Traffic Patterns – What Influences Traffic
Last week, I tried an experiment.
Normally, I publish one or two or three blog posts a week. I hold back a lot of my ideas because I don’t want to email my list too much.
But last week I wrote and published a blog post whenever I felt like it. I didn’t hold back.
Now, I continued to email my list like normal — but no more than once a day. I picked the best post of the day and let them know about it.
I didn’t tell them about the other blog posts, but left it up to chance to see if they’d find them or not.
At least one person noticed. Stephen Dean said, “Ryan Healy was busting out blog posts this week like Lindsay Lohan on stimulants.”
While Stephen’s description made me laugh, the question is not, “How similar is Ryan Healy to Lindsay Lohan?” The question is, “Did more frequent blogging increase traffic to my blog?”
The answer is… yes. In fact, traffic to my blog increased quite a bit. Here’s a graph from Google Analytics:
Saturday is consistently my lowest traffic day every single week, so I have noted that above. Monday-Thursday are my highest traffic days.
Conclusion: More frequent blog posts generated more traffic to my blog even though I didn’t increase the frequency that I emailed my list.
You may find the same is true in your market. It’s something worth testing.
Explaining Alexa Traffic Spikes
While Alexa isn’t perfect, I do like to check Alexa to see how I rank against similar blogs. I also like to analyze the charts to see why I’ve gotten more or less traffic than normal.
Here’s a chart of my blog’s Alexa rankings compared to Terry Dean’s blog MyMarketingCoach.com.
As you can see, our sites have similar traffic levels. But I’ve had a couple recent traffic spikes that are explained on the chart.
Ray Edwards is a colleague of mine. He’s a freelance copywriter, as I am. And our blogs have similar traffic levels. But check out this Alexa chart:
As you can see, my Jeff Walker post and more frequent blogging both created noticeable traffic spikes.
But those spikes pale in comparison to an organized promotion where multiple friends and/or affiliates promote your product on the same day or within a narrow window of time.
Last week, Ray promoted his new book Writing Riches. I promoted Ray’s book, as did a number of other bloggers and marketers. This caused a massive spike in traffic to Ray’s blog.
3 Ways to Increase Traffic
If you’d like to increase traffic to your blog or web site, here are three proven ways to do it:
- Be controversial.
- Blog more frequently.
- Get friends and affiliates to promote a product you sell.
As the charts above demonstrate, an organized promotion can generate far more traffic than either of the first two strategies.
This is because people are generally more motivated by money and obligation than the opportunity to share something new or controversial.
Have a great week.
-Ryan M. Healy
