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JLP’s Grassroots Effort to Build Blog Traffic
By JLP | June 19, 2006
What are the ways to build blog traffic? Let’s see, there’s…
1. Search results from Google, MSN Search, Yahoo and other search engines
2. Links from other blogs
3. Links from forums and bulletin boards
4. Carnivals (also considered links from other blogs)
5. Media attention
6. Links from huge sites like Instapundit and Lifehacker
7. Word of mouth
It is he last one mentioned that I want to concentrate on by offering up a “what-if” scenario.
My goal is to have 1,000,000 hits by January 1, 2007. Right now I’m sitting at around 162,000 hits. As of today, there are 196 days until January 1, 2007. That means I need to average 4,271 hits per day for the rest of the year to meet my goal. When I’m averaging 800+ hits per day, 4,271 seems IMPOSSIBLE! However, there is a way that my goal could be met but I will need your help.
According to my Feedburner stats, AllFinancialMatters has nearly 900 readers (most days it is over 900 readers but the Feedburner numbers fluctuate quite a bit). Of those 900 readers, I need 100 people to send an email to 10 of their friends, introducing them AllFinancialMatters and asking them to help out by telling 10 of their friends about AllFinancialMatters and so on until the goal is met, which would occur after 4 rounds of email. Here’s what it would look like:
1,000 readers tell 10 friends = 10,000 hits
10,000 readers tell 10 friends = 100,000 hits
100,000 readers tell 10 friends = 1,000,000 hits
Hmmm… That looks like a chart from an Amway meeting! Regardless, it shows the power of compounding.
This brings me to this question:
Would any of you readers (not bloggers who are already linking to AFM, since you are already helping to spread the word) like to help me out with this project? If so, please start spreading the word by emailing 10 of your friends and telling them about AllFinancialMatters and encourage them to help spread the word.
UPDATE: Clearly I didn’t think this post all the way through before I published it. I am in NO WAY trying to persuade people to start a chain letter. I’m sorry if that’s the way this post read.
Topics: Blogging | 11 Comments »
June 19th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Just one question. Why?
June 19th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
Anon,
Why not?
June 19th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Anon’s questions is legitimate. You have much more to gain than those who help you.
Will you donate all of the blogs profits to charity?
June 19th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Are you really asking your readers to be the initiator of a chain email?
Do you really want your website to be associated with a chain email?
Perhaps the better way to go about this would be to write great articles which your readers might then choose, of their own volition, to forward on to friends and family members (because the articles are well written, concise, and relevant). Those friends and family members might then choose to become regular readers.
Or maybe that’s just crazy talk.
June 19th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
If all you care about is making the hit counter spin, then just go onto EBay and buy some hits from one of the traffic exchanges. You should be able to purchase 1,000,000 visits for $50 or so.
Why you would want to do so I’m not going to venture to guess. The quality of the traffic will be even lower than the viral campaign you’re proposing. But if 1MM hits is your goal that will get you there.
June 19th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
I didn’t expect this kind of response.
NO, I don’t want to start a chainletter or anything like that. My POINT was more about the power of word-of-mouth than just trying to get hits.
June 19th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Word of mouth builds a solid group of readers; it just takes time. If you want more traffic I suggest a layout change that focuses more on the actual article content and less on the ads. Remove one of the side bars and pare it down to relevant items.
Your site often comes across as more about the side bars than the actual content.
June 19th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
Well I like you anyhow. I will try and link you where I can, although you linking to me definitely was a bigger boost to traffic. =)
June 19th, 2006 at 3:23 pm
My point was, look at the posts on your blog lately. From what I can tell, on the front page of the blog, there is not a single “original” article about finance. The only thing that comes close are the “Questions Of The Day”.
Most of the posts are just links to articles or other blogs. I don’t mean to pick on you — this is true of most of the “finance” blogs out there. Very few actually write anything original.
But, while I subscribe to some of these blogs because it takes only seconds per day to see if there’s content or not (thanks bloglines!), I’m certainly not going to suggest to friends and family that they spend their time reading the blog.
If you want me to do that, you need to come up with something a bit more original than yet another “Blog Of The Week”.
June 19th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Anon,
I have always thought that I published a lot of original content. A lot of “how to” posts and things like that.
That said, I do link to a lot of outside articles and resources that I think are worth passing along.
Obviously if you don’t like what you read here I would not want you help spread the word.
June 19th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
Personally I don’t mind the links to outside articles. It saves me the time it would take to scrounge the net for interesting tidbits. If I don’t see anything that interests me, I just skip it for the day.