Secrets told: how to increase traffic for a new site?
Summary: A blogger named Game_Producer at DP posted some very good points in gaining traffic. Within 3 - 5 months, he was able to promote his game business blog from 37 monthly visits to an astonishing 14,657 monthly unique visits. This thread here and his blog are well worth a read.
Source: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=214339
General insights in gaining traffic
- Setting up goals, stop slacking around anymore and being hitched by small things. Keep them in mind and later on you would figure out how exactly to achieve those goals. Be bold, and be confident in your creativity and hardwork. I think what separates Game_Producer very different from others is that he doesn’t try, instead, he set a goal and do it.
- Update daily, or even half-daily. Especially if it is a blog, keep writing and publishing new content EVERYDAY! Make good links to the new stuff, so that human visitors, big blog directories and search engines know them. And if it is a very frequently updated site, they definitely want to rank it better for the fressness. As Game_Producer puts it, it’s the major contributor of traffic.
- Cherish uniqueness and provide your own content. It is always preferred to publish something explosively shocking or at leaset from a grand new perspective rather than things that are generally accepted; while dog-bites-man is good content, man-bites-dog makes the headline.
- Discover what people are interested. Ask this question first to yourself. As an accidental visitor, what am I interested in knowing from this site? Is there any page that is so freshly baked that I have never seen anywhere else before and can’t help but linking to it on my own website? Game_Producer gives us several good examples of this:
- Sales statistics - I wonder how one gets such stuff.
- Interviews - something he mentioned I think is quite important is that it really doesn’t cost much to interview someone. Many people are more than willing to be interviewed. So, pretty much not what I had expected, and I am very probably gonna try this one out.
- News submission - One I have heard recently is newsnow.com.
- Write quality forum posts - According to Game_Producer, just this thread at DP brings in 100% additional traffic to his site.
- Press releases - Don’t be too aggressive in advertising. People rarely link to heavily monetized pages, in spite of good content. Take some time for a good site design, you won’t regret it.
Also some thoughts on monetization
- Adsense is not the right choice for everyone. He finds more possibilities with Text-Link-Ads and a subscription based membership to the forum.
- Experiment with different approaches to see what works, and seriously take the visitors into consideration, maintain a fresh site design. In the long-run, they are the ultimate source of revenue.
- Archive old pages, never erase any.
More on his success, pleast visit this other thread.
Others have their opinions
Well, some of the responders supply their own views about increasing site traffic. One of them confirmed that frequency of updating does matter. He left a site of 10k unique visitors / month unattended for several years and finally traffic landed about 100 uniques. Now he has to work harder to hit the former mark.
