If we closely look at the traffic graph shown above, we can witness a steady growth in traffic after some of my posts received good attention by social media users. You can clearly observe that before those big spikes, traffic was pretty much stagnant. The key factor was to identify this phenomenon and capitalizing on it. Following these big spikes, I introduced some major changes in my blogging routine to pull and convert more traffic.
Here are those changes that I implemented in last 2.5/3 months.
Posted Regularly
Readers and search engines both love regular feed of content. Prior to November 2008, my posting frequency was quite irregular with no definite pattern. Nothing can be better than daily posting, but if you cannot make it everyday, try to post at least 3 to 4 times a week. I have created a strict posting schedule and now I publish 3 articles per week. Try to publish at least one long in-depth post per week. Regular posting has not only given crawlers a reason to index the content quickly but it has also inflated the archives rapidly resulting in more traffic from organic sources.
Written For Audience
Daily posting alone cannot help build traffic on your blog. To make it clearer, let me ask you some simple questions. Why you visit some popular blogs? Do you like the design of the footer? Or you love to watch animated banner ads on that blog? I'm sure almost all of you go there only for one reason. To get answers of your questions and to get vital information related to your domain. So the key is to identify the needs of your audience and serve what they want. This is applicable to almost every business process - "Anticipating Customer Demands And Delivering The Goods Accordingly".
To implement this on your blog you need to do some research. Here's how I did it.
Google Analytics - is one of the best sources to identify what kind of content is receiving most traffic. Use the 'Content -> Top Content' report to identify the posts receiving most attention of the visitors. Generate 'Visitors -> Keywords' report to identity the most popular keywords that are sending traffic to your blog. After analyzing these reports, here's what I found out.
Following type of posts was receiving most traffic.
1. Problem-Solver Articles
2. How-To Tutorials
3. Lists of Resources
4. In-Depth Post About A Service/Feature
Asking fellow bloggers - in similar niche helped me in getting a clear picture about the type of content that receives most attention on their blogs. The results were almost the same as I got through analysis of Google Analytics reports.
Talking with some of my readers - gave some useful insight about their expectations and the type of content they are expecting from MintBlogger.
The most important metric to assess the popularity of any blog is the amount of traffic it is receiving. If you are unknown in blogosphere starting from scratch, building decent traffic on your blog can take some time. Here's how I managed to increase the traffic in recent months by applying some simple yet powerful techniques.
At present, I'm getting around 12,000 page views/month. I know it's not huge traffic when compared to some popular blogs in similar niche. However, the increase from 2,000 PV's/month to 12,000 PV's/month in about 2.5 months is certainly a good development for a relatively new blog.