Case Study – I increased my traffic from 1100 uniques to 3600 uniques per day in a week
As I promised this post to you guys here it is. In this post I will show you how I increased my normal traffic from 1100 uniques to 3600 uniques visitors per day on my blog in just five days. Before I begin this post, I will say that this was done after trying and seeing stumble results on my blog for previous months.
So prior to the past week, I was getting an average or 1100 unique visitors a day to Balkhis. Then last week my traffic went to an average of 3600 uniques a day for the 5 days starting Nov. 11 – Nov 15 2008. Now this was not pure luck! So How did I do it?
Step 1: Planning
I started this week with a planned post for each day. I looked up my stats for the past two months because my stumbleupon traffic was high. I looked for each keyword and analyzed what I had to write about. So I carefully picked out the articles that I wanted to write about. While most articles weren’t that spectacular. They were above average except for my 1800 subscriber post. I consider that one excellent. But the other ones were just above average. I worked really hard on the titles. I looked at the titles that make Digg’s Homepage. I looked at my other posts that got me a lot of traffic. Then I carefully chose the titles. I wrote articles that were useful to my readers. That was the planning that I did.
Step 2: Action
Now that I wrote the posts. I scheduled them to be posted on each day. But I posted them on different times which I experienced in the past to work best with social media. First was 7:30a.m EST. There was another one around 8:40 a.m EST. Then there were 10:20 a.m EST. I posted in between these times. Once the posts were up, I sent a message out on Plurk asking my friends to digg/stumble the post for me.
Step 3: Results
I have the traffic increase. Pretty simple eh.
Ah you guys don’t want to know what I did because I didn’t reveal much. Lets hear some of the dirty secrets that I used. The truth is there were none. I just wrote good titles. If you can work on anything, work on your titles. The next thing you need to worry about is content. Once you are done with writing your posts. Then go back to your titles and see if you can make it better by editing it.
I ran a lot of experiments on which posts work better on Balkhis. Here is a Case Study for That.
Now just search digg’s homepage and see which ones work better and the titles. Now the trick with stumble is you need to get about 5 – 10 stumbles. You can get it naturally, or you can buy it. I suggest you don’t go to people who say 5000 stumbles for $5 because those are crap. But if you know some people in communities, you can just have them stumble for just a few pennies.
I am willing to answer all questions that you might have. I will answer them, so feel free to post them in the comments. If it is something general, I will add them in the post 
Hey, I am Syed Balkhi, The guy who is behind Balkhis Inc. I entered the industry back in 2002 not knowing a single thing. I barely spoke English at that time. In the past six years, my language barrier has been eliminated. Aside from English, now I also speak html, and php. Along with the languages I have also managed to master a few arts. Art of web-designing started when I first entered. Messing around with photoshop, I learned how to create my first web design. Now I founded a web designing firm Uzzz Productions. After running numerous amount of websites in various niche, I have mastered the art of web-development. Now I am compiling a resource of what I already know, and what I am learning on this blog. This resource is to help me if I ever need a guide to look back to, and it is help my fellow webmasters.
Stats analysis is an extremely important process to increase traffic. I recently looked at my feedburner stats and saw a trend in what posts were most clicked and viewed. This can give a pretty good idea of what you have to write to get people’s interest.
Not a lot of people will really analyze their traffic this way. Looking deep into your stats and what kind of searches brings people to your blog is a great way to write new articles. Very nice case study Syed!
That was really great. I never knew that timings could affect the traffic you get from stumble or digg. However, I never can use StumbleUpon as the site doesn’t load here properly.
Yes this is new thing that i learned from here. Timing was never in my mind before. Now i will throw my posts at good times.
That was really great. I never knew that timings could affect the traffic you get from stumble or digg. However, I never can use StumbleUpon as the site doesn’t load here properly.
3600 uv/day is just awesome….
any chance of getting banned from SU by telling people to stumble ?
Chances of getting banned are high, but there are ways to get around it. I am writing an ebook which will be for sale. It will be included in that
I’ve used to buy some stumbleupon votes. That was working for some time but after it start to make less and less results. I think stumbleupon have a pretty damn good algorithms to find out are your stumbles natural or not.
If you keep stumbling from the same account, or the same person is stumbling it / discovering the article for you then the results goes down.
Yes. If StumbleUpon finds out that you’ve been stumbling the same domain name a lot of times, then it will disable or suspend your account. I believe there is some one domain to other domains ratio that has to be kept in mind while stumbling.
Not only does the result go down but a few more would ban a thumb from that account on that specific website. It has happened to me once!
Sweet post. Results don’t lie.
Its always good to go on the search query basis which helps to inc the traffic ….
Good to see that u have pretty good traffic
Congrats
ZK
Awesome post! I like to experiment with new ways to generate traffic. I will look into what you did and let you know how it works for me.
Well, its a great thing that you have pointed out. It’s an experiment worth getting into and if you have such great results, then all the more great. I’d like to see how I execute this….
Congratulations! It is very hard to get constant traffic from stumbleupon five days in a rough. You mentioned digg in your post, did you hit front page on digg also ? I guess in that case you would have much higher traffic those days ?
FP on Digg is like more than 50k visitors in a day . It can even crash your serevr. Right?
Yes it can that is why you use WP Super Cache.
Really intersting post, especially with regards to stumbleupon. I am finding my way with SU and appreciate this is another unique way of increasing traffic. I must give it a try soon.
That is Digg (in another post) and Stumbleupon you explained really well. I am sure a lot of us learnt a lot about how each of these services can be used to great effect.
Wow. This post just give me an idea on how to use stumble. By the way, if ok to publish in this comment, my stumble upon username = jojobucuk .
I like your tactics and agree that stat analysis is important. I will now be watching over the titles as I schedule my weekly posts.
Thanks for the pointers as well.
Thats really cool, increasing your traffic thrice.. I hope i get some traffic like this too
Get creative with titles. I guess that will be the takeaway lesson from this post.
No questions here. You actually answered a question I had about stumbleupon. I have noticed in the past a wave of hundreds of visitors a time all from srumbleupon. Didnt know how it happened so randomly but now I do. It was most likely a handful of people all stumbling the same post.
SU has worked for me too. ONly problem is that when the same ppl keep stumbling from the same site more than once, SU happens to be discounting those thumbs ups. Have you experienced this?
[...] % unique visitors per day (well about 2500 to be exact) yes Balkhis has been there, done that in Case Study – I increased my traffic from 1100 uniques to 3600 uniques per day in a week. Did you enjoy this post? If yes, why not subscribe to my RSS feed or get it via Email. That way [...]
Nice traffic generation tactics. You really have it all pinned down to a science. lol.
It is a great revelation that such minor timing in posting can make such huge difference. Good tip for all bloggers with real content. Nice post anyway. I enjoyed reading it.
I start working on it, wrote a article specially to get some traffic from google. I frame the article title catchy and thats all. that single article is sending at least 300 to 400 visitors every week from google. So analysis is the key.
While paying people to stumble or digg your article actually works. It seems to be over inflated, because people aren’t stumble or digg your article because they found it to be content worthy. Since you pay people and people are willing to do almost anything for money, it seems to paint a false picture of the site.
To me, when you do this, the site is actually manipulated and over rated. While the site still can be of quality and have worthy content, it is just manipulated by the means of taking shortcuts.
This is my opinion and I am sure that many will disagree with it. I am building my site on ethical principals that are for the long haul.
It seems that with the short attention span and instant gratification of our society the title of the post is becoming increasingly important. Of course, the content needs to be strong, but you need to pull in the readers.
I was just wondering if this would work for any kind of website, besides a blog based website. Take for example a website that sells custom apparel for anything. I would like to increase my traffic to this website but wanting and it happening are two different things as I am finding out.
Thanks
Mr. School Fundraising Ideas
Ethical principals must be observed in the first place,that is very important and this is the grounding of any business.
Syed,
“If StumbleUpon finds out that you’ve been stumbling the same domain name a lot of times, then it will disable or suspend your account. I believe there is some one domain to other domains ratio that has to be kept in mind while stumbling”.
Do you know how true is this as in my forum we have a group going on in which we stumble each other’s posts.
Peter Lee
How very interesting! I have heard about it for the first time.It is very good of you sharing this.
wow, that is an amazing increase in traffic. Well done!
Nice traffic generation tactics. Ethical principals must be observed in the first place,that is very important and this is the grounding of any business.
Thanks for sharing with these pointers on generating traffic. I have had no idea that timing may result the increasing of my readers.
Timing is a major factor in getting onto social media. You have to know when a lot of users are getting on. Because there are some dead times and there are times when everyone is on it.
Great, I suppose you always need to plan before you really fulfill an aim. Unfortunately, I never took that into consideration, thanks for outlining these points!
Sounds like a great idea. Analyize the keywords and choose great headlines! I will have to try in out on my online income blog!
its a good post.i come here from peter lee,and what he said about is right.i am glad to know this blog.thank you
Good case study. I agree that writing good content never fails to bring in the traffic and that should be motivation enough for new bloggers to remember. I’ve had good traffic from SU but they don’t convert well at all.
I absolutely share the idea of timing.May be it is the reflection of the theory of waves.