Take the Ladder of Success One Rung At A Time

If you recently visited any of my sites, you may have noticed the tagline under my "Genki Productions" logo: "Changing the World One Byte at a Time (TM)". Arrogant? Maybe... But I have built up my traffic to over half a million pages a month and 150,000 unique visitors by sticking to this "rule". In other words, it really works!

What I do is to slice the problem of getting more traffic very thinly. I set myself a target for the number of extra page-views (you can also work with actual visitor numbers, of course!) I have to find during a month. At the moment, I have picked a target of 15% a month growth. You can choose any rate you like. The smaller your current audience, the larger you should make your target since you only need a few more visitors to have a dramatic impact on your page-views.

Then I work out the actual numbers. For example, if my site received 100 page-views per day then by the end of the month I want it to be averaging 115 page-views per day. I find it helps a lot to keep a small figure in mind, rather than focusing on the absolute number of visitors. So I forget about my current visitor numbers, and say to myself "Now, how am I going to get 15 more page-views a day?"

Then I work towards the goal in various ways. I check my site's position in the search engines, I post messages to discussion groups, I request links from other sites (and if the fit is right I offer to reciprocate as well), I tighten my pages so that they load quicker and therefore my visitors are willing to go deeper into the site, etc. Once I reach the target, I can relax for the rest of this month and then start thinking about how I am going to meet NEXT month's target.