High Traffic Website Growth
When seeking a high traffic website, one thing people don’t realize, is the power of compound growth! Webmasters will analyze their traffic stats and see that they might have gone up 10-20% in traffic from the previous month. They figure after a year, they will probably double their traffic (17% X 12 = 200%) That can be depressing, if you only are getting a couple hundred visitors a month. But your traffic actually will add up faster than that, due to something called compound growth.
In other words, 20% growth every month accumulates mathematically to not 240% growth a year in traffic (.2 X 12= 2.4), but actually almost 400% (1.2 X 1.2 X 1.2 X 1.2 …. done 12 times = approximately 400%). Likewise just 25% growth in traffic per month does not equal 300%(3 times as much) growth in a year, but mathematically it comes out to 12 times as much traffic in one year!
There is many things that you can do to cause traffic growth each month. For established websites, repeat visits is usually the main underlining reason for continual long term compound growth. If just 1% of your visitors return to your site because they liked it, you will experience 35% growth every single month, automatically without doing anything. Over time that keeps adding up cumulatively. If you can get a tiny percent to come back for another visit, you are on your way to getting a high traffic site.
Worrying about repeat visits won’t be very helpful to you however, if your reading this and your site is 6 months old, has low search engine rank and content, and only getting 50 visits a day. You would first need to work on getting the site more established and getting more initial traffic.
The following below will be some things I believe you can do, to pro-actively help accelerate your websites traffic growth in the beginning.
1) Make your site look attractive or creative. I know that sounds very minor, but let me explain in detail. When a site is attractive or is creative, a visitor is more likely to remember your website. And if he remembers your website he not only will be more likely revisit it, but he will also have a higher chance of wanting to give you a backlink from his website.
2) Networking. It even has it’s own term, now called Social media Optimization (SEO). This is where you use social networking sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Technorati,etc to interact with other users. Through these sites you can give your traffic a boost that has a domino effect as word spreads. You can integrate plugins into your site for these sites to help with their promotion. Some websites do better centered around SMO than others, such as fun/funny sites or sites with original and quality content. You can also do networking on your own by doing link exchanges with other sites or commenting on relevant blogs.
3) Content. Writing excellent content that is not only interesting, but written in a way different from most, is an excellent way to get people’s attention. This will lead to repeat visitors and backlinks from other bloggers who found your articles interesting.
Even more important than that though, is the more content you write, the higher chance someone will find your site through a search engine. No new content means stale search engine traffic growth. You cannot get to a high traffic website(unless you want to spend tons of money on advertising) without the help of search engines. And you cannot get a ton of traffic from search engines, without writing tons of original content from a diverse range of topics.
If you don’t plan on continually adding new original content for years to come, forget about getting a high traffic website. A site that doesn’t have much content will never get off the ground, because it simply won’t have enough content to fill the search engines on hundreds of different keyword search phrases.
An active website will also mean a visitor is more likely to come back and see what new things you are saying in the coming days. Add RSS feed icons visibly to your website to make it easy for people to want to come back.
4) SEO (search engine optimization). Search engine placement is very crucial. Your goal is to do everything you can to get your website to good results in the search engines. Without that high rankings you will NEVER receive a very high traffic website. A site that is at the bottom of the 2nd page probably won’t even get 10% of the clicks then if it was at the bottom of the first page for an SERP (Search engine result page).
Continually getting higher rank for SERP’s will give you massive accelerated growth. SEO is also one of the most difficult things to do of these 4, not because of time, but in learning and applying it.
Final thoughts:
Do not expect a double digit growth every single month, especially after the first 6 months or certain competitive niches, but your goal should be growth every month. As long as your site is growing steadily, you can’t complain. If you think its growing too slow, just work a little harder or learn how to better promote your site.

June 24th, 2007
Thanks for article Paul. The four points you mentioned do ring true - especially the learning curve with SEO! There’s a cool conference in Vegas in November called PostieCon where the pros get together to share their expertise on this little subject. It’s also free - You should check it out.
Thanks again -
aB.
June 24th, 2007
Thanks for your post. I live a few hours from vegas, but won’t be able to attend. Maybe someday in the future.
June 26th, 2007
Excellent article, Paul.
January 30th, 2008
That was very helpful for affiliate marketers like me, who need traffic in order to best optimize earnings on a website for their affiliate programs.
January 30th, 2008
very helpful article.Thanks!
March 25th, 2008
Thanks for the info
April 17th, 2008
When starting Ezdate123 we tried everything to bring in traffic…. The best way was Google adwords…….we tried radio, TV, Direct mail etc…..Give Google a try.. Mike/ezdate123
May 22nd, 2008
Man these was usefull informaion
and i agree with you in every point espically the point of social netwroks
really it has alot of users that would make people know about your site or product
Thank You
August 28th, 2008
Great article Paul! In my experience, constant new content is key to developing search traffic. I find social media sends traffic, but the traffic is not the greatest and bounce rate seems to be pretty high.
dave
September 30th, 2008
what is the industry standard on bounce rates? what should we be looking at?
thanks, Ursula