Just as promised, I’m back with Part 2 of my Building Traffic for Your Blog series. When I wrote Part 1 of this series, this blog had a monthly average of 60 Visits / day and about 20 Subscribers. I also said that my plan was to reach and average of 500 Visits / day in the next 3 months. While I’m still pretty far from achieving that goal, I have to say April was a pretty good month. 
I also drew some conclusions: I have to improve SEO, social networking traffic is just like the sea tide and blog traffic building doesn’t happen over night. They were all confirmed this month:
- While I didn’t put too much effort into SEO just yet, search engine traffic is better. I guess it has more to due with the quantity of content. More content = more chances of being hit. Still gotta work on this.
- I had my share of social networking traffic, which helped reach new people. Like I said: take advantage of your 10 minutes of fame.
- Blog traffic building is a long term commitment. It’s not easy, you often feel like quiting, but if you are persistent, results will start to show.
Here are this blog’s statistics for the month of April:
- In April I more than doubled the traffic: Ireached a total of 4366 Visits, which brings the monthly average to about 145 Visits / day
- The traffic sources pie chart looks like this: 26% search engines, 56% referring sites, 16% direct traffic
- Subscriber count tripled in just 1 month and now shows 62 subscribers (Thanks again!)
One of my goals when I started this blog was to create a free Wordpress theme and reach 100 downloads. I can check that one from the list. Corporate Sandbox has been downloaded 133 times.
Another wish was to find more freelance gigs (mostly blog design) and this is exactly what happened: I usually get 2 or 3 blog design requests each month, from people that stumble across my blog and like my design work. Generating some traffic to this blog is also something I can check from the list.
Now all I have to do is make my first $100 from blogging and be the first Romanian blogger who’s internationally famous, then I will have to come up with a new st of goals. 
Thanks for listening!
As you probably noticed, it’s been more than a week since my last post. I was really, really busy with a couple of new blog designs, as well as some other web design work.
I just wanted you to know that I didn’t abandon the blogging thing and that this month I will be back with more freelance stories, more Wordpress themes and more blog design tips.
Since last month, this blog has grown a lot: more than doubled the traffic and almost tripled the number of subscribers. So I have all the reasons in the world to keep generating great blogging and freelancing related content.
As some of you may know, last month I began a series of posts about this blog’s growth. If you are new, you might want to check Building Traffic for Your Blog - Part 1. Tomorrow I will write Part 2, where I will tell you all about the month of April.
I also want to thank you, my subscribers, for giving me a little piece of your time. I will try to make it worth with every new post. I know time is precious in this crazy world that we live in, so really… Thank you!
Darren Rowse declared the day of April 14th the unofficial Blogger Appreciation Day. Although I’m a day late, I would like to take this opportunity and say thanks to a couple of the bloggers who inspired me over the last couple of years.
- Darren Rowse - Problogger - like I said in my first post, when I first found Darren’s blog, I spent hours reading his interesting articles. It was my first real contact with the blogging phenomenon.
- Yaro Starak - Entrepreneur’s Journey - Yaro’s dedication to help others succeed is well known. I really enjoy his articles and podacasts, as well as the BlogMasterMind course (I have to catch up on my reading though).
- Alex Cristache - Blogsessive - I met Alex after finding his blog in a CSS gallery. If you are looking for blogging tips (SEO, plugins, themes), then you should really visit his blog. Alex was kind enough to implement a couple of improvements to my recently released free Wordpress theme.
For me, their blogs have a special meaning: the beginning, the initiation, the pursuit. Thank you, guys!
And since it’s Blogger Appreciation Day, here’s a wacky idea: I’m no SEO expert or anything, but we all know how important link titles and link captions are for SEO. So wouldn’t it be nice if every blogger had these things visible on their blog, for other bloggers to use them? Call it “blogging courtesy”.
Maybe someone can take this idea and transform it into a plugin, or even a website. Just like Matt Brett’s Feed Icons, create some kind of standard.
It’s just a thought! 
Although I’ve set up this blog in December 2007, the actual blogging started about one month ago. That’s when I started to write more often, to set up plugins and make all kinds of tweaks to this blog, to interact with other bloggers, to promote my blog on forums and social networks, etc.
I will use March 1st 2007 as reference and I will write a post like this one at the beginning of each month (first day of the month if possible). I will post information about this blog’s traffic and the methods used to bring more traffic. My plan is to reach and most importantly keep an average of 500 visitors /day in the next 3 months. But hey, I won’t be upset if this happens sooner.
Below is a screenshot from Google Analytics with traffic stats from March 1st to April 1st. And no, that sudden increase is not an April’s Fool joke. It’s not Photoshop.
As you can see from this graph, there was a spike in traffic on March 13, generated by the fact that one of my articles was posted on StumbleUpon. That’s when I reached 273 visits. Apart from that, there were no major events. Still, the traffic levels increased from 10-15 Visits in February to about 50 Visits in March, so I guess that’s pretty good news.
That abrupt increase in traffic from the last couple of days is due to the fact that I have been receiving some traffic from various sources:
On April 1st this blog had 249 Visits. I know that from this graphic it looks as though traffic really took off, but I will have to disappoint you: after April 1st, traffic levels didn’t continue to rise above the record of 273 Visits / day. But there is some good news: traffic didn’t fall all the way down to 50 Visits, but is steady at about 75 Visits / day.
And now it’s time to draw some conclusions:
- Work on your SEO and how you can bring more traffic from search engines. I know I have to: search engine traffic accounts for only 11% of the traffic I received in March. This is way, way too little, but the good news is there’s a lot of room for growth.
- The occasional wave of social networking traffic will make you popular, but only for a while. You will soon find out that you can’t ride the wave for too long. You just have know how to take advantage of your 10 minutes of fame.
- Building traffic for your blog is not an easy thing to do and it doesn’t happen over night. Like with every other thing in life, you have to put some hours of work into it, before you can see some real results.
I’ll be back on May 1st with Part 2 of this article.
Photo by James Cridland
As you probably know, FeedBurner allows you to display the FeedCount, a small widget (chicklet as they call it) that shows the number of people who subscribed to your blog. It’s a known fact that bloggers (and people in general) tend to follow a crowd, so having a significant FeedCount can determine a snowball effect on your subscriber number. On the other hand, choosing to show a small FeedCount can drive people away. That’s why it’s better to show the FeedCount when your blog has a consistent number of readers.
I used to have a plugin installed, that allowed me to display the subscriber count as plain HTML text, instead of the FeedBurner chicklet (for design reasons). I deleted that a couple of days ago, because someone on a forum told me people could be thinking that I’m faking my subscriber number. That would have been hard to believe, since that number is 17. But I removed it anyway.
What determined me to write this post? Well… I was browsing one of the blogs that I subscribed to, when I noticed the content is not all that great, yet the chicklet showed about 150 subscribers. Sorry, but that’s the truth. So I right clicked and noticed the guy was using the RSS feed from another blog. Needless to say I’m no longer subscribed to that blog.
So I’m asking you: is faking subscriber count worth it? Is there something to gain? If people do subscribe because you seem popular, won’t they unsubscribe when they will realize your content sucks? And another thing: if you are using someone else’s RSS feed (and not a static image) to fake subscriber count, why not use Problogger? I mean… if you’re faking it, why not aim high?
Don’t know about you, but I would rather have my 17 loyal subscribers, rather than faking a crowd.
