How I Tripled My Blog’s Traffic In Under One Day

PageRankWorld is only a few months old. I picked up the domain over the summer because I noticed it randomly, and thought it had a great ring to it.

I didn’t decide to build a blog until a few weeks later, and I didn’t even choose to go ‘all-in’ on this site until very recently. What I’m trying to say is that PageRankWorld is extremely new, but there are a few huge pieces of knowledge that I have gained so far.

Today I’m going to explain what I did to triple (nearly quadruple) my site’s traffic in just a day.

What I Did Right… And What I Did Wrong

As you can my blog was getting about 4-7 visits a day, mostly from organic search traffic, up until December 15th. By that point I had already written maybe 20 blog posts of high-quality content (that means Google’s supposed to love me, right?) and if I had to guess, I would say those hits were coming from random long-tail searches.

I wasn’t doing much blackhat seo at the time, or really any search optimization at all, other than the usual best SEO practices.

What I was doing right at this time:

• Posting great content
• Promoting my posts on social media networks
• Optimizing my theme/design
• Working on the overall experience of my blog
• Working on my blog’s monetization plan

What I was doing wrong at this time:

• Lack of direct marketing
  • Nobody knew to read my blog
  • My blog wasn’t connected to my online persona
• Lack of guest posts (for traffic and brand exposure)

One of my biggest problems was my inability to create and market myself for guest posts. This is one of the best ways to get high-quality links, along with building traffic to my site.. and I was neglecting to put any time into it.

The main reason I was being so dumb was my own procrastination.

The other main problem was a lack of marketing.

Think of an non-promoted blog post the same way that a great product with bad/no marketing will sell less than a crappy product with fantastic marketing…

I wasn’t thinking about how to increase my blog traffic

Until one day I decided to take a step back and look at my promotion methods. Social media wasn’t going great for me because my followers didn’t have any emotional attachment to my new blog. I needed to build a new user-base around PageRankWorld… not spam it’s name to already alienated followers.

Here’s what I did:

1. Forum marketing – I went back to my roots, and posted up a few amazing threads in related forums. In a similar light to guest posting, I posted a fantastic thread and then threw in a link to my (niche relevant) blog post somewhere in the middle.
2. Networking – I started making relationships with some of the best bloggers and internet marketers in my niche. One of my favorites right now is Matthew Woodward. He just seems like a great all-around guy, and he knows how to make some serious cash from his blog.
3. Re-arranged my site - I organized my site in a new way to optimize it for the three different types of traffic I could get. One was potential buyers/subscribers, which is where the new email opt-in comes into play.
4. Boosted my email marketing - Signed up with Aweber to get access to their amazing email marketing services. Check them out today if you are trying to build a business based on passive online income.

Another form of traffic is bloggers, and I re-vamped my guest blog requirements page and contact page just for them.

Finally, the last form of traffic are the random people who stumble upon my page, and for them I increased my social media sharing/bookmarking links, added a personal bio in the right sidebar, decreased the number of ads and changed up the theme.

So after-all, was it just good karma or did these ideas boost my blog traffic?

Oddly enough, the day after I started working on these three ideas is the exact day where you will notice a huge spike in traffic. Initially I gained a ton of traction from my forum marketing, but for some reason my organic search rankings were boosted as well.

I still have a ways to go in terms of site optimization–that’s what I attribute my terrible bounce rate to–and I plan on having a bunch more sleepless nights before I perfect my overall blog monetization strategy.

Honestly, I’m just hoping for even more success in the coming months.