This guest post is by Dan H., the founder and editor at Maciverse.com. Maciverse is a Mac Help website with tips, tutorials, and news for Mac users both new and old. Follow Dan on Twitter: @Maciverse.
Maciverse.com is a website that covers everything about Apple’s Mac computers. It has been almost 2 years since we started the website and we are now really hitting our stride. We currently average 70,000+ monthly unique visitors, but that wasn’t always the case. In fact, most of our success has come during the last year. Twelve months ago we average 12,000 monthly visitors; we’ve since discovered a few tips, tricks, and secrets that have allowed us to grow quickly to where we are today. In this post we’d like to share some of those lessons learned that have contributed to our growth.
Finding Your Niche
One thing almost any professional blogger will tell you before you start blogging is that you need to find your niche. Writing just about yourself and the things you do each day may be enjoyable for you, but finding thousands of other people that want to read about your daily adventures will be difficult. Its not that people aren’t interested in what you have to say, it may just be that they’re more interested in your knowledge and experience about one particular topic. Based on our experience with Maciverse and a few other websites, we advise you to find a niche that’s big enough to allow your blog to grow to a significant number of readers but at the same time not be so large and vast that you’re trying to compete with the major players in a market.
Unless you started blogging in 1999 or are a major online player, the chances of you starting a new blog about broad topics such as Finance, Professional Blogging, Making Money Online, Professional Sports, or News and quickly being a major hit in the blogosphere is very unlikely. But that doesn’t mean you can’t pick your niche in a more narrow portion of those areas and still be successful. We knew when we entered the Mac blogging market that it would be competitive but we believed we had a way to make ourselves stand out and fill a need.
Keep Your Niche Narrow
We launched Maciverse in 2008 and were significantly late to the Mac blogging scene. We understood the space was very competitive and that it would be difficult to be successful if we were just another version of the many Mac blogs already out there. What we decided to do was to narrow our focus to newer Mac owners rather than the uber Mac geeks. We’ve all watched the computer market long enough to see that the iPod and iPhone halo effect, along with some very effective advertising, have significantly increasing the number of Mac users. We figured that all of these new owners would need someplace to find answers to their questions. By answering basic questions and posting simple tutorials, rather than covering Mac rumors and breaking news, we found our sweet spot and a place we could be in the Mac space with little competition.
Building Traffic Without Competing With The Big Blogs
In early fall of 2009, Apple released their latest operating system, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. As is custom, the large Mac and Tech blogs were writing reviews of the topic, how much it would cost, when and where it would be available. We decided that there was so much hype around the product that their must be an opportunity for us to increase our traffic by taking a different approach than the other guys.
What we did first was to write one of our longest posts ever. The post covered everything and anything we could come up with on Snow Leopard. We appropriately broke the article up into different sections, calling out keywords in the headers of each section, and completely exhausted ourselves in details the article. This article wasn’t what gained us traffic, nor was it the intent. We wrote this long article so that we could review the keywords people were using to find it.
After we published the article, we watched our Google Analytics stats and keywords used on search engines that brought individuals to the new post. We started to see the exact topics and keywords that people were searching for that weren’t necessarily being covered the larger blogs. From that data, we had exactly what we needed to write very targeted articles that wouldn’t receive millions of hits like the other blogs, but could still welcome a nice flood of traffic. Some examples of those articles are: Install OS X Snow Leopard From a USB Flash Drive, Snow Leopard Parental Controls, and Install Snow Leopard On an External USB Hard Drive. While not as sexy or glamorous as the more general articles, these longer-tail articles quickly gained us more traffic.
Traffic Increase Of More Than 100%
The method described above increased, almost overnight, the daily visits to Maciverse.com by more than 100%.
The traffic did decrease a bit as time passed from the product launch and interest waned, but we continue to see success from duplicating this approach for every large Mac announcement. It allows us to understand more about the people in our narrow niche market, see where the big blogs weren’t competing, and provide to visitors the information they are looking for.
How Your Blog Can Achieve Significant Month to Month Growth
There is nothing more important to most bloggers than seeing their traffic and community increase each month. In our efforts over the past year to increase Maciverse’s position in the Mac blogging market we learned a lot about blogging. Below, summarizing what we learned, are 3 ways to help you increase your blog traffic each month:
- Be Unique- You need to provide unique content to visitors to your site so they come back, subscribe, follow you on twitter, comment, and link to your site. As you can see from our approach above, we try to cover stories from a unique perspective or cover smaller topics that get less publicity. Read your competitors blogs and understand how they view the topics they write about. Try taking a contrarian viewpoint, digging deeper into the topic, and generally providing new and different insight and information to generate interest in your site.
Our success with the Snow Leopard release article showed us that there is always something unique about a topic that has probably not been covered. Providing unique content about popular topics will help users find your blog organically and it will most likely be what sets you apart from other blogs.
- Use The Right Keywords – If you’re not writing about a topic the same way that your potential audience talks about it then many potentially interested visitors may never find your site. Optimizing your site to reflect the way individuals search for your market will help you increase your traffic.
Google’s Keyword Tool is a great source for finding out how people search about a topic. Enter in some of the keywords you’ve used on past articles and then let the Google tool show you how many people are searching for those words. The tool also provides synonyms or potentially different ways to word the topics you’ve written about and will show you the way most people search for particular topics.
By making the words and terms in your site match the way individuals search for them you’ll make it easy for Google, Bing, and Yahoo to know that each topic you’re writing about may have the answers that people are searching for. Go back through your old blogs posts and check to see if the words you used on a topic match the way that people search for that topic. If not, make the quick changes to your blog post titles, page titles, bolded keywords, etc so that they reflect the most popular search terms. This alone will help increase your monthly traffic.
- Utilize Analytics – If you’re not utilizing blog traffic analysis tools like Google Analytics on your blog then you’re missing out on essential information that can help you make your blog a huge success. Google Analytics and many other web analytic software services are free and easy to incorporate into your blog. Analytical input is part of every article we write. A few times a month we’ll review the analytical data on Maciverse to see how people are finding our site, the search keywords used by visitors that enter the various blog posts we’ve written, and how long visitors are staying on our site.
Google Analytics will provide you with all the keywords used in search phrases that lead visitors to your site and breaks the information down post by post. We have spent significantly more time this year looking at the keywords that drive traffic to our site. It has helped us identify topics that readers are looking for that we may have not yet provided a post for as well as help us understand when people are looking for more information about a topic we’ve covered. This keyword research helped us find the topics we wrote about with the launch of Snow Leopard and to build our strategy that increased our site traffic by over 100%. It also has helped us keep a long list of topics to cover for future posts on our blog.
Using the methods described above Maciverse.com was able to see month to month traffic growth and still continues to do so. We continue to keep up with advice from sites such as remarkablogger’s Blog Coaching to help us identify new and different ways to reach our readers and hope to see continued success into 2010.
What unique approaches and lessons have you learned that has helped you and your blog grow in 2009? What do you plan to do in 2010 to continue to grow your traffic?
Perhaps I should consider the right keywords on my blog. I have not been paying much attention to it. On other aspects though, I have done good.
When you consider how important search traffic is, it only makes sense.
There is no other sense to make. If you know who and why someone is visiting your site and you don't react, you miss out. Better than reacting is proacting…but that comes in time.
thank you for sharing.. i own a personal blog by the way =)
Good tips.The best way to build traffic is to be unique, choosing the right niche is important as well and then writing a useful and helpful blog post every day and linking out to other blogs.Many people are afraid to lose “link juice” for linking out, but this actually boosts your ranking and gets you more traffic.
This is definitely interesting. When I read through this and I think about some of the concepts in Seth Godin's book Tribes, I tend to pay attention to the value of 1000 true fans. While I agree there's no doubt that you can get search engine traffic by taking this approach, how valuable is that traffic. Some things I think about in terms of traffic:
1) How many of these people become part of my community?
2) How many do I develop a real relationship with?
3) When I write for a search engine and focus too much on keywords, does my writing quality suffer (I think it does)?
A niche can help you overcome many of these hurdles. I'm not a blog exerpt per se and have been only at it for about 8 months. To me being unique is the one thing that trumps all of these. Part of why we love certain blogs is that the person has an interesting story and they communicate it well. Some of my favorite blogs are people that you've probably never even heard of or are relatively unknown. I think we also have to be careful not get obsessive over analytics. One thing I realized is that analytics don't have enough value to use for insights until you've been around for at least 3 months.
Awesome story and great lessons, thanks for sharing. Man, I have tons of questions, so here goes
From your site and about-page, I saw that “we” is two of you, was it like that from the start? Did you each focus on specific kind of posts, topic or such?
About choosing the niche and narrowing down… Did you find your (sub-)topic right away or did it become “clear” a bit later, and have you expanded the blog to other topics later when you've grown bigger?
How many posts you published per day/week at the start, and have you lowered/upped the frequency now that you've grown bigger?
There was two of us originally and we've expanded our authors to three or four authors over the past few months. We originally focused on this niche and periodically expand our topic a bit but have not yet seen much success with this. We may not be big enough yet for this in our market, but we're getting there. We each write about any topic that we feel fits the site, and coordinate with each other to make sure topics that should be covered are receiving the attention they need. The first year we tried to write 4 – 6 posts a week. Now we get about 2 – 3 but would like to be back at 4 – 6.
Excellent – thank you so much for the reply. You've done a great job, and it's good to know that one doesn't necessary have to go for multiple times a day to get nice growth like you did
Outstanding article, thank you Dan! I clicked over just now and used the Google Keyword Tool. I put in the URL for my blog and received a WEALTH of information. Certain keywords were so significantly popular over others that I'm truly floored. No question about what my upcoming blog posts will cover.
I also took the remarkablogger blog coaching seminar in the Fall and highly recommend it, besides learning some excellent traffic building techniques it helped me re-focus and become excited again about my blogging which of course flows into my writing and has re-energized me and my readers. Thank you Michael!
You're welcome. Glad you found Dan's method helpful for you! Some folks are
really in the dark about what keywords really matter, and it's easy to find
out!
It is very important for bloggers to learn how to optimize their keywords in order to rank and generate more traffic. Social media promotions is also effective in creating buzz about your blog. It's best to try all the channels possible to increase traffic.
It is really true that in blogging one must find their very own sweet spot and excel in it. Everyone has something to share and it's up to you to find where you are an expert of and write about it or share it. It is also good to keep in mind that quitting is the worst thing you can do, as it’s the only real way to fail at blogging and internet marketing.
That is very true. Not just persistence, but also imagination. Your three
main qualities for success are: knowledge, persistence, and imagination.
These three build each other up.
Imagination – I like that one! For me the hardest one.
Andrew
That's a fabulous idea. I've got this keyword data and people say it's useful, but I'd never really considered mining it for insights into how people really think – rather I've considered it a stroke of luck that they've still found my blog!
I'm going to give it a go. Thanks!
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You have a lot of good articles with useful information. Thanks for posting this article on how to do build traffic and to start a blog.
Thank you for your tip.I will try it.But 1 question how can people know the right keyword?
Finding the right keywords is a challenge. Learning how to do keyword
research will help you. There are many free keyword tools online you can use
to find keywords, like Wordtracker and Google's search-based keyword tool.
Very nice. We almost have the same ways in increasing traffic but I don't do some. Thanks for sharing. =)
Using analytics to find the keyword searches is genious.
The trick is knowing which keywords matter.
Thanks for sharing this
Great article. I'll try and implement some of your tips to see if I can improve my traffic.
Thank you for this artilce. I will use few tips.
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great article. I was actually thinking being unique and choosing a niche would narrow the people reading your blog. I've learnt something new.
Fantastic sharing! That's what I'm looking for!
Thanks for the tips they have helped me in my quest to find good ways to boost traffic thats not spamming
Glad you liked it William.
These are really great tips. I have used some of them and plan to implement others. I think the social media widgets are really important as well, like the ones you have here.
Thanks!
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very excellent points you said…Thank you fo this tips
Remarkable post indeed. Very helpful. Thanks.
Really good article, now i will go to our analyttics account and will check the keywords more often! But the increase of your traffic is amazing 100% from 2000 to 4000 visitos a day!!!
Thanks for the great information you have here. Increased traffic is hard to come by.