I don’t like an increase in traffic

I don’t like an increase in traffic. I won’t be able to make money on it and it’s just a waste of resources especially on bandwidth. However, I do like something else…

I managed to increase my traffic by 250% in 1 month!

For the past few months, I’ve been looking for ways to increase my blog’s traffic. I read a lot of articles on how to increase my traffic. Some of the tips I’ve read I applied on this blog such as using social bookmarks (I’ve been active on StumbleUpon) and on commenting on other blogs. I admit that I have not done the other tips such as submitting my blog to directories and top sites.

However, take a look at my blog’s traffic growth. You would see that traffic has been growing steadily since July but it increased big time in December. Do you know what I did to increase my traffic by this much?

Calling all the pervs!

It was late November that I read on Macuha’s blog about pinay s-c-a-n-d-a-l and seeing that it would a good way to increase traffic, I joined it (I won’t be linking to those posts I made for a reason to be explained later). I made my own posts about it and bit by bit I started ranking on the search engine results. I received a lot of traffic and I was happy. Every time I log-in to my statistics such as Google Analytics and WordPress Stats, I would see an upward trend in page views and unique visitors but after a while, I sense that something was wrong.

Aside from an increase in traffic, I also had an increase in bounce rate, increase in bandwidth consumption but no increase in earnings. Let us go through each one of them…

• increase in traffic – everytime I look at my stats I get about 100+ queries on pinay s-c-a-n-d-a-l. let’s just say that every search is a new visitor and you do the math
• increase in bounce rates – pervs wants to see some hot, steamy action.. however when they visit this blog, they get disappointed and leave.
• increase in bandwidth consumption – every page view uses up resources like the images of the blog, the post page etcetera…
• NO increase in earnings – I feel like a shopping mall where people just go in to savor the air conditioner without buying anything at all…

Because of this surge of traffic, I had to switch web hosts because 5gb a month isn’t enough anymore. So what have I gained from this increase of traffic? Nothing! I even had to spend money in a new webhost.

Increasing traffic isn’t enough

Increasing traffic isn’t enough. I’ve already discuss how I managed to increase my traffic but it didn’t convert to any earnings. In fact, it’s just more expenses. I just call it useless traffic. These kind of traffic won’t participate in blog discussions, click on your ads or even just stay for a while.

So now you see why I don’t like an increase in traffic. However, I did mention in the first paragraph that I like something else and that something else is…

Traffic that converts to earnings

Now this is what I like, traffic that converts to earnings. Let’s be realistic here. We buy our domains and webhosting packages using our own money and we create a blog. I’m sure that there’s a part of you there that wants to gain back what you spent on your hosting through your blog. One of the simplest (not necessarily the easiest) way to gain it back is through Google Adsense. When somebody clicks on the the adsense ad, you gain money.

Unless you already have an established reader base, I’m sure that most of your traffic comes from search engines. When people search, they expect to gain what they are searching. Now let’s compare the traffic between two of my biggest traffic delivering posts, pinay sandal (just add a “c”) and ragnarok bot.

In terms of search volume, pinay sandal wins and obviously it gives my blog more traffic than ragnarok bot however, it is the opposite in terms of adsense earnings. In fact, pinay sandal doesn’t give me a cent because it belongs to the “stop words” of Google adsense (words that will make adsense show public ads or you-can’t-earn-a-cent-with-them ads).

So now, do you get my point? Writing about pinay sandal was a big mistake on my part. Not only did I waste resources on it, I did not even make a cent out of it. However, I’m glad I wrote about ragnarok bot because it gave me adsense earnings. The earnings are not that high because when I researched about ragnarok’s cost per click in adsense, it’s just cheap (less than one dollar).

My single tip

If you rely on adsense as one of your sources on your blog’s income, make sure that the articles you write are those who can bring clicks to your ads. I’m not saying that you will write articles asking your visitors to click on them. Start by looking for keywords to optimize such as “eating disorders”, “ragnarok bot”, and “naruto manga”. (Hey I’m giving away my prospect keywords already) and write posts about them.

If you need help in looking for you keywords, check out Manuel Villoria’s post on how to find keywords. (I’m going to write my own version soon.)

Lastly, I did not link to any of my pinay sandal posts because I don’t want to add give link juice to them. In fact, I want to remove them from the search engine results.. that useless traffic generator. ^_^

Update

In addition to what I’ve said, Macuha has shared to me Glennx post on how to earn from these types of posts, so if you are interested just give it a click. I’d love to try this. ^_^

Subscribe to my feeds

Did you learn something from this post? Want to say something? Then just write it in the comments. Want to learn more? Then subscribe to my feeds…

Subscribe to my feeds