135: How to Grow Your Blog’s Traffic and Income by Setting Goals

Setting Goals to Grow Your Traffic and Income Today’s podcast is about setting goals to grow your traffic and income. Pamela, one of our readers asked this question: “Darren I’ve been blogging now for 12 months and I’ve seen some growth in my traffic and more recently income - but I’m finding it hard to know whether I’m going well or not because I don’t know where a 12 month old blog should be at? Maybe it’s too hard to give a number but do you have any advice on what kind of goals I should be setting myself for my blogging when it comes to traffic or income?” This is a great question that ProBlogger readers often ask. It may be a bit hard to answer when it comes to specific numbers because no two blogs are alike. There are many factors that go into blogging. I do think it is useful to have goals. Today I’m going to make some suggestions on how to set those goals based on how I did it back in 2004 when I began to monetize my blog. In Today’s Episode Setting Goals to Grow Your Traffic and Income Listen to this episode in the player above or here on iTunes. In 2004, I started to experiment with AdSense ads and Amazon’s Affiliate program I noticed my traffic was growing, but I wondered how much traffic I actually needed This is before Google Analytics - most blog stats were freely viewable through Site Meter I knew I needed to do something different and stop comparing my blog to other blogs I decided to compare my monthly traffic to the traffic of my blog from the previous month My initial goal was any uptrend - I was happy with this for the first few months I realized my blog was growing about 5% every month - gently trending up over time I decided to set goals that were a bit more aggressive My first goal was to double my traffic percentage or to go up 10% instead of 5% There were times when 10% growth was easy, there were also other months where it seemed possible, but by having that goal, I could see if I was on track and it helped me grow my blog faster I did the same thing with my AdSense income - I knew AdSense income would increase with traffic increases, so I made my income goal more aggressive - if my traffic goal was 10%, I would make my income goal 15% I did this because I knew there were a number of ways to increase AdSense by using it better - changing placement, size, color, optimizing ads I also started selling ads directly through advertisers and using other networks like Chitika I found that by running other networks and optimizing AdSense sometime I increased my income by 50 or 100 percent Compare monthly stats from month to month or each month from year to year See how you are trending, then set goals that are slightly more aggressive Percentages will vary, at some stages growth is easier You can apply these techniques to many different stats - social media, subscribers, bounce rates, the goal is to be better each month Setting goals is fantastic - being aggressive and having something to aim for can stretch you Think about the strategies to get to those goals - not just the end result - where will the traffic increase come from? What blogs, content, posting frequency, etc. Further Resources on Setting Goals to Grow Your Traffic and Income How to Find Readers For Your Blog How to Use 2 Types of Content to Find Readers for Your Blog How to Turn Surfers into Blog Readers by Building a Sticky Blog How to Find Readers for Your Blog Through Commenting and Relationships Grow Traffic to Your Blog Through Guest Posting and Creating Content for Other Blogs, Forums, Media and Events How to Make a Full Time Income From Your Blog Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to Episode 135 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. Today,