5 Traffic Sources That Helped Me Reach 10,000 Visitors A Month

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Everyone wants more traffic to their site. So which traffic sources are the the best to use? Today, I want to take an in-depth look at Drop My Link, and share how it grew from no traffic at all to nearly 10,000 visitors a month. With very little effort on my part, I might add.

DropMyLink is a site I created back in December 2009 that helps you find free do-follow backlinks. It does this by performing specific Google queries that will find all sorts of backlink friendly sites, like CommentLuv Premium blogs, KeywordLuv blogs, and more.

What is interesting though, is that I ended up never really doing too much promotion of the site myself. I did initially make a couple of forum posts on WarriorForum and DigitalPoint forums to try and publicize it. But I was never able to generate a ton of buzz at the time, so DropMyLink became more of an afterthought as I moved onto new and better things.

Then six months ago, seemingly by itself, the site’s traffic took off. It steadily grew from 20 to 80 to 150 to now 350 visitors a day. It essentially went viral as people started spreading word about it on their own.

So where is all this traffic coming from?

I thought it would be interesting to share in this post what the site’s biggest traffic sources are and share some real stats about how much traffic each one has sent. Plus, it gives me an opportunity to give a shout out to some of the people who were responsible for helping the site grow as fast as it has.

1. Product Traffic

DropMyLink really exploded traffic wise when it was featured in a product called Fast Attack Links by Anthony Devine and Craig Mako.

This is the 3rd in the popular series of Fast Attack Reports, with Fast Attack SEO and Fast Attack Traffic being the other two. According to WarriorPlus, each of these 3 reports are in the Top 10 best selling WSOs of all time.

DropMyLink was the first tool featured in the Fast Attack Links report and this resulted in a massive increase in traffic to the site. My traffic stats are a little in-exact since click-throughs via the ebook don’t pass the referrer data. But when Fast Attack Links launched, I estimate it sent over 2,000 visitors in the first week, and it has more than doubled the site’s daily traffic since that time.

2. Site/Blog Traffic

Once a site reaches a certain level of visibility, and it offers some compelling value, other marketers and bloggers will take notice and start writing about it. That is what happened with DropMyLink.

The most traffic DropMyLink has received from any one site so far was after it was featured on DotComSecrets.com. This is the official company site of well known IM guru Russell Brunson.

Russell actually mentioned Drop My Link in a video that he did during the Halloween Episode of his Daily Sketch series.

Check it out: (Starts at 5:18)

Pretty cool, right? This one video alone brought in 450 visitors to the site in the first week.

That isn’t the only site to talk about DropMyLink. Here are three other examples of blog posts that have sent hundreds more visitors to the site:

• 8 Completely Free Tools That Will Catapult Your Link Building Efforts (AlexWhalley.com)
• Fast Way To Find DoFollow Blogs & .edu Sites That Accept Comments (NicksTrafficTricks)
• Find Blogs to Comment On with Drop My Link now with Livefyre Search (DragonBlogger)

3. Guest Posting

Guest posting is probably the best way that anyone can get traffic to their site. But you definitely need to choose wisely as not every site will send you the amount of traffic that you expect.

In the IM/blogging market, ProBlogger is probably the holy grail of guest posting opportunities. With over 161k RSS subscribers, ProBlogger has the biggest reach of any IM blog I know.

Lucky for me, Ben Jackson from SEODiscovery wrote a completely unsolicited and fantastic guest post featuring Drop My Link titled White-Hat SEO + Social Media = Link Bait Magic.

This particular guest post on ProBlogger sent over 210 visitors the first day and more than 500 visitors overall.

I also got Ben to write another guest post on the ComLuv blog network called 3 New Ways to Rank & Succeed with Blog Commenting. This an excellent site for guest posting (PR 6) and this post has brought me almost a 100 new visitors since it went live.

Ana Hoffman from Traffic Generation Cafe also wrote a terrific guest post on Kikolani.com called 10 Dreadful Mistakes That Kill Your Comments that mentions DropMyLink. Currently, it has attracted 88 Comments, 128 Tweets, and 95 Facebook Likes which is way better than I could ever do myself. If you ever are looking to create a great guest post yourself, then this is certainly one to model yours after.

4. Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is a very powerful traffic source and frankly quite underrated as well. While blog traffic and guest posting can often send more visitors at one time, the amount of traffic will decrease over time as posts drop off the front page.

Forum traffic on the other hand is generally more consistent over the long haul as threads get bumped up and new posters are exposed to your threads.

At this time, there are 18 threads on the WarriorForum, and 17 threads over on DigitalPoint which mention DropMyLink. And how much traffic have these forum threads sent overall? According to the stats, more than 1,000 visitors each, and growing by the day.

And those are just two of the major internet marketing forums. It also gets traffic from a quite a few other forums as well, along with some paid forums like WPGoldmine, Adsense100kBlueprint, and Bring the Fresh that I can’t even access myself!

5. Social Traffic

I’m not really a big into social media myself. But DropMyLink still gets quite a bit of social traffic as well, with StumbleUpon being the major source. Stumbleupon has sent over 3,000 visitors over the lifetime of the site. And I don’t even have a StumbleUpon button on the site!

StumbleUpon only works if you have something good to share, but if you do, don’t forget to take advantage of it. Following some of these social marketing tips is a good idea too.

I also get quite a bit of Twitter and Facebook traffic as well. Mostly as a result of the guest posting that’s been done I’m guessing. Unfortunately, the exact sources from each are harder to pinpoint since they don’t pass the referrer information in my analytics.

Final Thoughts

Here are a few takeaways from this post.

First, create content and products that fill a need. A site like DropMyLink isn’t hard to create, but it has become successful because it does something that people are always looking for (free ways to help their site rank better). All it takes is to be observant, and find ways to solve some real problems that people in your market are experiencing.

Second, target as many different traffic sources as you can. The more exposure you get, the more chance you have of going viral. Take advantage of traffic source ones you can control like guest posting and forum posting. This will enable you to plant some seeds and build some buzz around your site or product. Sometimes that all it takes for whatever you are promoting to take off.

And finally, don’t be as passive about promoting your stuff as I was. If you have something you know is good, then promote it as hard as you can. While DropMyLink became popular despite the lack of my own marketing efforts, who knows how much bigger it could be if I had spent more time promoting it myself?

Now let me pose a question to you. Which traffic sources have worked best for you? Leave a comment below and let me know.

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