Stay Focused and Get Lots and Lots of Traffic

I have a really good reason for writing some of the things I do. You may notice and you may not, but sometimes I write stuff that isn't personal and isn't one of my usual topics. The simple truth is that each article is merely one leg of my trip on the road to success, a journey in which I hope to carry as many passengers as possible.

This particular article, the one you're reading now, isn't a tightly focused article and it's intentional. I'm not repeating and emphasizing key words and phrases. The article in which I wrote about our 2006 Toyota Corolla Altis is an example of a focused article. If you don't believe me, read it and then use the Shoemoney SERPS script to see where the post title and word combinations rank on the search engines for my main URL.

Before I started this little project with my first experiment, "How to Make Money Online", this blog's number of daily unique visitors wildly fluctuated between 200 and 400 (and higher if something got stumbled). I now consistently get more than 300 unique visitors per day. My goal is to have 3000 visitors per day by the end of January, 2009, without it being a niche blog.

For those of you who are more interested in the social aspects of blogging, you may consider search engine visitors a by-product of your efforts and you may not be interested in the numbers. It's the wrong way of thinking. A percentage, perhaps only a small percentage, of your search engine visitors will turn into regular readers of your blog. If you only get one regular reader per 1000 search engine visitors, isn't it worth it to get more search engine visitors in the first place?

For those of you who are interested in the monetary aspects of blogging, search engine visitors are your bread and butter. You'll get more ad clicks and affiliate sales from your search engine visitors than you ever will from your regular, or even semi-regular, readers. I'm not guessing here. I'm reporting facts based on experience.

The reason I'm even writing about this is to point out things I see when I hop from blog to blog. I'll see a blog where every article bounces from topic to topic and I can tell it isn't focused and isn't receiving a lot of page views. Ladies and gentlemen, even a personal blog can have articles focused on various topics. You don't have to have a niche blog to get a lot of traffic.

On the other hand, if you have a niche blog, not focusing each article will cause your blog to perform at much less than its potential. You wouldn't want a personal blog, like mine, to get more traffic than your specialty blog, now would you?

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hari on 2008-01-23 at 3:28 pm (Reply)

I have to say that I agree with focused articles, but I also feel that sometimes I need to ramble on simply because I feel like rambling.

I suppose you could say that my Linux articles are almost always focussed. But some of the others aren't. It's a mix of the two and since I don't use context-sensitive advertising anyway, it doesn't matter I guess.

hari's last blog post..Social networking or self-centred networking?

RT Cunningham | Untwisted Vortex | Philippines on 2008-01-23 at 3:34 pm (Reply)

That's just it, Hari. It does matter. Unless, of course, you want very few visitors. If that's the case, a blog isn't the best tool for the job, so to speak.

I know for a fact, just by reading the comments at your blog, that visitors appreciate it when you focus in on something, like your latest article on social networking.

Hari, if you put AdSense, Miva, Yahoo Ads, or any other contextual advertising on your blog and limited it to search engine visitors (invisible to the rest of us), you could probably make much more than I could.
hari on 2008-01-23 at 3:44 pm (Reply)

I should try something like that. My first attempt at AdSense wasn't a success, because, well, I just put it there and didn't focus on keywords.

Is there any other specific technique you use to limit ads to SE visitors or do you just use the "HTTP_REFERER" variable to find out?

hari's last blog post..Social networking or self-centred networking?
RT Cunningham | Untwisted Vortex | Philippines on 2008-01-23 at 3:51 pm (Reply)

HTTP_REFERER would be the one to use. You could use stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) == "google" || (repeat) == "yahoo" || (repeat) == "whatever to zero in on them.

Checking my referrer log, I see google, yahoo, and a lot of engines that use "search" as part of the engine query (including AOL, SweetIM, Windows Live). My guess is that if you focused (no pun intended) on google, yahoo, and search, you'd get the vast majority of them.
2. Stephen Cronin on 2008-01-23 at 5:46 pm (Reply)
  
  Hi RT,
  
  This post is spot on. I've come to realise the power of search visitors myself recently, probably as a result of reading Vic, Court and Grizzly's blogs(I've only discovered them in the last month or so).
  
  For Hari: I'm in the middle of writing a post on how to hack the Shylock Adsense plugin to only show ads to search engine traffic. I know you don't use WordPress, but here is the function I've used to determine search engine traffic for my hack, in case it's useful to you. (I can't take credit for this, it's from the Who Sees Ads plugin):
  
  function scratch99_fromasearchengine(){ $ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; $SE = array('/search?', 'images.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.'); foreach ($SE as $source) { if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false) return true; } return false; }
  
  Hope the code appears sensibly…
  
  Stephen Cronin's last blog post..How To Avoid Adsense Smart Pricing On Blogs
3. hari on 2008-01-23 at 9:11 pm (Reply)
  
  Thanks, RT and Stephen… This is something I might use if I re-sign with AdSense. Thanks.
  
  hari's last blog post..Social networking or self-centred networking?

Funny Video on 2008-03-01 at 11:29 am (Reply)

Maybe it works for me because of the way I treat my individual articles, but I bounce around from subject to subject for my funny video site. I don't get alot of focused index site traffic; the VAST majority of my traffic goes to the individual articles. Right now I'm getting a rush on that SNL skit where Obama and Clinton are debating and the reporters keep asking Obama if they can get them anything. It's the 1st article of mine about SNL, Clinton, or Obama
Funny Video's last blog post..Saturday Night Live Clinton vs Obama Debate

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Stay Focused and Get Lots and Lots of Traffic