The Plan to 5X My Website Traffic

I’ll be starting from a measly ~1800 page views and trying to ramp it up to 10K as fast as possible.
The plan to 5X my website traffic

The Backstory

Since the end of last year (2016), I haven’t done much with my blog in regards to generating traffic to it, as you’ll see below. Course sells on Bitesize Business School mainly come from Youtube. The blog never has generated much website traffic. But that is on me since I haven’t focused on traffic. Mainly because I’ve been so busy with client work. Going forward, I plan to change the stagnant amount of traffic the site has been getting. In fact, my initial goal is to 5X monthly pageviews.
I’ll be implementing new tactics and strategies to greatly increase overall traffic. I’ll be sharing my results each month. Additionally, I’ll post the amount of affiliate and ad income being earned from the blog. While not a full income report, it should be another measure of progress. If I’m doing things right, affiliate and ad income should increase as traffic increases.

I also believe affiliate and ad income are what most bloggers consider of when they think about making money from their blog. I hope by showing regular traffic and income results, it will inspire you and show what is possible.

This post contains affiliate links, which means I will get a small commission if your purchase through these links. It will not affect your purchase price in anyway.

The Initial Plan

Here’s some of the initial changes to the blog that I’ll start with to increase traffic:

  • Interlinking of posts. This means linking one to post to another relevant post. Interlinking provides more overall value to your readers, increases page views and session time (time a user is on your site).
  • Posting more content. This probably won’t be anymore than 2 or 3 times per month because of client and other commitments of my businesses.
  • Better images.
  • Utilizing Pinterest.
  • Adhering to good SEO practices

Current Website Traffic

Showing my most recent traffic is probably a good place to start. The graph below goes back 6 months (Oct 1, 2016 thru March 29, 2017):

You can see a steady decline. This is due to my lack of posting and promoting the site.

Pageviews for October, 2016 were 2359. For the month of March (up to March 29), they are 1809. I believe a great goal is to reach 10,000 page views per month as soon as possible. That’s a little more than 5X my current traffic. I can’t really predict when this will happen but I’m hoping within the new few months.

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Below is a graph of March 2017 thru March 29. Notice the small bump (where the annotation icon is) on March 27. On that date, I began implementing some of the items from the above list. My goal is to try and implement a little every day.

Current Income

Let’s shift over to income. Below is February income, which pays out around the middle of the following month:

Affiliate Income:

  • 99designs – $150

Ad Income:

  • Youtube – $162.37

Total Income: $312.37

Expenses:

Pinterest Strategy eBook – $32

How To Make Your First Affiliate Sale On Pinterest – $25

Aweber – $10

Total Expenses: $57

Net Income: $245.37

In future reports, I hope to see more affiliates listed and Adsense income directly from the website.

You’re probably wondering if $245 is all the income I made in February. Bitesize Business School does make additional income by selling courses directly from the site and marketplaces. All of my freelancing work comes from BKR Consulting Group. I run a completely separate business as well at steadyoptionincome.com.

You can always view all of my income reports here.

To provide a better correlation of income to traffic, since the above income is based on February traffic, I’ve included a graph below showing traffic for only February.

I will keep the Bitesize Business School blog content focused on startup, business growth, marketing and finance related content.

Website Traffic Building Resources

A few great resources I’ll be using to help build up my website traffic are:

All are great reads and well worth more than their small up front investments.

SEO Tips

There are a few fundamental SEO tips that I want to leave you with and that I’ll be using. I see there tips in just about every SEO article I read. SEO can be overwhelming because there are so many things you can do to improve SEO. But this list of tips is short and simple and should be used every time you create a blog post.

  • Use your main keyword in your post title
  • Keep post title character length to no more than 65-70 characters. Otherwise, the preview in Google search results will get cut off.
  • Fill in the meta data title and description, which are also used in Google search results
  • Use an H2 for sub headings/titles within your post
  • Fill image alt tags with relevant content, which doesn’t need to be your keywords but just a description so Google knows what the image is about

I’ve created a simple infographic checklist that you can use each time you create a post. Feel free to tweet it out or post to your Pinterest boards.

[bctt tweet=”6 SEO Must Haves simple infographic checklist: http://bit.ly/2nB8vD3. @bitesizebschool”]

 

The next post about my traffic will be for April. Since affiliate and ad revenue usually pay out by mid month the following month (May), I expect to have an update out by mid May. I’ll add all of March traffic and income as well. Although the impact of my traffic building won’t really start to take effect until April.

Get Update to Each Website Traffic Report

If you’d like to get regular updates to my traffic and income reports, just sign up below.

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