sally neill review of blog traffic

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Well I thought it was about time I posted a screen shot of my Google Analytics stats for the amount of traffic coming to my blog.

I have recently been trying to drive as much traffic as possible to my blog because of a competition that is being run by my coach Alex Jeffreys, if you want to know more details about it, you can see my first post about it here:

In It To Win It

I had set myself a target of 8000 visitors, yeah right!

Very unlikely to reach that amount, but hey I gave it my best shot, can’t say I didn’t try.

To be honest I am not gutted I didn’t reach anywhere near my target, the main thing is I have taken steps to ensure I get traffic now, and for a long time to come.

There are lots of “fake” traffic methods out there, you know, the guaranteed 1 million visitors type sites, and I remember a long time ago I used that for my very first site, sallys-ebooks.co.uk.

I remember going to bed dreaming of a million visitors and lots of lovely cash.

The visitors came, probably generated by robots, as the stats sure showed that, but not one single sale, lesson learned there.

From my google stats I can see that my most popular page on my blog is the video tutorials.

And the post that has had the most hits was the In It To Win It Post.

I also seen that I am getting quite a bit of traffic from Twitter, this probably due to my own posts being tweeted by visitors to my blog, and from the tweets of other peoples blog posts.

There is 1 blog that is sending me most of traffic, I did ask the owner if I could share their link, but they declined, as they didn’t want the blog hoppers all heading to their blog.

Not sure why, but I suspect it’s because they want real comments on their blog, not just comments from people seeking a link for traffic generation purposes.

I did try and follow some of the techniques used by one of the previous winners of a similar Alex Jeffreys competition here:

Kotobot Success

But to be honest, some of the methods, I just wasn’t willing to try.

I think the total amount of visitors Jim got was over 40,000, amazing!

Ok, so the methods I used so far are:

Oil Rig / Blog Hopping

This is a method taught to me by my coach Alex Jeffreys, you basically visit a blog and leave a comment, not any old comment, a comment that tries to add more value to the original post, so a quick “love your blog etc” would not suffice.

In order to try and organize my blog hopping I set up rss feeds to be notified instantly of new posts, you can see how I done that here: Blog Hopping Made Simplier

I have since started to use Feedly which has a beautiful user panel and is much nicer to use for RSS feeds than Google Reader so give it a try, has made my own blog hopping a more pleasurable experience.

The blog hopping was a great experience for me, I have found some blogs I absolutely love and will visit daily, not for traffic, simply for pleasure on my own part.

I have also me some new friends from blog hopping, so this has been a big bonus.

Blog hopping has been very time consuming, but time well spent, for me anyway.

Twitter

I have never been a big twitter fan but I am obviously in the minority as Twitter has so many members.

A traffic source that has proved to work for me personally.

So much so that I even got a nice new twitter skin designed by Michael Ottman of Simple Ecovers.

Michael is now working full time online thanks to completing Alex Jeffreys coaching, another successful student churned out.

My new twitter skin can be seen here: Sally’s Twitter

(Feel free to follow me if you want)

I don’t think Twitter requires a fancy background, I just wanted one.

As I said before, visitors to my blog have tweeted my posts, and anytime I visit a blog, if it allows it, I tweet their post.

This has seen my followers increase and I have started to follow more people too.

I am starting to quite enjoy Twitter, not for only for marketing, just for fun too, and have met a few new friends from using it.

So I would say you should get a Twitter account yourself if you don’t already have one.

Forum Marketing

Not really done a lot of forum marketing to be honest.

I have a few forums I go on, such as More Monthly and the Warrior Forum.

But I did find a list of do follow forums (this means if you add your blog or website url to your forum signature then the link will be beneficial for your site, kinda like a backlink I think).

If  I ever get the time I will sign up at some of them, you can see the list here: Do Follow Forums.

Forums can generate you a lot of traffic if you spend time on them, helping people, asking questions.

Forums are basically a place where people with a similar interest gather and share information on that subject.

They are like a little or sometimes very BIG family, members can often be very protective of their forum,  so don’t dive on the forum and start pushing your links in peoples faces, get to know the members, add value, help out and you will soon be took under their wing, once this happens you will see a big increase of traffic to your site.

Article Submission

I have submitted no articles recently, except for one directly from my blog.

There is a wordpress plugin you can get from Ezine Articles, and it basically allows you to submit your blog posts directly from within your wordpress admin panel, straight through to Ezine Articles.

I found out about that plugin from Alex Whalley’s Blog.

To get the plugin, login to your Ezine Article account, under author tools select wordpress plugin.

Then you can submit your blog posts as articles in an instant, super cool tool.

I have not really submitted articles to other directories, but I know I should.

There is a great list of the top 50 Article Directories here: Top 50 Article Directories

Rss Feed Submission

Not quite sure if submitting my blog feed has been beneficial yet, only started doing it last week.

But if you want to know more about Rss Feeds read my previous blog: Rss Feed Submission

Facebook

I have set up A FaceBook Fan Page too, not sure why but I watched a video and it seemed like a good idea to generate a lot of traffic.

So far I only have 2 fans (stop laughing!)

But it did look like a great idea, so I set one up and added my rss feed to be posted into it automatically, again only done this last week, so will need to see what happens traffic wise.

You can see my facebook fan page here: Sally’s Fan Page.

Will update you if I see any results from FaceBook Fan Pages.

Blog Carnivals

Nathan Rufus told me about these and I have started to submit my blog posts to BlogCarnival.Com.

A blog carnival is basically a blog community that publishes relevant articles related to a certain topic, like a blog magazine with links to lots of other blogs.

Again not seen much results as yet from this method, but it should give me links back to my blog and hopefully some more traffic.

All you do is visit blog carnivals, choose a relevant category to submit to, choose the post to submit, and bingo your done.

PHEW!

Well, that’s how I have been driving traffic to my blog.

Perhaps not all instant traffic methods but certainly building me lots of backlinks and the possibility of lots of future traffic on auto pilot.

My worst day for visitors to my blog has been just 26 visitors.

My best day, after I finally broke the 200 visitors barrier was 217, that’s the highest amount of daily visitors I have had so far.

Further methods I intend to try are:

Squidoo

Hub Pages

Ebay

Hopefully this will bring more traffic to my site.

Feel free to try out any of the methods above, they are starting to show some promising results for me, and there is no reason you cannot do the same.

Have you got any super duper traffic generation tips for blog owners, if so, share them below…

Catch you soon, Sally :)

Filed under: Traffic Tips

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