I want a few minutes of your important time to share my story. I have made a site : mysixstringsblog(dot)com in which I provide guitar lessons, chords and tabs. This is my first site ever which I started on July, 2011 that’s 8 months from now. I have done everything since then to build my traffic with the best I could do : SEO, Social Marketting, posting on forums, commenting on similar site, submitting in search directories and a thousand similar things (I think I have tried every possible traffic building techniques I read online). But the result was a maximum of 350 visitors on a particular day and since then it has never touched that number. Still, after much effort the number of visitors per day reached upto about 200 per day this January. But than tragedy hit, my site closed for about 15 days because of some server breakdown. And now number of visitors has gone down to 20-30 per day. What luck!
8 months of hard work, 50+ posts, unlimited online hours = 20-30 visitors per day.
This is definetly not a luck matter, I’m sure I’m doing something wrong and repeating the same mistake again and agian. I’m not here for any sympathy of any kind. I just want you to tell me where I was lacking and what should I do to get this fixed.
The obvious question to ask is … what gap in the market are you aiming for, what does your site offer that others don’t, and how many visitors do you think your site should be getting?
Searching Google for “pentatonic scale guitar” gives nearly a million results, and all the ones on page 1 look relevant. Similarly other key phrases from your site return hundreds of thousands of results. I’m not saying it’s impossible to crack that market, but obviously you’ve got a lot of competition there, and you need to work out a proper marketing strategy for your site before jumping in to SEO and slathering your URL across the internet. So many website owners (particularly bloggers) set out believing the mantra “If you build it, they will come”, but that doesn’t just happen.
Have you analysed your visitor stats? Are those 20–30 people a day regular, repeat visitors or are they new people who visit the site once but don’t come back? Are some pages more popular than others – either as landing pages, or for people to click through to? Are people finding what they wanted when they come to the site, or are they bouncing straight back out empty-handed?
As a general point of principle, I would try to tone down the ads a bit, particularly the large ad box that sites front and centre on the home page, and also change the styling of them so they are more clearly differentiated from the site content. I know you want people to click on them, but if visitors can’t easily tell the difference between site content and adverts, that is going to lose you trust and reputation, and visitors.
Look again at your home page. What’s the first thing you see? A great big Google ad. What’s the second thing? An animated ad. You’ve lost people already. That first impression is vital, and you want your visitors to instantly see what your site is all about. At the moment, it looks like it’s all about you making advertising revenue, and that isn’t a message that you want to give! I would think about how you could redesign the home page layout with a stronger “guitar” feel and a clear message about what the site has to offer visitors.
Your website doesn’t even show up. I don’t know why that would happen.
From a design standpoint, it looks fine, but I want to echo Stevie D in saying that the ads are very annoying. I want content before I think about supporting you.
Thank you Stevie D and TehYoyo for replying. @Stevie D : http://www.wsadirectory.com/view/justinguitar.com == analytics of justinguitar.com this is what I want to make my website like. You are right that my homepage needs some work to be done. I’ll take care of that. I always look at the stats of visitors, there are some posts which perform better so I socialize them more. Thank you again for your advise. @TehYoyo :
So ads are the problem. I’ll have to take care of that ASAP.
I don’t think TehYoyo is saying that the “ads are the problem” - only that he finds the ads annoying and - for him personally - off-putting. That’s important feedback that you are right to take notice of. But don’t for one minute think that removing the ads will necessarily solve the problem.
You said that you have tried “SEO, Social Marketting, posting on forums, commenting on similar site, submitting in search directories and a thousand similar things”. Some of those things are valuable, others are not. But none of them is a jot of use unless you have a site that people will actually want to visit and will find valuable. And Stevie rightly points out, your site has got to offer something that people want, and that differentiates you from your competitors.
Regarding the loss of the server for 15 days, that is indeed a cause for concern. But how long ago did it happen? I’ve occasionally had server outages for several days at a time (but never 15 days), with the resultant loss of traffic, but the traffic has always returned after a few days or a couple of weeks at the most.
I hope you won’t be too discouraged by all this. We all go through these sort of problems, so stick with it.
hey miki thanks for your reply. As I said earlier the site was down for exactly 15 days because the server was hacked by some hackers (as they told me) and they were having some problem regarding that.
The best way to get visitors in your site is to be high ranked in google.But if your site will be down again,you’ll lose all work…websites are penalized for downtime.So,my advice is to change the hosting first.
Ram Hi, I am a Fellow SEO Person. i did a quick check on your site, thier appear to be multiple areas where you could use a bit of Improvment.
FIRSTLY your source page needs a bit of repair.
The SEO phrase should appear at least once in the description Not sure what your Exact Phrase us Guitar Lessons etc
but it should be in the Description. you need to check your H1 H2
Page Title my six strings blog
Should use the SEO phrase in the page title
H1 Headings my six strings blog guitar chords, tabs, lessons and more
Should use the seo phrase at least once in the h1 tags
H2 Headings how to create pentatonic scale
There should be at least 425 words on the page.
Phrase occurrences 3 (0.7712 %)
Should occur at least once for every 100~ words (1-4%) written on the page.
First 50 words on page
Should use the seo phrase at least once in the first 50 words (not counting header tags)
Let me know if this helps a bit, thier are more things you can do re marketing social media etc
good Luck please let me know if this helped.
rgds
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