I thought i would share how Ive gone from zero to 206,856 visitors in the last 12 months to one of my simple sites that i set up around an interest of mine.
Now i know that is a lot of traffic you hear about these claims all the time but as you know there is no room for fluff and hype on this blog so i have included some screenshots below to show you the figures.
Firstly i will say that looking at these numbers in total can seem like its going to take you a very long time to attract that kind of traffic but as long as you enter a niche or market where there is plenty of traffic and by targeting the right keywords then all that traffic is not so hard to actually get.
For obvious reasons i cant give you the site name but i will say that the market is around movie reviews and because i like to watch movies i decided to put together a site around an interest of mine. I don’t always believe that you should always go down this route about only choosing niches that you have an interest in because you there is a certain criteria that each market you choose has to meet which i explain in other posts but the site that i built over a year ago was going to be something extra and it never intended to be a good money earner but its ended up providing some good income which of course I’m very pleased with.
As you can see i had some fairly good traffic at the start and then in the middle it dropped right off and i was only getting around 60 – 100 visitors a day but lat summer i started to build more links and add content and then at the end of august my traffic jumped up to around 700 visitors a day and has been growing ever since
The main thing that i have done to get all this traffic is I’ve chosen a good domain name which gets plenty of traffic for the main keyword. Also i have made added new fresh unique content written by me on a regular basis and i continue to do so still around 1 or 2 new posts a week.
You don’t have to ALWAYS add new content in order for your sites to get regular traffic because some of my other sites continue to get more traffic and i only make a new post every so often not every week. I’m trying to build an authority site so that’s why i continue to add more and more content each week on my movie review site
Another reason why i decided to make this post today and pretty much the main reason was to show you one thing that i have recently done which has improved my bounce rate (basically holding my visitors attention much longer, hence they stay on my site much longer)
If you have been online for any length of time then you will know how important it is to hold your visitors attention because it could result in more revenue being made on your site and also it looks much better in the eyes of the search engines if your traffic stays for a longer duration.
I’m truly shocked with these stats because they are so much better but they are indeed accurate as you can see from the screen shots below.
I will tell you what i have done to increase it under the screen shots:
BEFORE I MADE THE CHANGE
AFTER I MADE THE CHANGE
As you can see my bounce rate has increase from 60% to now only 5% while my average time on site has remained the same pretty much. These stats are only for my home page where of course gets most of the traffic however a lot of my internal pages have been getting some great traffic aswell over the last couple of months too. Also all of my internal pages bounce rate have reduced to very low figures which means nearly all of the traffic do not click off straight away after arriving at my content.
I have recently just had my best traffic day which was 2,311 visits in one day….not bad huh considering some of my other niche site get that in 1 month lol
All i have done is Ive used a free banner/header creator and designed my own customized header for the site. Before all i was using was a basic theme with a really basic layout. I think people now come to my site and maybe trust it more as it now looks much more trustworthy and professional.
I am no designer to say the least but i just used a few colours with a little creativity which took about 20 Min’s to make.
So far my CTR for the adsense ads have dropped slightly but I’m not too worried about that because I’m building an authority site I’m thinking more about my traffic and long term than just short term income.
So in summary if you have any sites that could do with a make over or maybe your traffic don’t stay very long try adding a customized header and see how it goes. Of course you do need to test and tweak things to get the best results. If your sites CTR drops a lot after adding a new header then you will have to decide what is more important, revenue or gaining more trust from your traffic so that your site looks more professional.
Hope you have enjoyed reading this
see ya soon
paul
Many things that i hear on a regular basis is someone saying that he or she has a website and they have put work into it but its not making any money.
There are only really 2 things that you need in order to have a profitable website however the 3rd is only important if you plan on getting the bulk of your traffic from the search engines, which in most cases it will be.
There has to be Traffic
You need traffic therefor the keyword or niche that you have chosen or got into has to have some demand within the search engines. If nobody is searching for your product or service then it doesn’t matter how good you think it is then your not going to make a dime. I always use the Google Keyword Tool to check my traffic, the figures are not always 100% how ever its the best indication your going to get and generally the numbers are fairly accurate most of the time i have found.
You Must have Buyers
You need buyers. I will say that again. You need BUYERS. This is where a lot of people make mistakes. When you choose a keyword or a niche to build a site around you should ALWAYS check to see how many advertisers are paying for ads in google because if people are spending money to get people to there stores then they are of course making money.
This means people are buying the product and it is a profitable market.
Just because 1 person is paying for advertisement that still doesn’t mean its profitable. What i do is use spyfu.com insert my chosen keyword and then spyfu brings back and tells me how many advertisers there are spending money in advertisement. You should always make sure there are at least 5 advertisers as a bare minimum.
Also if your building your site with using adsense in mind then you should always pay attention to the CPC price. A great cpc is from at least $1 sometimes you can drop below $1 but remember the lower you go the lower price you will end up getting paid when you get clicks on your site. That’s just something to keep in mind though.
First page of Google Must Not be Too Competitive
You will most likely get most of your traffic from the search engines so that means in order to get traffic you will need to be on at least page 1 of google and at least in the top 5 to get any reasonable traffic. If page 1 of google is very tough with lots of authority sites with PR`s 4, 5, and higher and with lots of home page URL`s then it will be much harder to rank.
Even if the first two steps are correct you may not be making any money from your site because its getting no traffic because your not even on the first page. A competitive first page of google doesn’t mean you cant rank but why choose a keyword where you have to work much much harder to see any results.
If you refer to my post about checking the first page of google for competition then you will be on the right tracks to building a profitable site.
hope this has helped
paul
