Where’s the Traffic?
September 15, 2008
Every week I spend some time looking at the numbers in my business. For example I’ll spend a few minutes over in my Adwords account each day making some slight modifications, adding another ad to test, and changing around a few bids.
At least once a month I check my Google Analytics account for all my domains to see how the traffic at each site is doing. And of course where the traffic comes from varies by what I do with that domain.
For example, at InternetLifestylesystem.com, my #1 source of traffic is from Adwords because I’m running Adwords campaigns to several landing pages on that domain.
Over at my Christian site, the #1 source of traffic are affiliates who promote the package through Clickbank.
On my other sites it varies from affiliates to articles to PPC to the search engines.
What about this blog?
The number #1 source of traffic here is direct traffic (meaning they either typed it in or came from an email).
The biggest source of new visitor traffic month after month for the blog is Google. Even if you add up all the traffic from other blogs and incoming links, Google still outproduces them. They don’t even come close.
What does that mean to me when I really sit down and think about it?
It means for free traffic…Google is the goal.
You’ll find blogs talking a lot about different traffic sources included but not limited to: Stumbleupon, social bookmarking, blog comments, article submissions, video posting, networking, PPC, etc. But the overwhelming winner in traffic for blogs is Google.
When I tested sending Adwords visitors to the blog, it wasn’t worth it…at least not compared to when I send Adwords visitors to a specific landing page designed for that set of terms (often a squeeze style page but not always).
When I tested buying traffic on Stumbleupon, it wasn’t worth it. For some reason, their paid traffic was lower quality than the free traffic they generate (and Google’s free traffic is still better).
So where should we be focusing on traffic generation for the blog?
That’s right…on Google.
That means choosing the right keyword terms for the blog, focusing content on those terms, and working on incoming links using those terms in the anchor text (which may include a bunch of the other promotional strategies).
Don’t just take my word on this. Go look at your own stats if your blog has been around at least a few months. You’ll likely notice the exact same thing I have. Google is the bread-and-butter for free traffic to your blog.
While we can spend time on other forms of traffic, this is where our number one focus needs to be and where we’re concentrating on for the blog.
Notice that this just applies to the blog. My SALES sites have other sources of traffic with PPC and affiliates being the big leaders for most of them.
What do the numbers tell you in your business?
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8 Responses to “Where’s the Traffic?”
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Google is definitely the biggest source of traffic for all my blogs. You’re right - I should be focusing more on using the right keywords, so I would get even more traffic from Google. I do this for my niche blogs, but I don’t do it enough for my intenet business blog.
Hi Terry,
What a fantastic article.
I get a good amount of traffic from Google when my 165 articles show up there every single day for different keywords that I have written about.
I guess that if one wants to get a good amount of free traffic from Google, articles is the way to go.
Things that I learned from you are all true. When you write an article, it will show up on Google at some point or another.
Tal
I have found this to be the case as well. About 50% of the traffic to my blogs is coming from Google’s search engine. Yahoo and MSN aren’t even close. But your post Terry reminds me that I need to work harder on incoming links.
Most of my blog traffic definitely comes from Google…especially since I added a WP plugin that automates my social bookmarking. But ever since I added this plugin to my blog, my Google traffic as well as rankings for my blog post improved significantly.
Also, I am getting quite a number of visitors from one particular social bookmarking site.
…but what percentage of search traffic becomes customers.
-J
I personally didn’t find the blog thru Google, I was referred to it, which actually is great, because it means people like what they read. Ranking in Google is one thing, being able to use Google or whatever else you do to start a snowball effect even better.
Hi Terry,
This article is interesing.
Yes, definitely different types of sites should have different types of sources for incoming visitors.
Google loves blogs. Mine too. Yes, you’re right. The majority of free traffic that gets to my blog is from google as well, from a combination of different long tail keywords.
Thanks for sharing.
Cheers,
Welly Mulia
Hi Terry,
I find it very true that google love blog. Using the right keyword in an article on your blog can drive you traffic from google for a very long time.
Imagine you write several articles per week, each with different keyword targeted, I am sure it will generate a fair amount of traffic to our blog.
That is also the main reason I love blog.
Thanks for your sharing Terry!