3 Important Factors for More Blog Traffic (With Google Analytics Data)

July 2, 2013 by Daniel Sharkov|

I am really not a fan of the “traffic is everything” theory.

I mean traffic alone is worthless.
It is just a number, showing how many people visited your blog the other day. But does that mean anything to you? No.

What I believe marketers and bloggers should pay a lot more attention to is the actual conversion.

Conversion rateis what plays a role. You would make a lot more money if you have the right call to actions in place and the right kind of content that persuades people to either buy or subscribe than if you simply rely on the number of visitors.

So what’s the purpose of traffic in the end?

It’s simply a multiplier. In other words you first need the right “funnel” to guarantee yourself a good conversion ratio. Once you have that in place, you use traffic to multiply the number of successful conversions.

And with that in mind, today I am going to talk about
three simple elements and the difference they can make to your traffic numbers and hence conversions. All information is based on my Google Analytics observations, which you can also see visualised in the next paragraphs:

1. Consistent Blog Posting

As I’ve said it multiple times, I don’t really believe that content is king. There are other factors such as marketing and social media strategy that are almost as equally important as having the right content in place.

But then again how much traffic your blog will receive
highly depends on the number of blog posts that you will publish.

Yes, there are some bloggers who will share an article once or twice a month and still their posts would receive hundreds of shares and comments.

There is one big difference between us and those bloggers however –
they are already authorities. You on the other hand are yet to establish your authority and consistent blog posting is part of the process.

So how much of a traffic difference does posting two times a week make compared to posting once every two weeks?

The graph is a comparison between two ten-day periods. The blue line is consistent blog posting or in other words four published articles for the ten days. The orange line on the other hand shows traffic levels with inconsistent posting or only one article for the whole period. The results speak for themselves. As you can see four articles have generated 49.22% more traffic than just a single article.

NOTE:
The drop of traffic in the blue line on the fourth day is due to organic traffic fluctuation.

If you’d like to become more consistent and start publishing more, you might want to check my article: 5 Methods that Will Help You Come up With More Blog Post Ideas

2. Consistent Social Media Marketing

I guess pretty much every blogger out there has at least a Twitter and a Facebook account. That however simply isn’t enough. A successful social strategy doesn’t come down to being present on a social network. It is about participation. Participation both in terms of creating meaningful conversations with other folks in your niche and also sharing your content.

And you know what, it turns out putting just a little more effort into your social sharing strategy can make for a significant improvement to your social media traffic figures.

Lately I wasn’t quite happy with the traffic that the top social networks were returning for me and I decided it was time for a change.

First it was Twitter.

I decided to start with a bit of research on some of the top players in my niche.

Twitter Counterhelped me see that the majority were sending out around 90-100 tweets EVERY day. For me that number was 50-60. So ramping up my tweeting was the priority.  To do that I signed up for Tweriodto discover the best tweeting times. After I got the results I deleted my previous Bufferschedule and created another one, focused on the times Tweriod returned. I also moved from an average of one tweet per hour to two.

Second network I focused my attention on was Facebook.

My strategy was simple – post more and post EVERY SINGLE day. And although I normally tried to do that I didn’t really make it a rule. There were a lot of days when I’d simply skip posting if I didn’t have the time. Besides I’d publish two-three stories a day. Now I changed the number to AT LEAST three (from which two point to my blog).

NOTE:
I did pretty much the same change on Google Plusand the results are almost identical to Facebook’s.

3. Consistent Guest Blogging

Have you ever thought about starting a guest blogging campaign?

Well let me tell you straight – if you’ve never written a blog post and never got one published, you are certainly missing out. Guest blogging on relevant blogs with high Page Rank and a decent amount of social sharing is one of the best ways to be discovered by your target audience.

A few months back I decided it was finally time to get my hands on guest blogging. Since then I prepared around ten guest articles and started sending emails to blogs that might be interested.

So what did all the effort bring in the end you are asking?

Well it not only brought traffic but also a ton of subscribers. That is the good thing about guest blogging – it drives highly targeted traffic that consists of people, who are actually interested in what you have to say thus contributing for a high conversion rate.

But back to traffic…

Organic traffic was really the winner here. With each guest post, the numbers kept going up from some measly 30 daily visits to over 150. Of course there was also a good amount of direct traffic following a guest post, but that one lasts only a couple of weeks until your guest article gets buried under new content.

NOTE:
Once you begin your guest blogging journey, I’d recommend you to complete at least three guest articles per month for consistent traffic flow.

If you’d like to get more information on my results from guest blogging, make sure to check out my comprehensive case study “ How to Make Guest Blogging Work for You“

In Conclusion

I really hope you found the information in the above paragraphs useful guys. All in all if you are able to work consistently on those three aspects, you should expect reaching the high-point of your traffic and converting a good percentage into subscribers.

Now I’d like to hear your comments!

How often do you publish new content on your blog? Do you have a schedule of some sort? Which social network brings you the most traffic? Please take a minute to share your two cents, I’d appreciate it!

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