Two weeks ago I shared my website stats for all to see and demonstrated how different things I’m doing online impacted my traffic.  Here is an updated look at my blog stats:

Weekly traffic on this blog

I’ve looked at a lot of website stats over the last 10-plus years, and although this is still a new blog at the low end of the traffic spectrum, I have to say “wow” to the quick progress it is making.

If you recall my post from two weeks ago, I discussed how my traffic has been influenced by different factors.  Early gains in traffic came from committing to a regular posting schedule and syndicating the blog via feedburner.com and technorati.com.  Then I created a linkedin.com account to further promote myself and started sharing my blog URL with clients and new leads which continued the positive climb in the stats.  Then big fall-out/bail-out in the stock market dropped my traffic for a week as more attention was taken up by this, but then I increased efforts in promotion by adding regular twitter.com posts promoting my blog and joining and utilizing biznik.com, in particular getting an article posted on biznik.com that generated a lot of interest.

Finally, just this last week, I posted an interview that was well recieved and I had my blog “stumbled” on stumbledupon.com which really spiked my traffic.

I’m not sharing these stats to brag, but to show as proof that social networking and online self promotion works.  Everything I’m doing can be emulated and none of it has cost me anything, except a commitment in time.

Ok, time to step back and do some full disclosure to see if my input on this blog of the virtures of social networking is truely valid.  So, behold the graph below:

Weekly traffic for this blog

I started this blog earlier this year around March, did a few posts and then got side tracked, leaving it abandoned until about 2 months ago when I started forcing myself to make daily posts.  This graph shows the weekly traffic to the blog, starting on the 14th week of this year.  As you can see, from week 14 to week 35 traffic is basically non-existant, reflecting my lack of attention to the blog.  However, traffic starts to pick back up right around the same time I started posting to the blog again.

One week after making regular postings I syndicated the blog through Feedburner.com and Technorati.com.  Consistant postings plus this additional distribution of the blog helped the traffic improve quickly through week 38.  I created an account with LinkedIn.com to promote myself, I started adding my blog URL to my signature file in all my outgoing emails and also sent out an eNewsletter to all my customers with links back to my blog.  This really saw my traffic spike on week 40 – everything was working good.

Then the economy happened, stocks tumbled, and the government talked about using $700 billion of our dollars to bailout Wall Street and traffic to my blog dropped.  Who has time to read how to better rank your site in search engines when the world is ending.  So, in the words of that famous chef that starts with an “E” – I think it’s Ernie, or Elmer or maybe Ebert? – it’s time to “Take it up a notch”.

So, in week 41, I stepped up my Twitter efforts by increasing postings there and I also joined a new site called Biznik.com.  Biznik allowed me another avenue to promote myself and I had an article published there that got a lot of attention.  All this led to my blog traffic seeing solid improvements once again.

Using all the freely available online social networking tools is a great way to grow your business.  Tracking your website stats is a great way to find out what is working and when to adjust your marketing when traffic patterns change.