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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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?