Traffic (or lack thereof) at German History Blog

The echo I hear each time I post an entry to my special interest site, German History Blog, is the sound of my words bouncing around the empty ether. No one’s out there listening (umm, reading)! Well almost no one. I have a handful of users each day, but I sure would like to have more.

I have a few reasons for wanting more visitors to the blog.

• Personal satisfaction — In fact it is somewhat satisfying to write about German History (a passionate interest) even if no one is reading it. But playing the lone wolf does get a bit boring after a while. I think it’s probably pretty rare for a blogger to remain motivated without an audience.
• Money — Even if I successfully increase the site’s readership ten-fold, I realize that German History Blog will never be a bread-winner. But hey, if I pulled down even 50 bucks a month in Amazon affiliate sales and AdSense clicks, I’d be pleased as a dog with two tails. $50 would more than pay for the web hosting and the cost of the AWeber list management service. (affiliate link)

So, how to get traffic? Well there are all sorts of free reports and guidance out there on this very topic; just try searching for “increase blog traffic” and you will see tons of results.

But what pops foremost into my mind after a few weeks of discussing and reading about these kinds of things with other people in Lynn Terry’s Mastermind group as well as by reading through Problogger.net’s (Darren Rowse’s) 31-Days to Build a Better Blog (affiliate link) and Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint is this: hard work and determination!

I know I’m stating the obvious when I say that traffic does not just magically increase, even if you put up fresh content every single day. Fresh content is damn important: particularly when you already have some sort of page rank at Google. But if you’re not even on Google’s page rank radar (like, sadly, German History Blog), then the fresh content is not really working for you.

Above all else, Google’s page rank system is based on your site’s “authority”, meaning how many other sites link to your site. Google’s thinking goes, “A bunch of sites are linking to this site — it must be fairly authoritative, so let’s rank it high.”

So: links into your site; that’s what’s important. These kinds of links are called backlinks. How to get them? There are some kinda, shall we say, non-kosher ways, such as by paying into a network wherein links to your site will be distributed across several sites. This is a bit artificial and fake, but apparently some of these systems have been known to work. I’m not into that (yet, anyway.)

The other, more standard way, is to do some hard work and accomplish a few things:

• Do some research to find other, related blogs, and send a nice note to the other blogs’ owners suggesting that you write a guest post for them. Include at least a topic idea or two, if not a completely finished, ready-to-be-dropped-in article. You don’t need to select your direct competitors, but of course those other blogs should be at least tangentially related to your topic.
• Write several articles and submit them to article sites such as EZineArticles.com. If your article is selected for publication on their site, then you can put a little “about the author” blurb in there that includes a link back to your own site.

These examples are covered well in the resources I linked to up above. Of course there is a difference between reading and actually doing! I’m at the point where I really need to start doing. In this stage, motivation and discipline play enormously important roles. Those are areas in which the mastermind group really help me. We members are challenged to set specific goals by the week and by the month. As time progresses, and people start updating the progress of their goals online, the enthusiasm becomes infectious.

I’ve been particularly impressed with what web copywriting expert Trish Lindemood is doing with her 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge. Trish has quite an ambitious plan. If you have a look at it, you’ll notice that guest posts at other blogs, and submission of articles to article directories play a very prominent role.

With my “real” job and my 8-month old daughter, I’m definitely not in a position to be quite as ambitious as Trish. But I have challenged myself (and have been challenged by others) to at least get moving on guest posting at other blogs and writing articles for submission. I will also be transparent with the traffic numbers like Trish has been.

We can start with what we already know about German History Blog’s traffic: the results from August and September.

German History Blog
Month	Unique visitors	Number of visits	Pages
2009-08	157	206	670
2009-09	166	181	332

I’d sure like to see those numbers go way up, just as Trish’s did at the end of the first month of her challenge. (Great job, Trish!)

Time to go work on it.

Until next time,

Bill

P.S. I learned about Trish’s 90-day challenge because we are both part of Lynn Terry’s Mastermind group (affiliate link). I’ve been getting to know about other interesting people and their projects as well in the group. I’m quite glad I signed up — it’s really helping me with ideas and motivation.

Photo credit

The lead photo accompanying this article comes from Flickr user kengz. It shows a Bangkok traffic jam at night. Kengz has graciously made it available via the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. The suggested attribution is as follows:

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