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 because it will seem like forever to get a lot of traffic. However, your traffic actually will add up even faster than your calculations, due to a mathematical model called compound growth!

The reason is because most people don’t calculate compound growth. They either forgot it or don’t know how to do it. 20% growth every month mathematically is not 240% growth a year in traffic (1.20 X 12= 2.4), but actually almost 890%. This is because you calculate it like (1.2 X 1.2 X 1.2 X 1.2 …. done 12 times = approximately 890%). That is how compound growth is really calculated in mathematics. 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!

If your website is getting 200 visitors a month and you grow 25% a month that means you will have 2400/ month after a year. Compound growth does happen, it happens to me. My sites in total increased about 400% (4 times as much) over the past year, even though I’m averaging about 10% or so growth per month.

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 site is 6 months old, has low search engine rank and content, and getting a few hundred 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 and creative.When a site is attractive or has a very creative idea behind it, a visitor is more likely to remember your website. And if they remember your website, they are more likely revisit it and give you a backlink from their website. Having a catchy domain name and theme is very helpful too.

2)Social 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 and forums to get attention from your peers and other webmasters.

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 though, is that you should write plenty of original content. The more original well written content you write, the more traffic you receive in the SERPs (search engine result pages). You won’t get a whole lot of search engine traffic, without at least a few dozen unique quality written articles or content pages. When you have written dozens or even hundreds of quality content, people will find your site through all kinds of long tail keywords in the search engines. You also might want to add new content periodically. An active website will also mean a visitor is more likely to come back and see what new things you are saying. 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. This is the most important thing you can do. Without that high rankings you will probably 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 than if it was at the bottom of the page one 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 because it requires not only time, but a lot of learning how to do properly and adapting to any algorithm changes or penalties you may receive.

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.