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How I Reached 30,000 Visits Per Month With Less Than 2 Posts Per Week
By SEO Advisor | May 29, 2010
One of the common suggestions for bloggers is to post as much as possible. A higher post frequency usually translates into higher traffic numbers. I have found that to be true but what if you don’t have time to publish many posts? That has been the situation for my gaming blog. I started it two years and two months ago. My initial plan was to post 2-3 times a week. However, life got busy and I didn’t have a lot of time to devote to the blog. Also, it took me longer than I expected to write the posts. I underestimated the research time to produce quality content.
As a result, I’ve posted less than two posts per week over the life of my blog. The screenshot below shows that I have 176 posts total.
I published my first post about 112 weeks ago. When you do the calculation (176 divided by 112), on average I’ve only published 1.57 posts each week.
Fortunately, the low post frequency has not kept me from increasing my traffic. I recently reached the 30,000 monthly visits milestone in March. As I write this post on April 30, the last 31 days have also seen 30,000 visits. The traffic has been mostly steady so I expect similar numbers in future months. Here are the relevant screenshots.
How did I achieve these traffic numbers with a low post frequency? My main method has been SEO.
SEO
The majority of my traffic comes from search engines. Here’s a graph of the traffic sources for the lifetime of my blog. Over 83% of the visits have come from search engines.
My SEO strategy consists of two things, keyword research and link building.
Keyword Research
At first, I used Google’s Keyword Tool to generate a list of keywords to target. This was somewhat effective but many of the keywords were too competitive or unrelated to my blog. I soon ran out of viable keywords.
Looking for inspiration, I visited a popular forum to see which words they were using to describe the niche. This technique gave me a lot of keywords to work with. I wasn’t sure if they would drive a lot of traffic but it didn’t hurt to try.
I inserted the keywords in my posts and my traffic grew slightly. Not every keyword was a winner though. I analyzed my keywords logs to determine which ones were sending the most traffic. In my analysis, I saw a curious pattern. Most of the top keywords were related to one broad topic.
I hadn’t planned to write much about this topic but I quickly changed my plans. The demand for content in that subject area was high and I was ranking well for the related keywords. Gradually, I shifted the focus of my blog to cover the popular topic. That’s when my traffic really grew. Today, 90% of my posts cover that topic.
My keyword placement has been pretty simple. I followed basic SEO fundamentals by including the keywords in the title tag of my posts. Also, I made it a habit to link back to my older content with keyword rich anchor text.
I’m able to get a lot of traffic without a high post frequency because I target a popular keyword with each post. In 2010, I already have 25 posts that have received over 1,000 visits. 12 of them have eclipsed 2,000 visits. My top five blog posts have combined for over 36,000 visits.
Link Building
Link building is important because some of your competitors will be targeting the same keywords. To determine the rankings for popular keywords, Google’s algorithm is heavily weighted to take into account the quality and quantity of incoming links of a site.
I haven’t spent too much time building links. Link building hasn’t had to be a big focus because most of my competitors do not have strong link profiles. Since my competition is weak in this area, I didn’t have to build many links to outrank them. If you’re in a saturated, more competitive niche, you will need to spend much time on link building to rank for the popular keywords.
I built my links using a variety of methods.
In the early days of the blog, I followed many of the smaller blogs and linked out to them. A couple of the bloggers appreciated the traffic I sent them, so they added my blog to their blogroll.
One blogger was impressed with my writing and asked me to write for his blog. I wrote two guest posts for him.
I interviewed a popular blogger after he did well at a big tournament and he linked back to my interview.
I wrote a few articles for EzineArticles.
I used to be a staff writer for a few internet marketing blogs. Since I would use my gaming blog as an example and case study, I was able to place links on those blogs.
I found a forum that allowed members to link back to their blog posts. I created an account, wrote about some of my best posts, and linked back to them.
I submitted my blog to automated news sites in my niche and they added my RSS feed.
In the last six months, I have regularly earned links from different blogs and forums without doing any work. I think this is a result of blogging consistently over time and getting enough traffic to develop a good reputation within the niche.
Don’t Underestimate SEO
SEO doesn’t get as much airplay as it used to in the blogging community, but it is still a very effective strategy especially in non-internet marketing niches where most of webmasters don’t optimize their sites for search engines.
If SEO is not a part of your overall marketing plan, you should consider it. Google is one of the most visited sites in the world. If you can get on the front page of Google for many popular keywords, you will receive a big boost in traffic.
Be patient though. SEO usually takes time and you may not see major results quickly. But if you work hard, in a couple of months your blog will reach new traffic heights.
I recommend reading the following articles to get started with SEO:
- SEO Basics
- The Blogger’s Guide to SEO
- Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization
- Search Engine Ranking Factors
This is a guest post by Dee Barizo. Along with operating a gaming blog, he recently started an online degree site called The Best Degrees with a friend. He hopes to apply what he learned from the gaming blog to this new site and reach 30,000 monthly visits within six months.
Topics: Internet Marketing, Network Marketing, Network Marketing | No Comments »