Nine Months Have Passed Since I Started Building Traffic to Rich Sage dot Com

My results are outstanding, with most of the traffic being referred by Google searches.  Then MSN and Yahoo are responsible for the next major traffic deliveries, followed by direct input of the domain name. After that RSS, forum and traffic from word-of-mouth sources round out my traffic building success.

I still have 3 days of reporting to add to the below chart, but what I see now are solid figures that are headed in the right direction.  Last month was not a correction, as much as you see, because part of the stats were “lost” when Rich Sage dot com was moved to a new server.

My traffic building effort consisted of using WordPress to setup a search engine friendly site with everything from search engine friendly page titles to a sitemap that is automatically generated for Google, MSN and Yahoo and then all 3 search engines are ‘pinged’ when changes take place.

Most of the technical parts of setting up and running a search engine friendly site were managed by WordPress and several plugins.  Next I’ll discuss what I did personally…

As I said, much of the technical stuff to help build traffic at Rich Sage dot com was handled by WordPress.  That left me doing a lot of the manual things, and I’ve listed them below.

Registration at Web2.0 Sites: I’ve pretty much registered at the TOP 50 Web 2.0 properties –every where from Digg to Facebook, I have used to put ads, make site registrations and publish content.

Forum Participation: I’ve discussed my participation in two marketing forums  –the Warrior Forum and the Digital Point Forums, in which I post some content and help solve problems.  Both of those sites send plenty of traffic, mainly from my signature that links to specific pages at Rich Sage dot com.

Site Reviews: I did more of this when I first got started, but it didn’t last long because of the time commitment.  I exchanged reviews that were linked to Rich Sage dot com using a key word or phrase.  While the traffic is not huge, it is very consistent.   I should add that those links help greatly with search engine rankings.

Community of Readers: I am drawing more and more readers to specific posts that are often bookmarked and those visitors obviously re-visit the entire site.  I have done some promotional work just to disseminate information from some of the key posts, and as more and more posts get popular, I will link from articles to them to provide more information on any given topic.  For example, the popular post “Make Money Online 11-Step Plan” has a summary article which I publish at article sites.  To get more information, readers have to visit the original article.

Community of Information: I didn’t like the idea of Rich Sage dot com being just a destination for information on building a web site and online business.  I wanted to be a destination community  -the Rich Sage Community, which I launched as I debuted the new RichSage WordPress theme.  The “Community” provides as many services as possible for FREE, and has several locations where members can discuss topics in forums.  My favorite is the Utopia forum, which I hope will catch on with the sustainable living group.

Helpful Content: After everything is said and done, nothing helps build traffic than content that in many ways is beneficial to the reader. Period. My content is not that technical, mainly uses WordPress to accomplish tasks and the rest of the time uses common sense to build traffic.  I think that resonates well with my readers.  I’ll just keep doing more of it!

Article Publishing: This aspect I didn’t get into until much later in my efforts.  I do have a lot of faith in it, but given my commitments, it’s difficult to ‘crank out’ a 100 articles.  But it WILL happen.  I will write 10 very good ones and then hand it over to a professional to do the rest.  Those articles will get published! As often as I can I follow my article publishing process to publish important articles.

OLD WORLD Business & Marketing: Down to ‘old world’ business ideas, like my email which always has a signature line and link “Rich Sage Community: http://www.richsage.com”  –I am sure there are clicks from friends to colleagues!  Then there are my business cards –the first one thousand are nearly distributed to just about everyone I’ve met this year.  Earlier in the month I was at a 4th of July picnic (Independence Day, USA) and I passed out a card to everyone who asked me “What are you doing these days?”.  The answer was in one card! I am the Rich Sage.  It greatly helps to have one brand.  It’s interesting how often “Rich Sage” is search on Google.  That process will only increase.  I have designed a new card which goes for a print run of 10,000.  Add to that t-shirts, mugs, e-books, etc., etc.  Things get busy rather fast.

There is no lone silver bullet to building website traffic. There are lots of ways, and the only way to make sure that you are part of a fast-growing online effort is to DO THEM ALL and then step back and see what worked well.  Then just do MORE of THE SAME  –put more resources into what worked well.  I will continue to do this month after month because I have reached only 10% of my traffic target!  With 90% to go and time flying, I will keep expanding my advertising and marketing efforts while doing all of the above.

Success & Carpe Diem,
Rich Sage