January 25th, 2009 | 
Author: Sorry for the lack of posts lately but there never seem to be enough hours in the day sometimes. Anyway, back to the nitty gritty and as you may or may not know, the challenge has changed to getting to 2000 visitors a day by 31st March 2009. I have decided to do this because I totally underestimated the level of curiosity in the cruise blog. Unless I can somehow hide my adsense blocks from the unnatural traffic I will have to leave it off unfortunately.
I am however looking at various options which may mean that I can either put Adsense on the blog or some other form of monetization but for now its all about traffic, traffic, traffic. Here is my latest AWstats for the blog showing the amount of visitors arriving on a daily basis.
As you can see, the traffic is slowly rising apart from the last 2 days where it has tailed back a little. About 2% of this traffic is not what I would call “natural” traffic, so remove the 2% to give a better impression of actual figures.
I am fully expecting the results of some promotion to start kicking in soon and those numbers should begin to rise I hope soon. I am also getting another 100 articles written between myself and my ghostwriter. I am also looking at a lot of articles from the directories and deciding which ones would fit my blog.
As for promotion, I am busily looking for backlinks from various “authority” sites and have so far got a succes rate of around 5% for the emails I have been sending. Some have even given me one way links which is great.
Overall, it has been a strange week and one that has left me with a lot of decisions about the direction of my cruise blog. I am hoping next week should see things move on from strength to strength. 2000 visitors a day seems like a long way off but I know what needs to happen to get there. My next post will describe some more promotion methods using social bookmarking, RSS feed submissions and looking at just how powerful web 2.0 techniques really are.
Hey Steve,
Just wanted to thank you for all the info here.
I’ve made some of the suggested points you make on my blog and I’ve already seen the traffic rise. I’ll be following you on this new challenge and wanted to wish you luck!
Thanks again
Just to be clear, are you aiming for 2,000 visitors a day or 2,000 UNIQUE visitors a day? The AWStats that you have posted do not show the number of unique visitors.
I am surprised to hear that only 2% of your visitors are “unnatural traffic”, i.e. from people who are inquisitive about your progress. I expected the figure to be much higher. Would you care to disclose where the remaining 98% are coming from?
Thanks for continuing to provide all this valuable info.
Best regards.
2% is a rough estimate, the rest of the traffic is split between mainly google and a little from MSN and Yahoo also. I am also getting traffic from my article submissions, lenses and some from other blogs that are picking up my links. Search engine bots are also in those figures.
As for unique visitors a day, I will be posting this up today. The 2000 visitors won’t be exclusively unique, there will be “genuine” return visitors in there as well. What I mean by genuine are people interested in cruises, forum members and anyone looking for new updates.
Hi Stephen,
[quote]
The 2000 visitors won’t be exclusively unique, there will be “genuine” return visitors in there as well. What I mean by genuine are people interested in cruises, forum members and anyone looking for new updates.
[end quote]
Your definition of “genuine” covers everyone that might visit your site, doesn’t it? Who does it exclude?
There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also.
Hey very nice blog!! Man .. Beautiful .. Amazing .. I will bookmark your blog and take the feeds also…
Wishing you the best of luck on this challenge!
Adsense is the best paying make money online program on the internet. I just wish that i could increase my website traffic to high levels so that i could earn more money on Adsense.
.