How To Generate Free Recurring Blog Traffic To Specific Articles

I’ve been analyzing the traffic stats for the most popular articles on Blogging Fingers to understand more fully why they have received the most traffic. To illustrate the “traffic waves phenomena” I’ve taken screen shots of the blog traffic stats for Blogging Fingers top 2 most popular posts.

Traffic Wave 1: StumbleUpon

The big StumbleUpon spike always occurs on the day the post was written and/or a couple (at the most) days later. After that, the SU traffic fizzles out and if the article is good enough SU continues to send low levels of traffic.

Traffic Wave 2: Social Voting Sites

Looking at it from a social voting sites’ perspective such as digg/reddit/Sphinn etc. Articles that hit page 1 on these types of sites attain large numbers of inbound links. Sphinn sends much less traffic but has the added bonus that many of the users are Stumblers and so the article may receive a secondary wave of traffic from their Stumbles.

Recurring Traffic: Search Engine Traffic

The links gained from the article hitting page1 on a social voting site give that page highly valuable Google juice, which is where the post titles come in. Post titles are the most important on page SEO factor that you can easily change. They are also extra important because people linking in to a post often use the title of that post in the anchor text for their link. The links gained from the social voting site have the ability to increase SERPS rankings and send traffic providing the title contains a frequently searched for keyword phrase that isn’t up against too much competition.

Example Of Success In Traffic Waves 1+2 Only

It may surprise you to know that the most popular article on Blogging Fingers (one that has had the highest number of PageViews) is 4 Blogging Laws I DoFollow. The screen shot above is of the traffic to this post and shows what happens when you succeed in getting the 2 traffic waves but fail in having a SEOd title.

Stats:

• Stumbleupon generated 1,896 PageViews
• Sphinn Generated generated 124 PageViews
• Google sent a measly 12 PageViews.

When the post was published there was an immediate traffic Spike from SU. It went hot on Sphinn later that day and the Sphinners also Stumbled the post resulting in an even bigger SU traffic spike the following day. The referring keyword phrase that it briefly ranked for in Google was irrelevant and the few visitors it did send hit the back button straight away making an embarrassing 100% bounce rate from them. The title had a massive impact on getting on Sphinn and Stumbleupon but failed completely to bring recurring traffic.

Example Of Success With All 3 Traffic Driving Methods

I know it seems a bit odd that the article that succeeded in all areas has sent less visitors than the partially successful article but it will catch up quickly in terms of PageViews and the visitors that have viewed it already are better targeted than the masses of SU visitors who viewed the other article. The article under examination is Top 5 Blogging Success Stories: Exclusive Quotes From John Chow, Yaro Starak And More. So far this post has received a total of 1,191 PageViews. Roughly half of the previous one but the point is that it still sends highly targeted traffic from Google every day. This happens simply because it ranks highly in Google for keyword phrases taken from the title, such as “blogging success stories“.

Conclusion

Having a general policy where you think you are optimizing for Google by blogging to the tune of “if a keyword phrase fits, throw it in”, you are in fact losing traffic. General policies like this are foolish because if you have a great article that makes it on digg or any voting site it could become a long-term traffic bringer via Google and specific research for the title of that post must be done or you will be living in blissful ignorance that you conducted a successful linkbait just because it went big on the voting sites, when the truth is that if you are not getting long term traffic from the article you failed.

Technorati Tags: traffic, Sphinn, Google, Stumbleupon, PageViews

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