I was looking over my blog stats for the year – wow when I got spammed my traffic was hurt and it has never recovered. Also, Twitter has taken the place of blogging for me (not sure if that’s a good thing). When I don’t blog as often my traffic drops dramatically.

Here’s why I think blogging is still important – because blogs are referral engines. In fact, Companies with blogs generate 67% more referrals online than those w/o blogs according to @Hubspot research.

Speaking of blogs as referral engines, not only your own blog, but links from other people’s blogs are. Especially from influencers. Case in point: I got more visits to my web site from one buried mention of my blog on the Pioneer Woman blog than I did all year from Twitter (with several thousand followers and active participation). Our audiences are so different I’m not sure I got any repeat visitors from the link, but it illustrates the point.

There are several blogs who have sent me a lot of traffic – and most are people I know in real life or locals (live in Utah). This underscores how important networking with people locally is. Personal relationships matter A LOT. Unless you travel and go to conferences meeting people where you live is important. I got away from that at first and now as my topics are more competitive I try to make it more focused on Utah again where its less crowded.

Here’s my theory on Twitter: it’s like Google News, people scan the headlines but rarely click through. With my audience I notice people don’t click through to read my posts on Twitter, they keep it on Twitter. Do you notice that? There is a huge range in this from my experimenting with Sponsored Tweets.

Google organic searches are my #1 referral source and search engines send me the most traffic overall. This validates what I teach about SEO and I’m not trying to rank for keywords. I didn’t have products to sell. I write because I want to and I’m more focused on writing than keywords. In other words it’s more pleasure than business.

Random Facts about my Blog Traffic

  • I get a lot more traffic from StumbleUpon than I expected.
  • Bing is in the top 10 referrers and so is Facebook.
  • Yahoo is not far behind and after that AOL.
  • I’m surprised that Blogcatalog gives me that much traffic.
  • # of referrals from ezinearticles: 13

What are the main sources of traffic for your blog?

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4 Responses to “Analysis: How I Get Traffic to my Blog”

  1. Cary Snowden Says:
    April 22nd, 2010 at 1:07 pm

    Great post, Janet! I agree with your assessment of Twitter; rarely do I see many click-throughs (though I did get to your article via Twitter!). Twitter is more of a ‘live stream’ to see what is going on, and there is often too much happening to drill in to too many links. I am doing more experimenting with Stumbleupon lately and hope to have the same experience you have; I have heard good things from others about them, too.

  2. robert lönn Says:
    April 23rd, 2010 at 4:42 am

    Hi,

    Nice articles and thank you for the facts on your stats. I wonder if we fool our selfs when we measure traffic from Twitter and the likes? I mean from people “searching” for a topic you want traffic since that means they found an answer in your content. But on Twitter you want something else….. I wonder what an appropriate and valid “currency” would be?

    I live in Sweden, Stockholm and have just rediscovered your point on local scene importance.

    Thank you for the inspiration!

  3. alana Says:
    May 6th, 2010 at 3:52 am

    Thanks for sharing your experience. Hope it will be helpful to me for the increase in my traffic to my website.

  4. Traffic Analysis Says:
    February 24th, 2011 at 10:27 pm

    I am surprised to know that only twitter makes such a difference.Thanks for sharing your experience I too go for it.While i promote my blog via social media and different link building strategies.

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