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Organic Traffic Building

The site hit a milestone of sorts, traffic-wise, the Sunday before last. On the 19th, I logged over 100 unique visitors in one day! I was pretty excited about that, mostly because these were real human visitors who came to read my blog, as opposed to mindless robots who just come to look around.

On the same day, more than 280 pages were requested, which means that, on average, each visitor clicked on almost two other pages besides the one they landed on. Not too shabby, sez I ! Some folks might sneer at these numbers, and harrumph that they get as many hits every time they sneeze – well, that’s great, but how long has their site been online? How long have they been promoting themselves? My public debut – in person at a local event, was only three weeks prior to that, so no one besides my wife and a few relatives and friends knew the site existed before then. Consider also that I had purposefully not advertised the site online anywhere – that everyone who knew about did so by word of mouth, and yes, I was pleased with the traffic.

I quick query of my database also reveals that before that date, a total of about 200 unique visitors had come by, so in one day the “audience” grew by about 50%. How did I do that? By registering my blog at a number of blog aggregators and feed services. It seems that people came to check out the newbie, and judging by the almost triple hits-to-visitors ratio, apparently they liked what they saw enough to take a look around. Cool!

As of now, a grand total of 475 unique visitors have darkened my URL (see the PixelList page for current stats), and if you subtract the roughly 5-10 robots that stop by nightly (mostly the same ones), that’s maybe 450 humans on this planet who are aware of my site’s existence. Ok, not earth-shattering or cyber-rattling, but hey, wait till I actually start promoting this on a broader scale !

So, why am I waiting? Mostly because I feel very strongly that this site is for and about Austin, and I really want to capture the flavor of this unique culture. I want all Austinites who visit here to make no mistake about where they landed, and to be able to identify with this space on an intimate level. Although the Million Dollar Home Page was an inspiration for this endeavor, I don’t want my home page to end up looking like that one did. We can do better. This is Austin, y’all !

So, although my marketing and sales methods right now are not scalable at all (it’s just little ol’ me), I think it’s the right thing to do. For now. I am starting to make small forays by advertising in very Austin-specific blogs, but mostly I am doing direct, in-person appeals.

Speaking of which, quite by accident I’ve discovered a web site promotion technique that I have not seen mentioned anywhere – LOOK FOR A JOB ! Yes, since one of the secondary reasons for creating this site was to demonstrate my web development skills, and specifically to show I can pick up and run with just about any technology new to me (I had never seen PHP code or downloaded MySQL before this), I have this site listed as a “personal web project” at the very top of my resume. So what happens is, I e-mail the resume to a recruiter or hiring manager, and sure enough, the first thing they do is check out the web site. One time, it looked like an entire office had landed here – wow, 80 page hits in a couple of hours, all from the same IP address! That was a fun interview, let me tell you.

My daily visitor count did not stay at the 100-something level, it dropped off after the initial curiosity, which was to be expected. I am using this blog to drive traffic for now, with the goal of establishing a base to grow from, so site promotion is really about blog promotion. This works well for the early advertisers, since the Skyline is on every blog page. Also, there is no real rush, since the ads are not time-based. Just a one-time, up-front payment, and the ad is there for all future traffic to enjoy.

I am having fun with this “personal web project”. Surprisingly, even making cold sales calls does not suck as much as I thought it would, and seeing the traffic build is very addictive. Coming up with ideas and implementing them as I see fit is also way cool (especially when they feed my addiction – like the cell phone accessible statistics feature).

My immediate goals now are to sell a few more ads and continue to tweak the site. Then I will embark on expanding the AustinMania! section, to convert it into a community-driven site. Stay tuned!