How I Doubled The Pageviews of My Blog in Two Weeks

Saturday, March 14, 2009

In the last two weeks I achieved an awesome result for my blog: I succeeded in doubling the number of page views. Since I did this with not so much effort, I thought it would have been great to share with you how I made this happen.

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First of all, it’s important to clarify that it’s the result of a combination of elements, which I doubt could have had such impact if taken alone.

Here are the ingredients of the magic receipt:

1) Switched my theme to a professional Wordpress Theme
2) Added full support to Twitter
3) Added full support to Facebook Connect
4) Optimized the content of the blog
5) Paid attention to SEO
6) Minimized the Bounce Rate
7) Modified some popular posts

1) Switched my theme to a professional WP Theme: Thesis

Using a pro theme for your Wordpress blog really makes the difference. You can modify it very quickly and you don’t almost need to change a single line of code. I already blogged about my theme, that I consider the best WP theme ever, a few week ago, so I encourage you to read my previous article about Thesis.

2) Added Full Support to Twitter

In the past month I became an heavy Twitter user (you will fully understand why very soon….) and started understanding the full potential of this wonderful service. The first “keyword” that comes up to my mind while thinking of Twitter is: VIRAL. If you are wise enough, you can leverage the power of Twitter and make it useful for your blog.

Each blog post now includes:

- Tweetthis: readers can quickly share my articles on Twitter by just clicking on the button at the bottom of each post

- Tweetmeme: a small icon in the upper left corner of each post shows how many times that post has been “twittered” and lets readers quickly retweet it

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3) Added full support to Facebook connect

As many of you should know already, Facebook connect lets you login to a blog by using the same uid and password used on Facebook. This way you can leave comments and say “hi” on the blog using your FB avatar and so on.

I’m using FB connect together with the powerful commenting platform Disqus. This way anyone using Disqus to leave a comment can easily share that on their FB profile, adding new sources of potential visitors to my blog.

4) Optimized the content of the blog

In my latest blog posts I tried to use more attractive headlines and match the most popular keywords used on Google, while keeping the same focus on the subjects I care.

Moreover, I tried to minimize the number of outgoing links, by linking to other posts covering the same subjects. For example, if in a certain post I’m mentioning the service XYZ, instead of linking XYZ to the url of the service, I link to another article on my blog which covers XYX.

5) Paid Attention to SEO

This is a fundamental aspect you can’t ignore. Thanks to the powerful architecture of Thesis, I can easily associate the appropriate keywords and meta tags to my posts, then I reuse them in the headline and body too. This affects the way Google indexes your blog, very important since over 80% of my traffic (and I bet yours, too) comes from Google.

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6) Minimized the Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who come across your blog, just hit it quickly and/or by chance, and finally leave it immediately. If you want to increase your pageviews, you need to offer to your casual (and not) visitors more opportunities to keep browsing your pages.

To achieve this, I worked on the design and tried to use as many internal links (described in 4) as possible. Here is the demonstration on how much my bounch rate decreased:

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7) Modified Popular Posts

This is another trick which helps you to achieve #6. If you realize there are old posts that are very popular on Google, you can modify them in order to highlight other new posts on your blog covering the same subject, with the objective to drive traffic to them. Here is an example, placed on my popular comparison between Apple iPhone and Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic:

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All these little adjustments, led me to double the page views of my blog in about two-three weeks. Honestly, I could never think of such success, but it’s happening and I wanted to share this with you.

What’s your experience? Is there anything you did on your blog (a “tipping point”) which led to unexpected but excellent results? Please share it in the comment section, other readers and myself would definitely appreciate it.

How I Doubled The Pageviews of My Blog in Two Weeks

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