About a month ago I posted some theories on getting more traffic to your weblog. I give out this advice so much to people that I figured I should prove it by moving my (totally unverifiable, and random) Alexa ranking below 800,000. I didn't have any traffic goals, as I assumed they would increase by some percentage I couldn't predict.

First, I started opening my stats every day. Before this month I rarely looked at my stats. I write my weblog for myself first, and for friends second. My audience is intentionally small (plus I can look foolish in front of friends, I don't care). So the idea of watching stats was completely foreign, it's for the big blogs that have ads and depend on the traffic to live.

I attempted to exploit the positive feedback loop of staring at stats to make the stats go up and I think it worked. I would notice traffic falling off on the weekend and make a point to bookmark some items I might like to link to throughout the week.

Second, I had to set aside time in my day to really hit my feed reader. A quote from Google Reader's trends: "From your 193 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 10,432 items, starred 3 items, shared 0 items, and emailed 0 items." It's a lot of work staying on top of your feeds, and I had to force myself some afternoons to quickly flip through the big sites to see what people were talking about. It's hard work to stay ahead of the curve.

My new Alexa stat ranking: 619,546. Looking at the 1 week averages (since the 3 mo. averages include the months I was not driving the rating down) my Alexa ranking is 464,345. If I kept up my pace over the next year I think I could easily land somewhere in the 400's for good, high 300's would be swell.

The missing element here is quality. Quality is pretty much the only thing that will keep you in the big leagues once you get there. I can't speak to having a good voice or consistent delivery of quality content so I left it off my original list of things to do.

As some people have a face for radio, I tend to think I have a writing voice that makes a case to start a site with user generated content.


comments

riffola

One reason why you might not be getting accurate stats is because your Yahoo Pipes feed is really weird. When I click on "torrez", the source link it takes me to the pipes page on Yahoo, which is supremely random.

It might show older links first or show flickr pictures from the last month or so on another refresh, I quickly learned that if I see old flickr pictures on the Pipes page I need to refresh to see the newest links and scroll down to see if the new links are peppered in-between older ones.

I preferred the old method when everything was linked back to notes.torrez.org, plus that would help your incoming hits be more accurate since the delicious/flickr/etc feeds on Pipes are all your work.


Andre Torrez

Whoah. Hmm. I didn't realize that. Maybe I should direct people back to this feed on my site that now goes through Feedburner.


jonson

my primary method for getting more traffic, and I'm not sure it will work for you, has been to be linked by your blog. Every time that happens I get several hundred more visits for a couple of days. So, in summary, you should link to yourself a bunch, is what I'm saying.


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