Where’s Your Traffic Coming From?
Let’s talk about an easy way to get more quality traffic to your site today, shall we? Last week, I shared a short report with you about installing and using Google Analytics. I hope you have taken the time to install it on your blog and website and should start to get some data at this point.
Today, we are going to look at one of those data points – Referring Sites. Log into your Google Analytics Dashboard. Under traffic sources, take a look at referring sites. It’ll look something like this:
What this tells is how much traffic you are getting from what sites. Ignore listings for search engines or email servers and focus on the urls for actual sites. In this example, you can see that I have been getting traffic from sites like:
My next step would be to visit these sites and figure out where my traffic is coming from. I can also dig deeper in Google Analytics to get a better idea of why these sites are sending me traffic.
In the case of NicoleOnTheNet.com and MasonWorld.com I know a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’ve written guest posts for both these blogs. I’ve also been commenting on them. Problogger.net traffic is coming from a few comments I made a while back and the fact that I am still seeing quite a bit of traffic from them tells me this is definitely something worth spending time on regularly (aside from the fact that it’s an awesome blog to read and always fun to participate in the community build around it via blog comments). Ezinearticles.com is pretty self-explanatory. I am getting traffic from articles I’ve written.
Next it’s time to form a plan for getting more traffic from:
- (A) The sites that are already sending me traffic.
- (B) Similar sites that I have yet to get traffic from.
Formulating A Traffic Strategy
Now that we have a list of sites that are already sending us traffic, it’s time to come up with a strategy of getting even more.
Part One – Sites That Are Already Sending Us Traffic
Group the sites that are showing up in your analytics stats by what sites they are and why they are sending you traffic.For example, you may be getting traffic from several different article directories. Note the ones that are toward the top and plan to write and submit one new unique article to each per week (or month). If you find some sites that have re-published your articles, approach the site owners about additional unique articles.
Group all the blogs together and then note which ones you guest blogged on and the ones you commented on. Set aside some time each day to comment on blogs that are sending you traffic and plan to offer guest posts to all of them over the coming weeks and months.
You may find some sites linking to great content you have written in the past. Take a look at what they are linking to and find out what makes it a link and traffic magnet. Then create more posts or articles like it and spread the word about them.
Part Two – Finding Similar Sites
Part one is probably going to keep you busy for a little while, but when you’re starting to run out of ways to squeeze more traffic out of sites that are already linking to you, it’s time get a bit creative.
If you’re getting traffic from Ezinearticles.com, take a look at some other big article directories like ArticleBase.com and ArticleSnatch.com for example. If you are getting traffic from big blogs in your niche or market because you’ve commented on them and eventually written guest posts for them, find a few other ones and start commenting on them.
Be sure to go back to your Analytics data every few weeks and adjust your “to-do” list according to what’s working and what isn’t. If you’re not seeing any traffic from a particular article directory, stop submitting there and find a different one. If you’re not getting hardly any traffic from comments on a certain blog, don’t continue to spend a lot of time participating there and writing guest posts for that site unless you have a good reason to do so. In other words, figure out what works and do more of that and watch your traffic grow each and every month.
P.S. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at another great source of traffic that we can improve on – keywords we’re already ranking for in the search engines.
You may also like to read:
- How To Use Keywords To Increase Rankings And Traffic
- Traffic Sponge Review
- How To Get Traffic To My Blog
- The “Get More Targeted Traffic” Project
- Increased Online Traffic in 30 Minutes Per Day
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