Well, it has been one week since I started this blog, completely “from scratch” and I have brought in 1,027 visitors with an average of 133 visits per day. As for page views, this blog brought in 1,944 total with an average of 246 per day. Not bad, I guess? For the latest stats on this site, click here.
I have definitely learned a lot in this first week and have also changed my opinion on some things since I started. Since one of the main reasons to get a lot of traffic is to make money and one of the most popular sources of revenue is Google Adsense, I take back what I said earlier about using traffic exchanges and anything that resembles that. Darren from problogger first clued me in on this. I wondered though if StumbleUpon would fall into this category. I emailed Google and they could not say anything about any specific company. They repeated the phrase “We recommend that you exercise caution when using traffic exchange programs”.
So, whether you can use StumbleUpon is a mystery. I’d say it is better to play it safe and don’t bother…for now, it’s not worth the risk. Which is too bad, because you can get some really good traffic for a fairly reasonable cost…and it is very well targeted.
If you’re not using Adsense or any other advertising network and don’t have to worry about being banned then perhaps traffic exchanges are for you.
Overall, I think this article and this article brought in the most traffic. I was mentioned in a few other blogs and forum posts, creating a mini snowball effect. Probably the quickest and easiest way to get good traffic is to write high quality posts that others will want to blog and talk about. Leverage the power of sites like digg, and if you’re lucky - one front page story could bring you bucketloads of traffic.
Other than this I think optimizing your blog is the next important thing. I’m still not getting very much (if any) traffic from Google, but my site is listed. Perhaps I have need to optimize a few more things?
I’m definitely running low on steam and have gone kind of overboard lately. I’ve got at least 5 blogs that I’ve started, and ideas for a few more I’d like to start. I know it’s insane and not the direction I should go in…but I guess I temporarily have “blog fever”. If I get my head together, I’ll focus on two or three blogs at most. Really, I should just focus on one - but I don’t see that happening yet.
I wonder what is best - to have one blog (using one domain) covering many different topics…or have several very specific blogs each with their own domain? I’m taking the latter route, so I guess I’ll wait and see what happens.
[tags]blog,blogs,blogging,Blogging+Tips,weblogs,blog-tips[/tags]
The latter route is a lot better in my opinion, I think that reaching 1,000+ visits in your first week is a great think, keep the posts coming and you should grow a successful blog =)
A.H