I’d like to say there’s a trick to building traffic for a website but I won’t insult you. Traffic takes work. The good news is generating repeat interest doesn’t take much extra effort. In fact, with the right tools repeat visitors sign themselves up to come back time and time again.

Measure Success
The first thing I look at is the traffic trends. You can use whatever stats program you like that reports these three things: unique visits, return visits and page views. Check out Badi’s overview if you don’t know what these are.

For our purposes unique traffic is an indicator of how your promotion efforts are working. Repeat visits indicate viewer satisfaction (if they hate your site they will not come back!). And page views reveal the value of your site to the viewer. More page views mean more value.

Once I have my tracking in place I set a baseline by putting my stats into a spreadsheet. I add the traffic for each month and divide it by the number of months passed for an average score.

Then I compare where I’m at against the average. My goal each month is to beat the average. And each month the average goes up making this more challenging!

Traffic Building
There are many sources of traffic for a website. Some are free, some are sweat equity and some you pay for. For 14^th Colony, I avoid paying for traffic. Paying for traffic is like cheating to me. I’m a marketer. If I can’t entice people to this site without a cash bribe I’m in a lot of trouble! Here are tactics that I’ve used with success:

Search Engine Optimization – About 25% of my traffic comes from search engines. This isn’t very much and I could (should?) step it up. There are three reasons search traffic is one of my favorites:

1. It’s targeted – Most of the people that reach your site through a search engine are looking for something on your site
2. It’s fairly consistent – Sure, rank jumps and drops but as long as you aren’t banned the search engines will continuously send you traffic
3. It’s free – OK, it takes some effort though once your structure is good, the rest becomes automatic (like writing search-friendly content or headlines)

Other Site Referrals aka Links – Links help SEO efforts and they are a great source of regular traffic. One of the best things about links is the webmaster of the site linking to yours does the work to make that link more valuable so that it will send you more traffic!

For 14^th Colony I wrote a couple reports about trends just before they broke. These became source material for other webmasters who linked back to my articles to explain their own articles and tools. These articles get stronger in the search engines over time and the links pointing to them bring traffic.

Another favorite tactic I use is encouraging new bloggers by linking to them first. Believe me, new bloggers remember when established bloggers link to them the first time. I remember the first time Stuntdubl linked to something I wrote. Todd’s probably picked up more than 20 links from me because of the one he sent me first. Smart linking builds dividends.

Think of links as fine wine waiting to age. Where can you pick up links today that are easy and cheap (free!) to get that will be worth a lot in a few months or a year? Link-building for traffic is all about long-term thinking.

Community Involvement – 10% of my traffic comes from sig links in forums and profile links on blogs and social sites. If you make smart comments, people want to know more about you.

Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking sites have their own search engines which drive traffic my way. Digg and del.icio.us are great for this.

On top of that, the few stories I’ve been lucky enough to see go popular have drawn a lot of attention. The temporary super-jump in traffic is fun but not sustainable. After each event, a new platform of return visitors about 20% over the previous average occurs.

Traffic Exchanges – This post is an example of a traffic exchange. Today I’m writing for Badi. In a couple weeks, he’ll write something for me. If you can keep things relevant, it works. You are now exposed to my message. And some of you are dying to read more.

Fan Following – I ask people to guest post at 14^th Colony. When guest bloggers write, their regular readers come to see what’s up. Just like you will when Badi makes his appearance.

Bring ‘Em Back
Return visits are key for websites that sell products or services. I’ve read that an average buyer has to visit a website 6 times before they’ll make a purchase! Bring ‘em back marketing is essential to increase conversions as each interaction builds trust with your site.

Community Participation – Being visible at forums and social sites draws blog followers. After all, they like what you say – its part of why they are there! Drawing viewers from social sites is a natural fit.

RSS – Most of the jumps in traffic after going popular with 14^th Colony come from RSS subscriptions. I track my feed with FeedBurner which also lets me offer email subscriptions.

Social Tagging – I actually stripped this down with the redesign but making it easy for your users to tag and share their favorite posts helps them remember it. Share This is a great Wordpress plugin that lets visitors tag their favorite posts or refer friends via email.

Ctrl+D – When 14^th Colony first got started I had a small call to action at the top-right of each page. All it said was “Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D)”. It worked great and AW Stats reports bookmarking still tops 110% which makes no sense but must be a good thing, right?

Keep offering fresh content – The reason people come back is to read more about your topics. A schedule is best though I’ve never been able to maintain one. I keep track of my stats daily and if I see a slide I make it a point to get something new up quickly.

Do something cool every so often – Defining “cool” is tough. Mostly it’s something different from the norm that still fits within your site topics and purpose. This could be a personal post. Or outrage at an industry event. My “Google is evil” posts are almost as popular as my “make money with Adsense” posts. It could also be a new tool or special report. Another cool thing is having a guest blogger or conducting an interview. I think the main thing is to break things up and keep them loose while not losing focus on why your blog exists.

Increasing Page Views
Page views are important if you have an ad-based model for making money. More page views mean more ad impressions and a greater chance of a viewer clicking one of those ads. As mentioned above, high page view numbers also indicate how useful your website is.

Page views are accomplished by two things:

1. Quality of content
2. Design

If your content sucks, the best design won’t keep visitors. Even if your content is great a bad design can turn visitors away. After redesigning 14^th Colony to be leaner and cleaner (less cluttered) page views increased an amazing 72%!

Make the design exciting enough to keep the viewer reading but not so loud or cluttered to become a distraction. Great design is like a well-framed painting – when people comment on the frame something is wrong. You want people to comment on the content within the frame.

With the redesign I also added a lot of “additional resources” links. At the end of each post is a “related articles” list. And at the bottom of each page are category headlines plus the most popular stories. On the right I added a couple “teaser” posts. This was all to increase page views and it worked.

Last Thoughts
Technorati and Hittail are great ways to see how much buzz and referral traffic your blog gets. I also like Icerocket as a backup stats program because it is nearly real-time and gives the basics without too much extra garbage.

Whatever you want to do with your site make sure you have a way to track success. That’s the only way you’ll really know what works and what doesn’t.

Stay in action! Just keep throwing things at your site until something sticks. A blog that just sits there is losing ground. A blog in action will always catch some attention.

We Still Have Tons of Great Prizes Left to Give Out! - So don’t forget to enter again for today.
• $150 Cash via PayPal + 2 Months 125×125 banner on dnScoop.com ($450 value)
• $100 Cash via Paypal + 2 Month 125×125 banner on dnScoop.com ($400 value)
• 3 Months 125×125 banner on dnScoop.com ($450 value)
• 2 Months 125×125 banner on dnScoop.com ($300 value)
• 1 month 125×125 banner on dnScoop.com ($150 value)
• $60 link in the dnScoop directory
• $55 link in the dnScoop directory
• $50 link in the dnScoop directory
• $45 link in the dnScoop directory
• $40 link in the dnScoop directory
• $35 link in the dnScoop directory
• $30 link in the dnScoop directory
• $25 link in the dnScoop directory
• $20 link in the dnScoop directory
• $15 link in the dnScoop directory

What I didn’t really hear about though, was any sites getting penalized for selling links. Maybe there were, but I couldn’t hear it over all the noise about people loosing Pagerank.

Well, today, this Sphinn story really got my attention: Shopzilla paying to get paid links removed.

Basically, this blogger was contacted by Shopzilla.com with several requests to remove a paid post that was purchased via PayPerPost from his site.

Then yesterday I got another mail from them saying that they will give me $100 if I remove the mail before noon. I was about to remove the link but didn’t remove the link because I didn’t get time for that. But in the second mail they were offering me $100 for the removal of the link.

Now I can’t say what exactly is going on with Shopzilla, but if a website of that size is taking an action as drastic as actually paying people to remove paid links, there must be a really good reason for it.

I’m guessing that those on the buying end of this penalty are seeing more than just a Pagerank drop. Even if the penalty cut traffic from Google to Shopzilla by 1/3 or 1/2, that could mean a drop in profits of tens of thousands of dollars per day, and that sort of thing would definitely be worth doing whatever it took to get back into Google’s good favor.

One of the websites I manage (I’m not the owner) brings in daily, more than many people make in a year. The site gets a little less than 1/3 of all its traffic from Google. Several months back,(within 1 hour (verry sudden)) we lost over 1/2 of all traffic from Google. Though Google traffic doesn’t convert as well as our other traffic sources, that loss still meant meant thousands of dollars per day.

Needless to say, for the next 2 weeks, everything else took a back seat to finding out exactly what the problem was, and correcting it.

Fortunately, we were able to correct the problem by coming up with a list of things that could have potentially caused the penalty, and fixing all of them. Traffic returned, and when it did, it came as suddenly as it was lost (within one hour).

If your site or company stands to loose big from a Google penalty, I’d definitely take note of this. Big “white listed” sites don’t have to sweat the small stuff as much as other sites, but they are NOT immune. Google will not hesitate to slap you.

If this situation is what it looks like, it would probably be a good time to take a good look at where your links are coming from. Try to correct (or hide) anything that could come back to bite you. It’s also a good idea to diversify your traffic sources. Too much traffic from one source == too many eggs in one basket == bad. Diversify.

Congratulations to cenourinha who wins the $60 link in the dnScoop directory.

Thanks for everyone who entered yesterday’s contest, and for those who didn’t win, there are still 14 prizes to give away.

So Enter Today’s Contest!

Also, I’ve already been contacted by potential sponsors, so that means even more great prizes to give away.

You can either download the Quicktime version (about 4.5 MB) to see it full size (600×800) or you can watch it below with Quicktime or Youtube.

Quicktime Version

YouTube Version:

My wife and I have been living back in Charleston for over 3 months now, and we finally got a second car. (Well, actually, I got a second car. I don’t think she would be caught dead driving this beauty)

We’ve been sharing one car for a while now, and it’s been fine since I work from home and rarely need to go out during the day (this was especially true when we lived in MA), but since we moved back to SC (more family and friends), we’ve found that we both need to use the car more, so we decided we should probably get a second car.

So why did I get this vintage beauty as opposed to a nice new car? Yeah, I’m sure a shiny new BMW 6 series would have looked a lot nicer, and made me look more like the successful internet entrepreneur guy, but I’ve learned from experience that at this stage, my money is best put to use in assets that are going to make more money.

I could probably afford a lot nicer car, but at this point, it would be a huge liability, and would seriously limit my options.

So for now, I’m cruisin’ in the 91 Cutlass… Supreme Style!

The community that gains the most new users by November 30, 2007 wins.

The winner will be announced live from the floor of PubCon in Las Vegas, which I’ll be attending, so it would be great if SEOlogs wins.

If you’re not a member of mybloglog.com yet, join, and then join the SEOlogs community.

Help Us Win: Join Here => http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/seologs
Thanks for the support.

Our conversation turned from the marketing on the web to marketing on television, and shows like Dr. Phil. I explained how being immersed in the search marketing world has totally changed the way I see shows like this. Most viewers only notice the actual advertisements that are shown between the show segments, but I notice the product placements, book mentions, and website address announcements.

As an example, I used a recent episode of Dr. Phil, which featured several guests with extreme beliefs, including a guy named Dick Masterson.

On the Dr. Phil website, Dick Masterson is labeled simply as : Chauvinist. Is he a really chauvinist? Maybe, maybe not. Most people will watch the show and think, “Oh my gosh! This guy is such an idiot!!!” or “What a jerk!”.

When I saw the show, the first think I thought was, “Wow. This guy really knows what he’s doing.”.

As Dr. Phil makes jokes about Dick’s height, and audience members take turns insulting him, everyone cheers and laughs, “That’s Right! You tell him Dr. Phil!”

And I’m sure he was thinking, “Yeah, tell them the name of my book. And don’t forget to mention my website address a few times.”

All that free publicity equals book sales, merchandise sales, and a lot of traffic / links to his website (notice the spike in November).

And it’s not over. Dick is now living in the Dr. Phil House, with 5 other guests, and will be featured even more on Dr. Phil this week.

That old saying, “any publicity is good publicity” is definitely true.

But what I keep wondering is, what’s with the sunglasses Dick?

I’ve heard many times, something like, “My site got over 1000 hits today!”.

Well, if that person knew what a hit was, he would know that 1000 hits really isn’t impressive at all.
Simply put, a “hit” is a request for a single file from the web server. That’s it. It could be any file, including: html, txt, jpg, gif, pdf, js, etc.

For most websites, one page usually contains image, javascript, and css tags, which have a src url pointing to separate files. So when that 1 page is loaded, it could potentially result in over 100 hits or more. (or over 100 requests for other file resources)

If it were up to me, the word “hit” would be completely stricken from the web analytics/ measurement vocabulary. I would instead suggest that the word “request” be used instead.

Pageviews:
Page views are a lot easier to understand, because the 2 words “page” and “view” basically describe what it means.

A Pageview is total number of times any page is viewed. For example, if someone lands on page A, goes to page B, then back to page A, that counts as 3 pageviews because there were 3 page loads.

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Cookie Based Measurements
The following measurements are cookie based, and will vary depending on which analytics program you use.

Unique Page Views:
This is a term that I first heard from Google Analytics. It is based on a session or a single visit to a site. So unlike a normal pageview, a unique pageview only counts once per visit.

For example, if a person goes to page A, then to page B, then back to page A, that would count for 2 unique pageviews, because the person only looked at 2 pages.

Visit:
A visit is also known as a session, starts when a user enters a site, and ends when a user exits a site. A visit consists of one or more pageviews. If someone visits a site for 10 minutes, then leaves, but returns 2 hours later, that is usually counted as 2 visits. (note: 2 hours isn’t a standard, the minimum time between visits can vary depending on the analytics software)

Unique Visit:
A unique visit is like a regular visit, but each visitor is only counted once in any given time frame. So the example above would only count as 1 unique visit.

Of all the cookie based measurements, unique visits is definitely the potential to be least accurate. Though some programs use IP address as well a unique cookie in the users browser to identify them, there are still lots of scenarios where things can go wrong. Just to name a few:
- IP’s are rarely static
- visitors can switch browsers
- visitors can clear cookies
- visitors can have more than one computer accessing the web, like a school or library
- visitors use proxy switchers