What Levels of Traffic to Expect

[Andy]

Hopefully we can get a discussion going here about what it takes to get certain levels of traffic to a website and our own personal experiences.

I will kick it off with results from one of my recent websites. This is a blog in a narrow niche about optimizing aspects of a web site. I set this up to promote my own products that are related to this topic. But I haven't marketed them yet. I am mostly posting my articles and networking on blogs by posting comments.

The site is about 4 months old now and I have posted 32 unique articles to the site. Currently, the traffic is 43 visitors per day (some will be return visitors) and 83 page views per day according to AW Stats.

The monthly growth rate has been like this for unique visitors:

March: 154
April:  169
May: 262
June: 158 (11 days)

This seems to be the beginning of an exponential growth curve and is a clear demonstration that it takes time and dedication to make a success out of a website. You can't simply click buttons on tools and generate successful sites.

Personally, I find it exciting to have even this many visitors. So I hope it gives you some idea of what to expect in terms of site visitors compared to how much content you add to your site and how socially active you are. I guess I comment on at least 1 related blog per day to give you an idea.

My latest article is PPC Landing Page - Optimizing Website Structure #1 which may give you an idea of the length and structure of an article that I try and produce.

Share your data...

[Menard]

On my new adult site I am getting around 30 uniques a day. Of course, figure into the equation that I am promoting the site daily (each day I submit to either a few directories or get it on a toplist or exchange) so those uniques are probably a little inflated due to bots, admin checks, and that some sites have a tendency to get an early traffic burst from toplists when they are first listed.

A key component of getting it promoted has, interestingly, become that ranking addon in Firefox. Before, I would just try to submit to any toplist I could, but being able to see if the site has any kind of ranking worth the effort is helping, I think, in getting more quality backlinks, saving me time, saving page space by not having so many recips, and probably getting appreciation from visitors who don't have to put up with as much recip junk on the site.

We'll see how it goes and if the current uniques hold up and even increase.

[Andy]

Thanks for contributing to the thread Menard. You have to be careful with "exchanges" since that traffic is well 

Also, how about "top lists" ? is this good traffic. Maybe it is, I have no idea.

What I am doing is social media posting such as to blogs, this forum and my own sites. Also, I am looking into ways to virally generate traffic.

I was actually shocked to see the stats from one prominent blogger that gets only around 30 visitors per day to his cool looking blog.

The blogging scam is a severe problem now I think with all these bloggers working 80 hour work weeks to make maybe $1 a day.

[Menard]

Thanks for contributing to the thread Menard. You have to be careful with "exchanges" since that traffic is well 

Also, how about "top lists" ? is this good traffic. Maybe it is, I have no idea.

I have not put the new site on any traffic exchanges.

Toplists? I don't actually know who all clicks through on those. I do know that they can get search engine traffic due to keyword loading from all of the sites submitted to them. I have found, in the past, that toplists and link dumps can show up early in search results; we'll see what the present holds for them.

[Nicolas]

I've heard that the content of the website should be always fresh and lucrative in order to gain more traffic to the site.