Let’s face the truth! In spite of all good free ebooks on “how to drive free traffic” literature, increasing traffic on any kind of site, requires some work and a bunch of skills.
On the other hand…
How much would you pay someone that actually drives traffic to his sites, to help you get visitors?
I asked myself lots of times this question and I found the answer extremely difficult to find… And you know why? Take a close look at the picture below. The screenshot, was taken a few minutes before starting to write this article.
The blog shown in the screenshot, is my first one. (Right-click and “Open in new tab/window” to see a full sized image) I started it way back in 2007. To be very specific, in april 2007. Almost four years ago.
The screenshot says I passed today, (12th of January 2011) over 17,000 visitors!
I set up the counter somewhere in 2008, because the internal blog counter counted all visits and it lacked options for ignoring self hits, repeated hits, so I used to have more than 300 hits daily, which, even for a beginner, seemed to me a little weird. After installing it, it proved that the real amount of traffic, was some 5% of the hits shown by the internal hit counter.
Wow! It was bad. I mean, falling down from the heavenly 300/day to 15/day… How did it feel? How do you think? How would YOU feel? Should I tell you that I had days with 1 visitor? Yes. This is the best way to speak. The truth! My average traffic, fall to some 8 visitors /day. I felt deceived, and for some time, I abandoned the idea of building an online business, based on the blogging model.
Still… How can you build a writer’s career, without writing? And what might be the best place to publish your work, other than a blog? There are so many FREE blogging platforms that ignoring this huge advantage, seems to me now an insane decision. Still, I made this mistake. I neglected my blog for months…
However, it is a legitimate question: How did I get to this amount of traffic?
Well… The year 2007, meant a real change in my life. I came to understand one simple thing: Using my talents is the only way to make a living online. A full-time job. Lucky me, I had a previous offline business experience, as a freelancer, for 14 years. And I realised that only working my talents hard enough, will lead me to unique results. And the day came! I published some parts of a novel I am still working on. And… There we are! Traffic exploded. In the next two years, you may see what happened…
This is how I learned two lessons… Actually, more than two, but here they are:
1. Quitting, means losing. Success, is a different kind of food…
2. Using my talents, is a far better and way faster path to creating quantity AND quality.
Another lesson was that the market is divided into “chunks”. In marketing, those chunks are called NICHE.
I will discuss about how I came to understasnd the concept of “niche” in another article.
And before saying good bye, I would like to ask you to leave a comment below this article. Thanks in advance!
