How long did it take you to get reasonable traffic?

People talk about building traffic but to be honest my blogs that did well got most of their audience by the first two months and held about steady since then. Probably because the hit any empty niche and got immediate search traffic.

Active promotion -- you need to spend time visiting other blogs and putting comments out there. The more you actively spread the word, the better chance you'll get visitors. Sit back and no one will find you.

jeffo said:

Active promotion -- you need to spend time visiting other blogs and putting comments out there. The more you actively spread the word, the better chance you'll get visitors. Sit back and no one will find you.

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I can't say that was my experience. My blogs are not superstars but two of them have sat at 5000+ uniques per month for years without that kind of active promotion. I was just strategic about subject and let Google do the rest.

First of all, we need to establish what "reasonable traffic" is. My blog gets about 1600 visitors a month. That might sound reasonable to some, but I want more. Way more. So far, I have primarily been marketing it to my facebook friends and my few twitter followers. I want to figure out how to get it out to the masses, without costing an arm and a leg. I look forward to seeing others' ideas.

Publishing content only on your own site isn't really much of a traffic-generating plan at all. The only traffic it can really attract is some eventual search-engine traffic (and who wants that?); it's also slow, unreliable and rather random.

I started getting floods of traffic when I had my content syndicated to other people's sites, which already had the targeted traffic I wanted to attract to my site (and without needing to do the targeting myself). This time-honored technique (variations of which existed long before the internet) can be a very good deal all round: the recipient gets free content and the donor gets free traffic.

Userc16 said:

That's actually an interesting point of view.

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It's what a marketer would call "content syndication". Some people also call it "article marketing" (not to be confused with so-called "article directory marketing" which is something else altogether, and thankfully more or less obsolete, these days).

Userc16 said:

Do you mean sites such as Reddit and so on? Or actual sites which go out and fetch content automatically?

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No; neither.

Reddit, and so on, I consider "social media marketing". (I don't know all that much about it, myself; nor do I believe in it, really). And there's very unlikely to be any real benefit from syndication to "autoblogs" and the like.

My rule of thumb is that I don't want my articles appearing anywhere where they can be published without any editorial approval-process, or quality control. I wouldn't expect to benefit from that.

I offer content (after publishing it on my own sites first, to secure the initial indexations) to relevant sites whose Webmasters I think may welcome additional content, and I supply it - in the form of articles syndicated from my own site - in exchange for a link back to my site at the end. The recipient site gets free content and I get free traffic. I do this only if I like the look of the site and imagine that it actually has traffic I'd welcome and value, myself.

It's very similar, in principle, to "guest blogging" (but a little less interactive).

There's no shortage of Webmasters, including those of some high-quality sites, who syndicate content already published elsewhere, as can be seen from the large numbers of people who look for it in article directories - this being, of course, the exact function that article directories serve.

There's also a minority of Webmasters not too familiar with this method, who confuse "duplicate content" with "syndicated content", confuse "original content" with "unique content" and actually imagine that Google might penalize them for re-publishing such content. This is, needless to say, totally wrong: "duplicate content", for which there are in any case no penalties, refers to multiple copies of text-files within one domain.

The syndication of content is good enough for many of the world's leading news and sports websites (who take content wholesale from Reuters, Associated Press, and so on), and it can work well for authors, too.

I've taken to only promoting posts that I would personally click on if I saw posted in a forum thread. Someone wrote about the many uses of dandelions and I was all over that. Maybe I'll read the rest of their blog, maybe not, but they got my traffic.

I know my blog has a very narrow niche, but on a planet of six billion people that's a pretty large narrow niche. If you post it, traffic will come.

First post here. Hey everyone

I've had my blog since 2011 and got an unexpected surge of traffic in the first year by adding one of my posts to StumbleUpon: one of them was a guide on writing chord progressions, which has since had 264,000 views. I then wrote an article on my experience in the suicide forest in Japan (Aokigahara) and promoted it by looking up every blog post on it and commenting on it with a link back to my original post. I also had videos up on YouTube embedded in the post documenting my experience and now when you search up Aokigahara it shows up on the first page. I didn't StumbleUpon that post and it's had 133,000 views. I now average 1,500 views a day and most of these are coming from three or four of my articles, which results in people checking out other posts as well. So far I've had over a million hits. I made the site for uni and never had any intention of this happening. I might be an outlier here and have gotten 'lucky', but to be honest I'm numb to it now and don't care at all about how many people see my site. It was a big rush at first but not anymore. Since then I've created two other blogs (one for book reviews and one for music reviews) and get about 10-20 views a day for each of them and I'm happy with that.

I'm going to give StumbeUpon a glance too. It turns out a few people I know of use it so who knows.

chaoticscott said:

First of all, we need to establish what "reasonable traffic" is. My blog gets about 1600 visitors a month.

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That's about what I get too. I've been blogging for 10 months and I blog mostly about research material I've collected for my historical plus random personal stuff and a few short stories. I don't do any promoting other than an update notice on AW. My research material was consistently getting the most views and I was a bit unsettled when a lot of those views were coming from Iraq (my historical is set in ancient Babylon and I hope I'm doing it justice) but for some weird reason, a short story I wrote last November called Unicorn Droppings has grabbed top spot by a long shot this past month.
I've come to the conclusion that if I write something readers find interesting a simple Google search will bring them my way.

Looks like a thread with much potential. I've got a StumbleUpon link going under every post. I've never thought about adding a post myself. I'll have to look into that.

Individuals discuss developing visitors but to be sincere my professional website designs that did well got most of their viewers by the first two several weeks and organised about stable since then. Probably because it hit that vacant market and got immediate results from visitors.

Am I doing something wrong here?? Ive added all of my posts to stumble upon, and aside from the initial bump in viewership (app. 4-6 views) I never get another view again for that post.

I would assume that your posts have to interest people to really get traffic from stumble upon. I just joined it, cause I'd never heard and it's very much if you don't like what you see. you pass. So I think I wouldn't put EVERY post, just the ones that shine.

I haven't put any up cause I don't really think any of mine will help, I may try my first just see what happens.

You don't stumble everything. That just makes Stumble block you for spamming. You Stumble things people on Stumble are going to like. And you know what they are going to like by looking at what is already on there. Just like every other sharing site.

But honestly, pushing traffic uphill like this is a lot of effort compared to having search engines bring it to you.

My case is a bit different to most. I started my blog in 2012 because I wanted to write my opinion about an online dating website. For the past two years, my blog has been getting about 200-300 hits a day and the majority of that is for the online dating article, viewed mainly by Americans. It started out getting about 100 a day, now it's increased and it seems to stay within that region. I'd written almost 20 articles since then, but this one article still continues to be the most popular. The rest of my articles don't generate nowhere near as many hits ..............

with the exception of an article I wrote in 2012 about England's sloppy performance during the Euro Cup. That got 666 hits in one day (I swear it is true!). Hehehe...

I haven't promoted the blog that much, but it's done a world of wonders for kickstarting my career as a freelance writer. I think one trick is to write an article that really appeals to the general public (my blog is very diverse so I don't just stick to one topic).

Side-note: It's always a lot of fun checking out what people Google when they stumble upon your blog. Things like "How to get a girl to show you their t*ts on meetme" or 'talking to someone on ___, is she a man?' or 'stuck-up women on ___" are always good for a laugh.

Sometimes it's not what you do, it's what you include. The right SEO can do more than all the social media pushing in the world. What I've seen work in my case: Make sure your keywords are both pertinent to your content and words that people will be looking for. If you use photos, name them in a similar fashion, so those keywords will add more traffic from search engines. You may get a temporary surge by promoting your posts, but good SEO keeps it steady.

Key words probably help. I usually forget to add them, and add them late.

Alexa makes a good point about content syndication.

Have you ever gone to a high traffic blog, read one of the posts, and then at the end of the post it says something like "This blog post was written by Joe Smith, you can check out his blog at XYZ"? This is actually a pretty common traffic building tactic called guest blogging. Essentially, you find a high traffic blog in your niche, then ask the blog owner if she would like to publish your blog post (no duplicate stuff BTW, this has to be unique stuff written specifically for that blog). That way, the blog owner gets free content, and you get some traffic to your blog.