How To Increase Your Blog Traffic By 55% with One Button

Written by Jeff Bullas - View Comments
Categories: Blog, Blogging


As I write this I am surrounded by men in tights and I am not in Sherwood forest hanging out with Robin’s merry men but in a cafe with cyclists in lycra having their caffeine fix after they have had their rush of endorphins from their morning’s cycling.

How To Increase Your Blog Traffic by 55% with One Button

I started this blog last year with very little expectation but with an element of  trepidation and a few questions.

How many people would read it? Would they like what they read? If they came would they make any comments and if they did would they be negative or positive.

I built this blog on my own domain (good idea!!) but  not self hosted (bad idea!!) at WordPress.com on a WordPress theme..  (the wordpress theme was a a good choice) and proceeded to write my first post. “The World is Hanging Up“.

As traffic grew and comments started coming and people started turning up I wanted to add features to the blog such as banners, plugins and widgets and other elements but due to the limitations of the platform and hosting on wordpress.com I was restricted and I felt I had one hand tied behind my back and I knew that it was costing me traffic to my blog by not optimizing my blog with this WordPress plugin.

One feature that I really knew was costing me page hits and views was a ReTweet button. Readers to my blog were placing comments on Twitter saying “add a retweet button so you make it easy for us to spread your content”.

So I have been working behind the scenes to launch the blog with

  • Re-Design (Banner Caricature by John Haycraft)
  • New Template (Frugal WordPress Theme which has a great easy to use powerful highly featured interface for making changes without having to know coding)
  • Self Hosted (Host Monster which have provided me with great 24/7 service beyond my expectation)

The challenge was to ensure that when I transferred the blog that I didn’t lose the 10,000 plus inbound links to my blog that had built up over the last 15 months so that prople didn’t have dead links when they clicked on these links to go to my blog on other people’s blogs or websites.

So the transfer was completed 2 days ago and the ReTweet button is installed and though it is only 2 days it appears that compared to my last 2 months average traffic  the Retweet button has increased traffic to my blog by 55% by making it easy for people  to ReTweet my blog without cutting and pasting.

I know it is early days so I will be providing an update to these numbers after a longer term comparison to check to see what effect this one little button continues to add to my traffic.

So do you have a ReTweet button?



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  • http://www.life-procoaching.com/blog @SerendipityJane

    Hi Jeff,
    it’s very much thanks to June that I was able to add the ReTweet button.
    She told me about it and I looked for it in the wordpress plugins. I’m a novice to blogging and found that it was awesome to have done this on my own – no further help required. It was a sense of accomplishment (I know, no biggy but I thought it felt great!). :-)

    Thanks for reminding me to use it and get into a habit of spreading the word for others also.

    Sharing definitely is caring!

    Twitter is so much more fun when it’s interACTIVE!

    As always a pleasure to read you!

    All the best,
    Lydia

  • http://www.life-procoaching.com/blog @SerendipityJane

    PS. Your new look is fab!

  • http://www.goldenTwine.com/blog Subrato Paul

    I am using Digg Digg plugin – All-in-One social vote buttons including Retweet by Yong Mook Kim. It is like Mashable. I would request you to explore this plugin. I am sure you would like it.

  • http://www.technshare.com Dev – Technshare.com

    Hey Jeff,

    Nice Post. I’m using simple Retweet button on my blog, but now i’m thinking to add some more social bookmarking sites.
    Thanks for sharing this great Post.

    ~Dev

  • http://www.3daysinlondon.info Cindy

    Hi Jeff,
    Love the caricature! it’s fun. Thanks for the heads up on the retweet button. I am on wordpress so will ask my daughter to do that for me (or try to figure it out myself, whichever comes first).
    Am now going to investigate inbound links. Have heard of them, not sure how they work….so back to google (unless you have a blog that explains).
    Thanks for the post, I always get good value from your posts.
    Regards
    Cindy @notjustagranny

  • http://www.randygage.com/ Randy Gage

    I get huge traffic from my RT button. And I’m on WordPress, so not sure why you couldn’t have it before.

    -RG

  • http://www.swimbikerunlive.com Jamie

    Great tip, but I’ve found that driving traffic through just adding the RT button isn’t universal.

    Depending on the type of content you are pushing and your audience, the “RT” button may not be the best use of your blog post real estate.

    A lot of my blog readers are also on Twitter, but when I experimented with the “RT This” button, it just wasn’t getting any action. I dropped it in favor of the Facebook “like” button and started seeing my Facebook referring traffic jump to 7x the normal levels.

    It doesn’t allow people to say WHY they like it, but at least my audience is much more prone to “like” a link than to “share” it with their network. The higher click rate is worth it for me to sacrifice users not being able to write a note next to my content when they share it on Facebook with one click.

    I’d suggest experimenting with with switching out the Facebook “share this” for a “like this” button. One big benefit is that it also shows if anyone in your network shared it as well. But again, it works for my content and my audience, but may not work for yours. Either way, it is always fun to experiment and do a little tinkering, no?

  • http://www.dunawaydietetics.com Ann Dunaway Teh

    I just added the re-tweet button to my blog. I don’t know how it is affecting my traffic though – now I need to figure out what to use to look at traffic to my site. Any suggestions??

  • http://www.socialwizz.com Praz

    Love the new banner Jeff….cool design.

    Cheers,

    Praz

  • http://www.socialwizz.com Praz

    And agree with all your tips, I learnt the hard way (non self hosted to self hosted) etc and all the tips you’ve provided are bang on!

    And yes…RT (and SHARE) button is a killer

  • Petees

    Why is self hosted WordPress a bad idea?

  • http://www.symplegades.com Ian Gertler

    I think there are some incredible points to note here, Jeff.

    1) Hosting: WordPress.com offers a valuable option for many people – and it works well. For people like me (and you) who have a domain and hosting on our own, installing the WP platform on your own site offers a robust opportunity for branding, traffic, etc. You can certainly forward/re-direct the URL, but hosting it yourself allows for valuable customization.

    2) Social media: the retweet button is increasingly important, but it’s also important to address the many platforms out there when appropriate. ShareThis and AddThis offer some terrific possibilities for many sites, but many times putting more engaging action items can make all the difference.

    I just transformed my website (http://www.symplegades.com) from a website to a blog — about social media, marketing, strategy and my passion: the official start of Techonomy. This is a philosophy that focuses on technology and innovation both spurring new opportunities and solving the world’s challenges. I’ve been invited to attend the inaugural conference with many of the tech industry’s leaders in early August (http://www.techonomy.com/participants) and will blog about it on my site and potentially on the Huffington Post website. I encourage you all to follow this movement to improve the world.

    Any questions? Reach out to me on my site or through Twitter: @iangertler

    Once again Jeff – great work!

  • http://astronlogia.com Saravana

    Nice post ! But i would also suggest Google buzz button along with RT

  • http://www.asmsite.net Arnel

    Suggest to add bookmarking button such as delicious.

  • http://goldfinshcanaries.blogspot.com/ massi

    Suggest to add bookmarking button such as delicious

  • http://freshseo2010.blogspot.com Atul Vhale (SEO 2010)

    Jeff,

    Your blog has interesting and something different story. Even you had not self hosting for your blog, you were earning ample visitors. I wonder after transferring your blog on self hosted domain how you preserved 10,000 plus inbound links to your blog. I know the one way of doing this e.i. 301 redirect. Is there another way to do it, I really willing to know it. Well, you did good job and congrats for that. When I read your tweet I wondered after reading it I thought how this possible but here I have to believe it. But if you want great number of visitors you have to build good and big network. Otherwise I don’t think it will possible by just installing re-tweet button

  • http://Selloutyoursoul.com James

    Can’t believe this is a wordpress.com blog! After you transfer I am sure you will have more and more success…

  • http://live-your-love.com/ Brankica U

    I wish I had seen the old blog so I can compare it :)
    The only thing I hate about blogs is this Disqus commenting feature. I think regular WP commenting is so much better cause it doesn’t require logging in.

  • Anonymous

    Thanks for the Tips! Reading your blog post makes me thinking again…but that’s okay. I am not in a rush so far.

    Thanks again,
    Claude

  • http://ebandit.in Andy

    Well great tips ,, these tips helped me a lot . Your trick has worked .
    Thanks and great work.

  • http://brittanyrubinstein.com/blog Brittany Rubinstein

    Ya know I was going to ask for some advice, should I put the button at the beginning or end of the post? But I see here that you have done both! Seems like that may be the way to go to be sure no one misses it. Thanks!

  • http://www.billeebrady.com Billee Brady

    Its amazing the true power of a little retweet button has on your blog.
    Twitter can prove to be a power house when it comes to driving highly target traffic back to your blog especially if you use a tool like twitter fried adder and add friends that have a directly interest in what you are writing about that way when you share your stuff on twitter you will get a mass of traffic.
    A marriage made in heaven!
    Billee brady

  • http://twitter.com/sam_artoftea Samantha Brown

    Yes, must look at a ReTweet for my blog http://realqualitea.blogspot.com/ as Ive only just started to blog. Thanks for the tips.

  • http://profiles.google.com/ukcynthiat Cynthia Reed

    Well, what could I do but re-Tweet!? Nicely presented, thanks. No, I don’t have one. Yet. ;-)

  • http://twitter.com/opusnozoo Dana Tan

    This is a great post. I just had a long discussion tonight about WordPress.com versus WordPress.org.  I started my blog two weeks ago and have been posting every day ever since. I actually started two blogs, one at blogger (http://danatanseo.blogger.com) and one at WordPress.com (http://tanpost.org). The first sign of trouble at WordPress.com was that I couldn’t install Google Analytics. All I could think was…WHAT??? So my upcoming personal blog will definitely be on WordPress.org not WordPress.com. Sure, i’ll have to pay for my own hosting, but it sounds like your experience taught you it was well worth it!

  • http://myownspot-r.blogspot.com/ Ruslan

    Thanks, it’s true lesson!

  • http://www.multi-housingnews.com Diana Mosher

    Jeff, great information!

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  • http://markfrisk.com Mark Frisk

    Is there a particular reason you don’t include a dateline on your posts? I can see from the URL that this post is from 7//17/10, but wouldn’t it be more user-friendly to include the date somewhere near the headline or byline?

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  • Cdunmars

    Great post, I recently started blogging and I am still waiting on people to show up. Congrats on your success!

  • Zentime

    Jeff – I enjoy reading your blog. Can you tell me more about this: “The challenge was to ensure that when I transferred the blog that I
    didn’t lose the 10,000 plus inbound links to my blog that had built up
    over the last 15 months so that prople didn’t have dead links when they
    clicked on these links to go to my blog on other people’s blogs or
    websites.”

    How did you do it?  I’m in this position and would like to ensure I do it correctly.

  • http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

    What I would recommend is top get a web developer who knows what they are doing :)

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  • http://soulati.com/blog Soulati

    When was this post written? Will you kindly date your posts, Jeff? Thank you!

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  • http://twitter.com/1OriginalGod Dr. Mukesh Chauhan

    Your articles are always helpful and worth reading. Perhaps I can tempt you to do special article for us computer non techy’s about exact steps to follow with which links to click from A to Z so we can implement excellent suggestions and recommendations

  • http://twitter.com/1OriginalGod Dr. Mukesh Chauhan

    Your articles are very informative and helpful. Perhaps I can tempt you to do an article for non comp techy’s about A to Z of all the links to implement to have a fully integrated social media campaign from say Tweeter, Fb, Li, Blogs and websites.

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