Traffic and Growth

[Dante_311]

Hey fellow bloggers,

I started up my new blog about a month ago being a complete blogging novice but interested in getting involved in the online writing community. I currently only get about 13 viewers a day, mostly through my online networks. My question to everyone is this:

What is your average daily traffic and how long did it take you to get to this point?

Although, I realize comparison is only so useful, I would like to gauge whether the traffic I am getting at this early stage in the process is normal or if I need to make some drastic actions to increase viewership.

Thanks!
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The Quintessential Finance Blog

[purplefdu]

I'd have to check my stats but I normally have a slow trickle based on my lack of true effort. I was doing pretty good but slowed down due to working up to changing to my own domains. Once things settle down a bit this week I will be working on switching the directory listings or resubmitting, as well as submitting to some new ones and other things to get the new domains ranked, crawled and seen. Depending on how you are working on getting traffic it can be slow or fast. I worked on directory submissions, link exchanges and forum posting (with links in signature) to get mine seen initially.

[graphoniac]

I have two blogs--one personal, one commercial. Both have had more traffic than any blog or website I've ever tried to start (1,500+ and 1,300+ since June & August, respectively). I use Wordpress because it allows me to see which links and search words people use to find my blog. Sometimes I find inspiration from search terms that don't exactly match any of my posts. Sometimes I find that I need to strengthen or expand one of my posts because of the high traffic.

To get my high traffic, I link to myself in as many ways as is decent (not becoming a spammer). For example: I've stumbled and dugg some of my best work, I've set up my social network page to subscribe to my blogs, I've guest-blogged for friends, I've made legit comments on healthy blogs (I only ever use my personal blog address, so it's not spammy), and I've linked to my blogs from each other.

Another way I increase traffic is by trying to write SEO (search engine optimized) content. I'm still new to this, but the basic idea is that you know what people are going to put in the search box to find the content you want to write. As you write the copy, you use the exact phrases you think will be used to find your article. Search engines use the title of the article and the phrases when matching to searchers' phrases. They also take into consideration the number of links to that exact page and the frequency of posting to the main website. All of these factors determine where in the search list your post shows up. I've had several articles make 1st page on Google since I started practicing SEO.

In short, the keys are: stay current, share the link love, and write what Googlers are looking for.