seems that the more comments I post, the more traffic I get!

At the time of ‘typing’ I have made a total of 218 posts on BHW and to date, it has brought me 2,275 visitors….. Not bad ay!!

 

This equals around 10 new visitors for every post I make.

Same thing with Traffic Planet. I have made 48 posts and I have received 520 visitors!!

Black Hat World – 10.4 visitors to my blog per post made

Traffic Planet –  10.8 visitors to my blog per post made

 

These numbers will continue to increase If I don’t make any more posts because members of the forums will still come across old posts and click my links!!

But I would be silly not to continue contributing to these forums! I have not really posted much at all at Warrior forum yet, but it’s something I need to do.

Make 50 forum posts per month and get an extra 500+ visitors!  🙂

 

 Use a Social Locker plugin

One of my favourite methods to build traffic is to use the Social Plugin. You have probably seen it used on my blog a few times. Basically it locks part of your content so the visitor has to share your page or blog to access the info!

My most popular Social Plugin is on this page. I exchange my 75 page pdf in return for a share!

People click one of the share buttons, either Google+, Facebook or Twitter and it goes out to there friends/followers

As you can imagine, this creates a nice snowball affect and it brings in a steady flow of traffic!

Here is what it looks like… Feel free to click one of the share buttons 🙂

 

The plugin is only $22 which is a great investment – You can get it here

 

Summary

So there you have it, the exact methods I used to increase my blog traffic by 96.4% in 1 month. I know there are a ton of other useful ways but this is a good starting point. I’ll continue to experiment with other ways and I’ll keep you updated of course.

If you like this post please share it to help my blog move in the right direction 🙂