125% Growth in Traffic Using These Three ‘Boring’ Techniques: Growing My Site from 10,000 to 25,000 Monthly Visitors

Hi guys,

Today I’m excited to announce that I’ve reached my second mini milestone for Entrepreneur Campfire’s growth. I hit 25,000 UVs in the last month.

It has been a rather rocky journey.

Truth be told, I had expected to touch this milestone six months ago. Growth between January and August 2017 was promising. Campfire’s traffic was growing between 15 – 30% a month even without much effort.

Extrapolating from that growth, I had expected to touch 25,000 UVs breezily by January 2018.

But my hopes were dashed when I started noticing a drop in September 2017 which continued through October.

The traffic continued to plateau from December 2017 through April 2018, and only began to see signs of real growth by May 2018 when traffic continued to climb from 16,000+ UVs to over 23,000 by July 2018 and 25,000 in the last 30 days:

As of writing, Entrepreneur Campfire got 6,501 in the last week, or an average of 928 UVs per day:

The switch from a site with a negative growth to a positive one wasn’t by accident, however. I made some strategic changes to my growth strategy that fueled the growth.

What did I do?

Overcoming Feelings of Demotivation + Taking Action = Growth

I’ll be honest. When I saw the drop in September, I felt beaten. After seeing the site grow so much within six months, I had expected the growth to continue.

But I was naive.

In September, Google released some updates to its algorithm which saw SERPs being shifted.

I can’t confirm if my site was affected, but from the sustained drop in traffic month after month, I had a strong feeling it was.

At first, I didn’t know what to do. It was my first time seeing a drop like that in the past one year I was building the site.

Over time, I realized I was making a few fundamental mistakes. Once I corrected them, growth continued. My site even survived the latest Google’s August 1st and August 26th’s E-A-T algorithm changes.

The changes I did can be said to be ‘boring’ ones recommended by every marketing blog out there, but once I applied them, it worked like magic.

Copy These Three Things I Did To Kick My Site Out of Plateau

In the internet world, content is king.

I knew that. Yet, I didn’t make much of an effort to publish much content in 2017. In fact, I only published 21 posts last year.

This year, I decided to do things differently. Beginning the end of January I tried to publish at least one new post a week to see if it improves traffic to the site. Publishing content more frequently has, after all, been linked to a growth in traffic:

It makes sense too. For a new website, how else would you get traffic from Google unless you have more stuff for it to index?

I decided to give it a try.

Thankfully about two months after religiously posting an update every week, traffic started to grow again.

Seeing this growth, I continued investing time in creating content for Entrepreneur Campfire. As you can see above, the year isn’t over yet and I’ve already published more content than I did the entire of last year.

I intend to publish more than 10 more posts this year, totalling this year’s articles to more than 40 and the site’s total number of articles to close to 100.

On top of publishing more often, I did a more aggressive keyword analysis and found more keywords that tied in nicely together into topic clusters.

If you don’t already use topic clusters, I highly recommend it. Instead of publishing content that seems separate from one another, you publish a cluster of content that links back to one another in a cluster.

Topic clusters are a way of adding more value to visitors to your site. So instead of only checking out one content and leaving your site, with topic clusters, they can read other related content as well.

Hubspot has a well-written guide on topic clusters I recommend you reading if you want to learn how to optimize your site for them.

Doing just these two things helped to improve traffic to the site. But I wanted to take it a step further by speeding up my site too.

I changed out my old blog theme for a new, faster one.

It’s faster now, but still not fast enough. There are a few more tweaks I have planned.

Combining more content, better content with a faster website helped me to kick my website out of a 4 month-long plateau.

Bigger Goals Up Ahead: 3X Traffic

With my second mini goal behind me, it’s time to look ahead.

Initially I had set my next goal to be 50,000 UVs a month, double the traffic of my second mini goal.

But now, it feels too small. I feel I could learn much more by setting my sights at a bigger goal than I first imagined.

So instead of 50,000 UVs, I’m going to set my target higher at 75,000 UVs a month. It feels a little bit intimidating right now, but I always like setting my goals a little higher each time to test my own limits.

Announcement: Hire Me to Help You Grow Your Site

Over the past year I’ve gotten a few requests from business owners who want me to help them grow traffic to their websites.

After working with them and helping them achieve growth, I’ve decided to officially open up my services to business owners who want to increase free traffic from SEO to their sites.

If you have a website you want to grow, send me a message below, tell me about your business and I will be in touch to help you do a free SEO review of your site.

Since this is my first year in service, I am offering my services at introductory rates.

This won’t last forever though.

Prices are likely to go up at least two times once the introductory phase is over, so act quickly if you want this price.

I’ll talk to you soon!

Get your free SEO review:

[contact-form-7 id=”2621″ title=”contact form 2″]

Have questions about this update? Share them in the comments section below!

Join other smart people who like to read about business

Subscribe and get my weekly newsletter packed with the latest insights about business in Malaysia so you can make smart decisions for yourself.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

2 Responses

  1. Hi John, thanks for your interest. I’ve sent you an email. Let me know if you got it. We can talk more from there. Thanks!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *