For most new bloggers, starting a blog is fraught with concerns. If you're a business or professional blogger, and employing the blog as a marketing or public relations tool, one of those worries is visitor traffic. Without anyone reading the freshly launched blog, all of those wonderful conversations and relationships with clients and customers will never get underway. The new blogger wants to know when some real life vistors will actually read the postings.
My friend Tinu Abayomi-Paul (pictured above left and below left) of the highly informative Free Traffic Tips blog has set out a very helpful timeline for the arrival of that much anticipated visitor traffic. The good news is blog traffic should appear in the first week the blog goes live.
About the early blog visitor traffic, Tinu says:
You can see your first traffic from blogging literally overnight, mostly from your initial pinging, Will it be a lot of traffic? Not necessarily. If you post at the right time of day for your site, you may see as many as 100 visitors come to your blog in its first day, due to a new blog post, just from pinging. You can see more than that if you let your existing traffic know about your blog.
After a certain number of posts, to lay the foundation of an active feed, you will also start to see a trickle of traffic from promoting your RSS feed or blog in directories and feed-specfic search engines. That can happen as soon as three days in, and sometimes after 7 to 10 days. The timing you can expect will depend on your blog.
Tinu continues the good news for novice bloggers as well. She points out that these early entries into your visitor taffic logs are only the beginning. As your RSS feeds (and you do have one live on your blog, right?) kick in with their traffic, those early numbers will take a jump. Another leap in the readership will occur when the search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, and Ask.com send information seekers your way.
As you gain experience in blogging and your number of posts increases, even more visitors will arrive at your blog. Other bloggers will link to your best posts and they will also add links to your blog. Sharing readership with other bloggers is a time proven technique for gaining more visitors.
As Tinu says, it takes hard work, persistence, and a heap of patience to build a successful blog. While you may have traffic levels only a fraction of the blogging superstars, the benefits gained from the blog will more than outweigh any traffic disadvantages.
Of course, if you listen to Tinu Abayomi-Paul and read her blog on a regular basis, your blog traffic numbers will grow. How's that for great advice!
