Waiting For Traffic
Waiting for traffic is not worth your precious time. Even with a blog, website and social media presence, you could be waiting a long time to gain traffic. Gaining traffic to your website requires you to do other things. That is what I am planning to do. I am reading various sites about increasing traffic and hope to see what works. Brian Dean is a person I have found to be a great source of information, because he tries his own advice and as a result he is not giving generic information. Unlike many how to blog websites, I have a different kind of website with a blog. I sell art on my website, so what may work for how to blog websites, may not work for me. I wish to try different strategies for increasing the traffic to my website. The hope is to try one new strategy at a time, to see how it affects the numbers. I will write about these experiences as you are all coming on this journey with me, of how to grow a business and a blog on the internet. Things are changing all the time on the internet, so I will keep trying new things even if I gain a lot of traffic, so you may give it a go. The reality is waiting to be discovered isn’t productive, because there are so many websites on the internet at this moment and the number is growing. The stories of people going viral are rare. Gary Vaynerchuk mentioned in his podcast that it is not the current podcast that will give you notoriety, but the fortieth podcast down the road that will be the one that sees you increase your traffic considerably. In the future I may try podcasting, though I value my privacy, I may have a podcast to expand on each blog entry. Then there is trying guest blog posting, link building and other strategies. The first thing on my list is making sure my SEO is properly done.
SEO Short For Search Engine Optimization
Having the proper SEO is vital for you being found by other people view search engines. If your website is made on Squarespace or with a similar type of company such as Wix, then it is made easy for you to finish your SEO. One thing I have already tried is adding a description on the SEO page of each blog post. I went back and did the same for all my previous posts. So when Google shows your blog posts you see a description in the results, that gives people more information which increases the chances of them clicking the link. Though I do not have more people coming to my website the traffic, is now spread out. This is a photo explaining my point.
In the first example, receiving traffic for that month depended on posting on Twitter on Friday. It started to diminish, to fifteen people in a month. Since filling out the SEO part of each blog post, I immediately noticed people were coming to my website on the days I didn’t post a blog entry. The number has been increasing on weekly basis. It isn’t a lot of people, during the last year I never had this amount of traffic in such a spread out fashion. Now I hope to focus on fully optimizing my SEO and see how it affects my website traffic. I have seen many suggestions on increasing website traffic, if you are not gaining traffic or wish to increase it, there are a lot of things to try. Numbers such as traffic or likes or followers on social media should never be used to boost your self esteem. It is business, not personal as you are in competition with a lot of other websites, no one can find you. For instance, I have seen people with large accounts on social media and the quality is not the most important thing, because it varies from person to person. The reason that they are so large is the fact that they are engaged with their followers and have good strategies for increasing their accounts. The same can be said for website traffic. These numbers are just maths, like maths you add something and it can affect the numbers. Don’t give up. I will be posting about the different strategies that I will be trying in the future.
Coauthored with Francesca Darcy who has more technological expertise then I possess and helps me with the technological aspects of my business. Twitter @francesca_darcy
