Increasing Traffic is Like Moving a Car that is Stuck in Mud

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Getting a car that is stuck in mud moving, requires considerable effort. Once the car is in motion, however, greater traction is gained, and the car can be accelerated more easily. Likewise, increasing traffic to a new website is rather difficult and requires effort; but, once a certain level of traffic has been achieved, increasing traffic further becomes much easier.

Like most other newcomers, I have been searching the internet for tips on increasing traffic. Most of the advice has been similar: write good content, link to other blogs, post blog entries to directories, etc. The simple truth is that, while this advice does help, the internet is a dynamic place that changes quickly. What may have worked well in the past, may no longer be very effective. Nevertheless, here are a few fundamentals that underly everything:

• A website's traffic is increased by making people who would be interested in its content aware of its existence,
• High search rankings result in higher traffic,
• Search rankings are increased by others linking to a website from their websites,
• External links increase traffic,
• External links are mostly created by others,
• Others telling their family, friends, colleagues, etc., about a website can rapidly increase traffic, and
• In order for those others to do anything that helps increase a website's traffic, they need to be aware of its existence (see the first point).

The fundamentals listed above are rather cyclic. Well-established websites have built up a group of others that can help increase traffic further, sometimes very rapidly. For example Steve Pavlina noticed a sharp increase in traffic in June 2005, after one of his pages made the popular list on del.icio.us; a task performed by others who were already visiting his website. Likewise, Blamcast recently saw a large spike in traffic after one of its articles made the front page of Reddit; once again, a feat that could only be achieved by others that were already Blamcast readers.

Thus, the ultimate issue for new websites is to build up a group of others who will help increase traffic, without the help of the usual mechanisms above (which require already having that group of others). This is difficult. In fact, I have found almost no website that has achieved rapid growth immediately, with the exception of Spring of Life. According to this page, Spring of Life managed to earn $8.66 in its first month, and $25.46 in the first half of this month (July 2008). Omar Abid appears to be unimpressed with these amounts, but for a blog that has been in existence for only one and a half months, this is actually very good. 

Comparing Spring of Life with this blog, it is clear that Omar has been posting far more entries (several per day) than I have. This is likely to help as it gives a large volume of content for search engines to scour. It is also possible that the blog topic is more popular; "making money online" and "how to be successful" are likely to be much more popular than "increasing website traffic" or "solving website issues." This is true, despite the fact that increasing website traffic is absolutely essential to making money online. The other noticeable difference is that Spring of Life uses services such as Feedburner, which are designed to help increase a website's visibility.

The next step for this blog is to take a closer look at social networking type sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, and Reddit. These sites appear to be very popular and good sources of traffic. Feedburner also looks like it could be of use. It provides tools for tasks such as pinging Technorati and other sites whenever updates occur. Another Feedburner feature is statistics on the number of subscribers, etc.

Comments (1) | 21 July 2008