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Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days

Posted By Darren Rowse 30th of December 2005 Blog Promotion 0 Comments

The following post on how to increase website traffic was submitted by Adrian W Kingsley-Hughes.

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I started the PC Doctor blog in May of 2005 and for the first few months my traffic was really low – down in the few hundreds of visitors a day. It was pretty depressing I can tell you and there were times when I thought about quitting.  I knew that the site was in the Google ‘sandbox’ and so I either had to keep on plugging at it until it was out or I had to give up.

Fortunately, I decided to keep on posting but in the interim I decided that I was also going to do my utmost to drive traffic to my site manually until Google kicked in. I took a look around at what some of the successful blogs were doing and came up with three tactics that helped to double my website traffic in a month.

  1. First, I made the most of Technorati tags.  I tagged every key word in each of my posts. Initially I did this manually but them I discovered a WordPress plugin called SimpleTags that made the job a whole lot easier. I found that by tagging my post effectively they were getting a lot more attention then their untagged counterparts, and as an added advantage I was getting focused, quality traffic to the site!
  2. I leveraged my existing website.  I’ve been running my business website for a few years and that was getting modest levels of traffic that was relevant to my blog – so why not try to drive some of that to my new blog! I placed a few FeedBurner headline animator blocks on some of my most popular pages and after a day or so I noticed a significant increase in traffic for 5 minutes worth of work on my part.
  3. Finally, I made effective use of trackback links to popular sites. If I commented on a post on another site I would make sure that I set up the appropriate trackback for it. The results from this are varied depending on the site and post that you are linking to but since I liked to comment and interact with the wider blogosphere anyway, it was free traffic!

Using these three simple techniques, I took The PC Doctor blog from a few hundred hits a day into the thousands in less than 30 days. This kept my interest in the site until it came out of the Google sandbox and I started to receiver some serious traffic. However, I’m convinced that these actions I took at the early stages have helped me create a loyal and targeted readership that continues to benefit my blog today.

Further Reading: If finding new traffic for your blog is what you’re interested in – check out 31 Days to Build a Better Blog – a month long set of exercises to help you develop content but also build a well read blog.

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. How do you “tag” words in posts? (My blog is on Typepad, so don’t think I can install any plug-ins.)

  2. The reason I don’t like tagging very much is that visitors when they finish reading your posts click on the technorati tags instead of Adsense, Amazon link or whatever money making links you have.

  3. ~Dawn says: 12/30/2005 at 4:38 am

    How do you do trackbacks? I see those, but don’t understand them.

  4. Normally, a blog will list their trackback somewhere near the end of a post. You can (usually) copy and past the URL of the trackback into your post editor. In WordPress, when you create a new post, there is a field to include a trackback URL. Just paste it in there.

  5. Incidentally I have implemented Technorati tags and trackback techniques on my blog http://www.pakquake.com and it got on top of SEs pretty quickly.

  6. I use a free service Haloscan for trackback services in Blogger. Have a look at the end of any post on my blog.

  7. Louis, you don’t have to display Technorati tags. I don’t. They are only in my feeds, where pretty much only Technorati sees them.

  8. Good stuff, I’ve just installed the tag plugin-

  9. Hi IOerror, Do you use the plugin http://vapourtrails.ca/wp-keywords to have your tags just in the feeds or something else ?

  10. IO Error, how did you put the Technorati tags in your feeds only?

  11. Theres a great tutorial for users of Blogger, Firefox, Deli.icio.us, and Technorati here:

    http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/2005/11/blogger-delicious-categorizer-script.html

  12. Louis: can’t you then hide the DIV with tags using CSS? Is this acceptable by Technorati and other tag search engines?

  13. Some very sound advice. I’m still having troubles getting my head around trackbacks though. I gather that when you write a post relating to an article on another blog, you can insert a trackback to it.

  14. Thanks for the tips, I’m going away this week but will try them next year. Thanks for explaining trackbacks Todd, never really understood them until now.

  15. […] I discovered a wonderful plugin over at ProBlogger. It’s called SimpleTags, and it’s making my life a whole lot easier. Up until now, I’ve been typing the html for each Technorati tag in by hand, which meant that I wasn’t adding all that many tags, since I am very lazy. And if you don’t tag, nobody except your regular subscribers will have any idea you said anything. Now I can tag practically every word in a post with almost no effort. Thank you, Broobles! […]

  16. I also appreciate the tips and look forward to trying at least one, starting with the Technorati tags. I’ve had problems understanding how to include them on my site, but I’ll give it a try this weekend.

  17. I congratulate you for having such a successful blog! Not only are your links better than some of the random ones generated in Google Searches, but your tips actually work, compared to the other “optimization” sites that have 3 Adsense blocks and a couple of sentences repeating google’s tips.

  18. thanks for the tips. I didn’t quite know about it, but plan to use it soon.

  19. At the moment I’m using a heavily modified version of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. It’s heavily modified because UTW doesn’t support Atom feeds, and Technorati prefers Atom feeds.

    I’ve been meaning to get around to writing a simple tag plugin that doesn’t have every feature but the kitchen sink, and just plain does its job, but I’ve been so busy blogging… :)

  20. […] Doubling blog traffic with 3 steps (ProBlogger) […]

  21. […] Doubling blog traffic with 3 steps (ProBlogger) […]

  22. Oô … No offense to anyone but I find it quite amazing that some readers of this blog, i.e. people you would say they are probably blog aware to say the least, still don’t know about technorati or trackbacks …

  23. Hi. Those that wanna use technorati tag and make it invisble, all you have to do is delete part of the code in the simpletags.php file. I did it to my site http://hyipfarm.com .
    The tags are invisible now and technorati can still detect them.

    You have to delete 3 stuff

    Step1
    In the simpletags.php file find
    $pre_replacement = ‘Technorati Tags: ‘;
    and change it to
    $pre_replacement = ‘ ‘;

    Step 2
    Find . trim($ttags[$i]) .
    delete it.

    Step 3
    Find . $ttags[$i] .
    delete it.

    Enjoy! No more worry that people will go away from your site from clicking those tags.

  24. sorry wrong link. the link to my blog is at
    http://hyipfarm.com/blog

  25. The categories of WordPress are the same as tags for Technorati. So if you post them under the right categories, Technorati will pick them up correctly.

  26. forgot to mention on thing:
    – you need to open an account for Technorati
    – make sure Technorati is pinged after posting, use for posting: http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

    no plugins are really needed to trigger Technorati other than the standard functionality of WordPress.

  27. While you might not “need” a plugin to trigger Technorati, in WordPress, by default, the only tags applied to an article are the pre-defined “categories” that you check off when you post it. Now you could go in and add a category corresponding to each of the tags you feel an article might merit, but I think that’s a lot of work, and then you have this huge categories list that would quickly become rather unwieldy.

    Take the blog post I wrote about this post. One of the tags I applied to it (using this very plugin, in fact ), was “ProBlogger”. Now I thought that was very relevant for this one post. But am I ever going to tag another post “ProBlogger”? I suppose it’s possible, but I certainly wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of setting up a category called “ProBlogger”. Plus then “ProBlogger” would have shown up in the list of Categories in my sidebar, which might have looked a little strange. I could type in the html by hand, of course, and that was what I was doing before I found this plugin, but I notice that I didn’t add as many tags per post, again because I am lazy. I might not “need” this plugin, but I”m certainly finding it very useful.

  28. Yes, Holly Ward you are right. If you want to add tags you probably never need again again, such a plugin works better. And I do believe that plugin is great.

  29. […] I’ve really been trying to keep things a little more positive here but every so often something gets under my skin and I gotta call a spade a spade. I’ll start off by saying I’m a regular reader of Darren Rowse’s Problogger and I respect and value his work there. Darren’s on vacation and having some guest bloggers write columns for him. Yesterday I noticed this post Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days. After reading it I wrinkled my nose a bit but let it slide. Later I noticed it had made it’s way to digg and was tagged by people in Del.icio.us and to be honest the way people were tripping over themselves to fawn over this was actually completly ridiculous. To prove my point lets take a look at the three suggestions: […]

  30. Hi, Excellent article

    I’ve got the HTML for Feedburner Headline animator blocks.
    How do i insert the HTML into my signatures?
    I use Thunderbird & Outlook

    regards
    Sean
    http://moneyswindon.blogspot.com/

  31. I just use ecto, and that makes it simple as pie :)

  32. Adrian, I just looked at your traffic chart on Alexa.com and I must say that it is quite impressive.

    I too was concerned about the technorati tags directing traffic away from my site. Thanks to the previous posts for the tips on how to make the tags invisible on your site.

  33. Ok, so I love the tagging, but I tried the trick so that the tags don’t show up (I’m not worried about people following links to leave my site, but I don’t like the visible clutter) and it just flat out did not work.

    Anyone got any other suggestions?

  34. TEX: You can hide it with CSS. Wrap your tags in <DIVgt; with id, for example…
    <div id=”tags”&gt….</div>
    then add style for tags to your CSS file:
    #tags { display: none; }

  35. I tried the trick from HYIP farm but it didn’t work. Anyone else has been able to get it to work, seems like a great solution.

    Happy new year you all by the way

  36. thanks for the tips. pretty cool to find someone who’s so wlling to help others out.

  37. I’ve got two bookmarklets that make adding tags to the ends of your posts very easy at http://marshallk.com/bookmarklets

    That said, I sure hope people are going to limit their tagging to subjects that the posts are honestly about. The last thing I want to have to deal with is tag spam, and that’s totally on its way isn’t it?

  38. […] Spotted via LifeHacker is this post on how to increase traffic to your blog. […]

  39. […] Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days: Blog Tips at ProBlogger […]

  40. great post, I’ve installed the plugin :D

  41. […] Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days: Blog Tips at ProBlogger (tags: blogging) […]

  42. […] Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days (tags: blogging) […]

  43. […] Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days: Blog Tips at ProBlogger (tags: blog tools follow_up) […]

  44. […] Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days: Blog Tips at ProBlogger (tags: blogging) […]

  45. […] Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days: Blog Tips at ProBlogger (tags: blogging technorati wordpress) […]

  46. […] Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days (tags: blogging tips) […]

  47. I myself have been following step 1 and 2 and must say that does make a difference. Didn’t know about the Feedburner service though.

  48. […] Increase blog traffic Technorati Tags: blog blog promotion blog traffic Posted at 1:55 pm in: Links , Tips […]

  49. […] Adrian W Kingsley-Hughes makes a wonderful post at ProBlogger “Three Simple Actions That Doubled His Web Site Traffic In 30 Days” and mentions Technorati Tags as his first simple action. […]

  50. hmmm…i wonder if just leaving a comment here will increase traffic to my little blog.

    only one way to find out i guess.

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