All of us who have a website, whether personal or professional, want to see it receiving more and more visitors. In the beginning, we can’t expect too many visits to our website unless we heavily promote it. Rule of thumb says that to go into heavy promotion for a web property, first you should first have a business model or a monetization plan. There’s no point in spending money on something when you don’t have a way of getting something back. Your goal should be to get a percentage of what you spend, as earnings.
In the beginning when we’re trying to figure out what our website will actually be like, what services we will offer etc, it’s likely we’re not going to get a lot of traffic.
But not all days are the same. We might sometimes see a huge increase in the number of visitors to our website. Especially for a brand new site, this isn’t something to just ignore. If we take action, we should be able to keep the momentum and help the website grow much, much faster.
To establish what a huge increase in traffic might actually mean, let’s take the following example.
If we have a website that posts funny images, such as Burn A Brain and have 3000 visitors per day, then if one day we get 8000 visits that’s not a huge increase; simply because the niche is not an expensive one, the traffic is not easily monetized and because let’s face it, sites like that are very easy to be liked, thumbed up and voted on in the social media.
if, on the other hand, we have a business blog that’s just starting out, a sudden increase in traffic is much more of a surprise. So if your average is 20 visits a day, your peak of 350 visits really is a big difference. 350 may not be much compared to the 5000 burn a brain scored, but then again, we are talking about 350 laser-targeted visitors, who are actually researching for more info in a field and are interested in what you have to say.
What should we do when a great increase like that finally happens?
Check what post or page became popular. This way we can further analyze how much time they have spent on the whole website and see if they actually found what they were looking for.
What media helped in this increase of traffic? If, for example, we saw that most of the traffic came from a specific social media, we have to find who actually shared the page by posting it on their profile and see how we can help promote it even more. If we had a product, one good practice is to contact the person that helped us with the promotion and see how we can strengthen our relationship with him. We can give away a demo of our service, send them the actual product in exchange for a review or create a giveaway contest for his followers etc.
But the most important of all is keeping the momentum.
To have a day with a very good Traffic Spike (another word for an increase in traffic), especially when you have a new web site, is not a sign that this is a good time to relax and enjoy the benefits. If your posting frequency is less than one post per week, now is the time to increase that. It doesn’t look good when someone subscribes to your RSS Feed to then have to wait for weeks before getting your next post. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and start writing more frequently. Having more posts per week will make those one time visitors become regulars, helping you build your audience. Ultimately, that’s your website’s end goal.
It’s time to decide whether you’re going to get seriously involved in making this website your main project, or if you’re going to keep it on the down-low until you have more time.
Remember, increasing the posting frequency and becoming engaged with the social network and the user that caused the traffic spike, can do miracles.
What other things did you do the day you received a very good traffic spike?
