Kent Newsome asks a good question:

If you were a struggling blogger and you had $1,000 to use to increase traffic to your blog, how would you spend it?

Though Kent didn’t use the word “established” I decided to add that to title. There is a difference promoting a site that is new versus a site that has hundreds or thousands of pages (posts in a blog case). If it’s new then the promotion focuses around what the future promises more than what is already there. For readers who just started a blog there is something in the post for you particularly in the free promotion tips section toward the end of this post.

Now before cutting through the fog and answering Kent’s question a few important items struck me that require reflection and explanation.

The hiatus
One, I’d sort of left Kent for dead toward the end of 2006 and beginning of 2007 as a blogger. I don’t mean that literally as in heart stopped beating dead. He went on this extended blogging hiatus without much (any?) explanation to his readers and recently reappeared energized, generating smoke and some strong posts from his keyboard. To go from a couple posts over a couple months back to several posts a day, wow, rock and roll.

As subscribers we didn’t know if Kent had quit blogging, was on an extended vacation, had lost the mojo or had been abducted by aliens. Kent now suggesting after this absence that he is willing to budget $1,000 to promote his blog plus his increased blog output is strong evidence that he’s back. Or wants to be back at least. Good news from a good writer.

These hiatus periods are problematic. Fortunately, I’ve managed to avoid them here but it’s hit me on other less trafficked blogs I contribute to (thus a good reason they are probably less trafficked, doh!). The minute we get some momentum flowing one of the absolute worst things we can do is stop or significantly reduce regular posting. And I don’t mean stop posting for a couple days or even a week or two for vacation a couple times a year. Everybody deserves a vacation and subscribers will happily concede a little R&R time to their favorite bloggers.

Subscribers with their own blogs aren’t quite as patient as non-blogging subscribers I think though. They want expect to see you cranking good material or it’s off to the delete stack where some other more hungry blogger is clawing for their attention and is more regularly posting the kind of linkable, quality material they crave.

The stall
The second thing that occurred to me is every blog (at least that I’ve ever been involved with) reaches a stage where growth stalls — or at least seems to stall. For some blogs it’s 10-50 unique visitors a day. Others it could be 100-250 uniques a day. Some can make it to 250-500 uniques a day. Some even get into the thousands or more unique visitors a day before the inevitable stall happens.

A couple years ago I remember being stuck at the 250-500 uniques per day mark thinking how could I get this blog to the next traffic level? Basically, I kept doing the things I mentioned in the free section below and never budgeted any money for promotion. I have, however, budgeted money to promote other types of sites our company owns over the years and would like to experiment paying to promote an established blog someday.

Anyway I got over the plateau by continuing to produce posts consistently and regularly. Last year around this time the stall was 2,000-2,500 unique visitors a day and I was thinking the same thing Kent is pondering, but decided again to focus on the content instead.

After I came back from summer vacation refreshed and renewed I broke through the stall again and created a new plateau of just shy of 4,000 unique visitors a day. The major change made was to increase the depth of the posts and focus even more on quality and depth rather than post quantity. The average amount of words per post increased dramatically from posts made post July to December 2006. The increased word count and breadth of posts worked.

With the new post quality focus I was still able to stay over 75 posts a month (except for October 2006 where there were 65 posts) which, IMO, is the bare minimum a blog needs to have in order to be in growth mode. Less than 75 posts and you aren’t posting enough to maintain ongoing reader interest. It’s possible of course to post less than 75 posts a month and have a growing audience, but your posts had better be dynamite.

The new growth we experienced here represented an over 33% increase in both visitors and revenue (thank you to all new readers and for telling your friends). Unfortunately most of this increase has since evaporated in 2007 and we’re back to the same levels we were before my vacation last July, so this particular story doesn’t have a Cinderella ending. However, I am encouraged by the experience and strong possibility that it can be done again and perhaps keep more of the higher traffic levels this time around.

Isn’t this fun?

BTW, I’m at least partly to blame for the traffic runoff here by making a somewhat dramatic content change: namely my weekday video experiments and completely resetting my reading list at the beginning of 2007. Those readers who had come to expect the meatier, more pensive, longer posts in the second half of 2006 have since been treated to a more regular dose of vlogging trials and tribulations. I can see those who dislike video in general being disappointed with the changes. Personally, I think the Hmm blog content has improved because it has become more original and less external, but I can understand readers fond of the content in the second half of 2006 seeing a change in the material and looking elsewhere. For those still hanging on and nodding your head please don’t despair, I’ve got some ideas for how to deal with that situation which I’ll deal with another day.

As I mentioned at the start of 2007, you don’t make bigger gains without taking risks and trying new things especially when things are going well and sometimes these moves payoff, sometimes they don’t. Our traffic and revenue dropoff could also be related to the time of the year (spring/summer slowdown has been a common phenomenon on the web) and the fact that I’m not posting as many text blog posts as I was last year at this time (*except January 2007):

(128) April 2006 vs. (58) April 2007
(92) March 2006 vs. (81) March 2007
(90) February 2006 vs. (78) February 2007
*(83) January 2006 vs. (93) January 2007

Last month in fact was one of the least posting months this site has ever had with 58 posts. We have to go clear back to July 2004 for a month where there were a smaller number of posts (52). The month with the least ever number of posts? December 2003 when 40 posts were made. Most posts ever made in a month as of this writing? 149 in June 2005.

If you look at the output on this blog from December 2005 to January 2006 you’ll see 12 out of 13 months had more than 100 posts published. From a quantity standpoint that was the most productive period this blog has ever had. It’s not by coincidence either that at the same time this blog went from hundreds of visitors a day to thousands, so I’m not simply offering these stats for naval gazing purposes but to backup why I believe there is a direct correlation between action (posting) and reaction (increased readership).

If you’re looking at the lower posting numbers I mentioned and saying: wow, how can you paint that as a bad month, then right now the #1 thing you need to work on should be clear. You aren’t in the game if you aren’t in the batter box taking swings. If you are making a lot of posts but aren’t seeing any noticeable readership increase then it’s time to be more critical of the quality of what you’re publishing.

Are your posts of the linkdump or Twitter variety with no explanation for readers about why you think they are worth sharing? Are you just rewriting news stories or restating what other (more prominent) bloggers have already written?

Why focus on a number of posts per month?
The sweet spot for a blog is 75-150 quality posts per month. That should be the goal number of posts for most (but not every) blogger wanting to grow their traffic. Notice I threw the word “quality” in there. Others may disagree but I don’t count linkblog type posts as quality. I count a quality post as something with some meat to it, something with an original or unique take, substance; something where another blogger might find a juicy quote to launch into their own post (and trackback) as I hopefully have done here with Kent’s question.

A post with only a few words and and link or two is an appetizer, not a main course. Twitter posts are, well, good for Twitter, they aren’t necessarily good fodder for blogging. 300 words is a good generic word target but don’t be seduced into thinking that hitting a number of words is all that you need to do. Exceptions abound so try not to take the word count too literally. BTW, 300 words is also the number my word count plugin automatically calculates so that any Wordpress self-hosted blogger using the plugin can see what the percentage of posts they have that reaches 300+ words.

(For those who think every post I write is more than 300 words, not true, my stats as of this writing: 1,466 [33.0032%] posts contain 300+ words).

I digress.

The traffic/income increase was a fun ride while it lasted (almost six months, woohoo!) but now I’m pretty much back in promotion mode like Kent.

When there isn’t any $$ budget $$ available to spend on promotion
The third and final major thing that occured to me after reading Kent’s question is the reminder that I’m part of a growing group blog — yesterday we just voted in our eighth author — and are wanting to promote and grow the traffic for our blog. That blog currently has about the same amount of traffic as this blog did a couple years ago, 271 uniques a day average via Site Meter as of this writing.

However our group doesn’t have the budget to spend $1,000 USD, although we do have 1,000 Linden dollars (L$1,000 = about $27 USD at current exchange rates) to spend promoting the site. Don’t laugh out loud too much now. There are some worthwhile promotional activities that can be done with L$1,000.

Our group voted to start setting aside 5% of the site profit or L$500 whichever is greater each month beginning with last month for promotional purposes. Since we don’t have the budget to spend more money we’re having to take more organic promotion methods described in the free promotion section below.

How to spend $1,000 promoting your site
Now onto answering Kent’s question and how I think he should spend $1,000 promoting his site, which can be broken into 4 evenly distributed parts: blog design, widget/gadgets, contests and third party advertising. Keep in mind if your blog is brand new then my advice would be much different than I’m suggesting to Kent: you don’t need to spend money promoting something that isn’t there yet. Establish your site content. Work on creating an archive of high quality material that’s worth promoting. In Kent’s case, he already has a stable of good content, so the advice for somebody like him would be as follows:

$250 - blog redesign with focus on site interaction and features. The more posts you have, the bigger your archives, the more important the focus on search should be at your site. If your current search solution is Google then you’re sending away people who came to you. Google site search should not be as good as a focused site search.

$250 for widgets for other people to use interacting with your site - Another 25% of the budget should be dropped on your favorite programmer(s) to build a bunch of widgets promoting your site. Dashboard Widgets (Apple), Y! Widgets, Google Modules (or whatever they are calling them these days) and Microsoft Gadgets for Vista and XP. Here are some widget ideas:

- RSS Reader widget. Think most popular / most read posts, author favorite posts, most useful posts, etc.
- site search widget. Make sure you have a Firefox search that interacts with your site search.

$250 for a site contest Giving back to readers/subscribers is a good thing, especially when some (many?) of them too might be bloggers and could thank you by writing about your contest. Budget 25% for a contest or better yet, a couple different contests with prizes related to the niche you write about.

$250 for third party advertising. This is a good chance to try Google Adwords. Look at all the new things you have to promote: a freshly redesigned, site search friendly site, new widgets to promote and share. You could also write about your experience spending $250 on Google Adwords and how it helped or didn’t help grow traffic.

Money is gone, now what? (free section)
Now that the $1,000 is gone, there are still many little things you can do to promote your site that will cost you time, but not necessarily any out of pocket dollars.

• Make a goal to sign up for five new sites / services every work day. With every new site add your site URL to your profile. That’s five new profiles to get spidered with links back to your site every work day. 25 per week (5 days x 5 work days = 25 new profile URLs per week).
• five two-way trackbacks a day. This means you find five good blog posts to link to every day. This doesn’t mean five separate posts, it could be one post with five links. By two-way trackback I mean you link inside the post body and send them a trackback post. Does the blogging software you use not have trackback functionality? Here’s a PHP trackback script I wrote that can send trackbacks to any blog. You just need to upload it to a PHP-enabled server with cURL, change the extension from phps to .php, fill out the form, and submit. Do not tell anybody else where this is at on your server though or they can use it to trackback spam others. I’ve been using this script to help harden my trackback anti-spam filters. Also useful to test if trackbacks are working at your website.
• add your site URL to your email signature. If you send a dozen emails a day, that’s 12 free email mentions
• add your site URL to messageboard signature space where you post if the site rules allow. You are involved at messageboards somewhere on the web, yes/no?
• offer to guest post on other blogs and write articles for other places to increase your site exposure (author site/blog link considered customary)
• join a group blog. This usually guarantees a bio that can point back to your home website/blog and also will give you valuable experience networking with other bloggers. I’ve learned a lot about working with other bloggers with our group project and it’s been fun trying to grow a blog’s traffic and site revenue as a group.
• submit your best work — and emphasis on best as not every post on your site can be your best and/or more useful to others — to sites like digg, stumbleupon, bookmark with del.icio.us, etc, basically any site that does not frown on self submissions. Also be wary of submitting only your own work. Try to regularly submit high quality work of others you are reading. This post, for example, if you honestly feel it fits that description might be something you’d consider adding to one of the sites. Thank you, if you do.

Patience, Danielson
Site promotion isn’t an overnight thing. I know we all would like to think we can increase the average unique visitors and subscribers by drinking some magic elixir, but unless you get some TV or major media exposure, slashdotted, front page dugg, etc, any growth experienced will come slowly and incrementally, not between the time you read this and the next stats refresh.

The point I’m trying to make with this post is that the focus should be on having something that makes people want to stay, interact, return, interact again and subscribe. Is your site a destination or some place to stop by once and never or rarely return? If you want site traffic to grow then you need to make it a place where the thing that drew people to your site can be experienced consistently and regularly.

Hopefully any “struggling bloggers” as Kent defined now know at least a few places they might look to start their promotional tour. Good luck, because you’ll need some of that too. I can think of worse things to invest $1,000 in than your own blood, sweat and tears.

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