Increase in my blog traffic: Reason #1

I have pointed out the increase in my blog traffic during September in my previous post Significant Increase in My Blog Traffic. I tried to analyze the statistics and figured out the probable reasons. I will present these in the next few posts. Here is the first one.

Know your blog traffic:
Until recently, I have not bothered to look at the statistics behind my blog traffic. The only thing that would interest me is the hit counter. I used to watch the counter, day in and day out, ticking slowly. You have to look into your traffic and mine the data for some useful information (a bit of data mining). Look at the visitors’ profile, where do they come from, the browser they are using, their click pattern and so on.

How did it help me?
I was surprised when I found that most of the visitors to my site came from a popular blog. This blog is one among the Top-100 Technorati sites. So, I took my time to visit this blog and tried to identify a link to my blog. After some time, I found that a link to one of my posts is sitting pretty comfortably at the sidebar. It did not take much time to identify that my link is part of an automatic widget, which pulled recent posts with certain keywords. To confirm this, I quickly wrote another post with the same keyword. As expected, I got another link to my blog displayed at this popular blog, which has about 20000+ incoming links.

No wonder I am getting some good traffic. Now, I would ensure that I always get a link from this blog by writing posts with similar keywords once in a while.

Follow the PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act):

1. Plan what you want to write about:
Everyone of us search Google or Yahoo or MSN for some valuable information. Sometimes we get it straightaway, sometimes it takes a long route. If you are searching for a term and unable to find the required information quickly, then it is a good topic to write about. (Eg. It may be on Free CSS templates, Blogger templates, Recent posts widget, Blog Assessment tools or any topic from your own niche)

2. Do post about the topic:
After finding a good topic, write about it. Even if you don’t know anything personally, you can redirect your visitors to other sites. When you redirect, give your opinion on each site and how did you find it useful. Do not just include the links, you should have tried it hands-on.

3. Check the statistics:
Does this post bring in any traffic? Where do the visitors come from? Has this post been linked somewhere else? Filter out the information. You could use some of the free statistics packages like Google Analytics, SiteMeter or StatCounter.

4. Act on the information:
If the post brought some traffic, try to leverage on that. Work out your strategy on how to retain this traffic.

In case you did not get enough traffic, don’t worry. This is a trial-and-error procedure. Go back to the PDCA cycle again. I have more to write, but I will do it in the subsequent posts.