It's Like Sunday and All, Over a Week with No Post...

Over a week ago, I told y'all that I was going to start posting regularly again, but I got distracted with traffic experiments and checking some stuff out and I thought I would give y'all some more ideas about raking in visitors to your blogs. Currently, there are about thirty or so folks that come here on a daily basis, entering on the main page. I guess those are the folks that are part of our family, but have not embraced the Google Reader or another RSS reader service. I did that very same entering on the main page thing, too, about five years ago.

Now, performing traffic studies from regular visitors and commenters really does us no good to expand our reach in our little clique, we are looking for new folks, amirite? There are way more than a couple of ways to accomplish this task, too, but we want something that is fast and reliable. I think that I have found something that works and seems so very easy to do.

About a year ago, I started looking into the stuff that drives traffic. I signed up with all kinds of marketing services and subscribed to webbynet blogs to find the key. The MAGIC BULLET, so to speak. Of course, just watching what Glenn Reynolds does would be enough for most people, but how many linkfest blogs do you think that the blogosphere can support? Anyhoo, when I started with the studying, I was averaging less than five hundred hits a day, then ramped that up to about 200k in the month of July of 2010. Then I realized that I was getting non-specific search engine traffic, which again, did us no good for what we wanted, so I cut that crap out.

What I wanted was daily traffic in the 5000 range, but with multiple pageviews. That means, 2500 unique hits, but with two pages viewed per visit. I wanted the readers to stay here and hang out, maybe make some comments, and tip their hat a time or two. We are not at 5k a day yet, but the visitors are beginning to visit more than just the landing page. That is what we want.

I tried a link building service which just so happened occurred at the same time that my blog got marked as spam because someone figured out my mobile posting log-in. That was pretty easy to do when I made it "MEANOLMEANY." How stoopid was that? So, I got bumped back to about sixty hits a day from search engine traffic for a minute.

This is the Sitemeter look-see at the end of last week. I shot this early on Friday, the image below was shot a few seconds later. What we see is that close to a third of our hits look at more than one page. Close to what we want. The traffic is also pretty stable with relatively few posts. Constantly posting really doesn't matter, HUH? Couple that minor Teh Google slap with the fact that I have only posted eighteen times since February.

Statcounter is a better traffic service, it has more information to let you see what traffic you get, what keywords people entered to get to your site, what links they clicked and the hot areas of your content they read. It is pretty much the same as Sitemeter, just more detailed. Of course, if I need a quick idea, Sitemeter is what I check. Old habits die hard, you know?

What I have noticed is this, making a well placed comment on a very high traffic blog or website and including a link to a relevant post sends folks right over. I tried this on a slow news day, Saturday, and dropped a link to an old post that gets very few visitors, just to see how it worked. It takes a day or two for the hits to come, especially linking in a Saturday post comment section, but that technique works swimmingly.

Yet another traffic building technique that builds goodwill, and in turn your network, is linking other folks' blogs. Stacy McCain has pimped this idea throughout the political blog circle and pretty much everyone is all up in some Rule 5. Of course, logic tells you that most folks just want to look at hot chicks in bikinis, but pretty much everyone benefits from the circular linkage. Teh Google likes some direct links to posts, but do you really want your link juice to be to your bikini posts or Sarah Palin NUDE? Or G_d forbid, Helen Thomas NUDE? That might get you an "adult" (or in Andy's case, a HOLY SHIT ARE YOU CRAZY?!?!?!) tag with search engines.

Oh, always acknowledge the folks that link you. This is getting exceedingly hard for me to do because I do not have the time to keep looking around for those links. It is simple with Blogger to see the other folks on Blogger that are linking you because it is right at the bottom of the post, but cross platforms kinda do not work well. Create a Google Alert for your site by entering "link:yourshittyblog.com" into the Google Alert box and adding email notifications to that alert. It is not perfect, but usually it works.

Get DAILY notifications, too. Then you know that:

William Teach linked your blog, not just once, but twice in the last two weeks.

That Dean is kinda busy today, but recommended your mediocrity, anyway. And for sure link back to the stuff of theirs that you find interesting, like Pelosi and Charlie Sheen.

And not only do the guys at Pundit Press have a fetish for Salma Hayek, but they like the Da Newz that you have a fetish for, too.

If you have friends that like talking about male genitalia and Donald Trump, link that stuff, too. Granted, that might get you an "adult" tag, as well.

But, now I am fiddling around with the old skool Trackbacks and trying to integrate that with Blogger. I found this html add for it, too. BUT! You gotta have Disqus installed. (See what I did right there? Remember?)

And I found this "TWO DOGS" video amusing. But, I wish to Hell that You Tube would quit FAILbooking up their linkage stuff every danged week.



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