Any good blogger with a relatively new blog should already be doing a couple of things. Firstly, you should be writing excellent content (old news I know), and secondly you should be promoting your content and your brand all over the place.

What follows is a quick look at how we at ThinkTraffic are growing our blog traffic and also how we are using Analytics to make our efforts more effective.

Traffic Building Methods

We are using three main methods to build traffic (other than writing good content, I hope). They aren’t exactly ground breaking, but they work:

1. Commenting On Blogs
2. Participating In Forums
3. Guest Posting

The main aim with these is to gain traffic, not necessarily to build links. We know that posting comments isn’t a great link building method...

The following framework can be used to test any form of traffic, so if you're into commenting, or if you have a different method that you think will work in your niche, go ahead and test it.

So how can we tell which of these methods is the best and how can make them all more effective?

Tracking Time Spent

The first thing that we need to know is the cost of each method. Fortunately, they are all free, so it is really a question of time spent. For this we use a free tool known as Toggl. This is a neat time-management tool that helps you track how much time you are spending on each activity.

You can track this as broadly or as specifically as you like. Start by creating a project for your own site (we have other clients too, so we have called our project “ThinkTraffic.co.uk”... imaginative huh?). Then, each time you start working on a particular activity, track it.

Note 1:
If you choose to use PPC or other paid advertising, the cost should be pretty easy to track, but don't forget to use Toggl to track how much time you spend managing that traffic stream too!

Note 2:
For comments we just track total time spent commenting. For forums we track time spent on each separate for (we have profiles on a couple of different business forums) and for guest posting we also try to track separately for each post – although this isn’t an exact science.

The Commenting Process

This is just a bonus tip. Sign up to an RSS reader and add a few of the most popular blogs in your niche – these are the blogs you will be commenting on. (We used to use Google reader, but since that is about to die, we are finding that 'old reader' is a pretty good substitute.)

To get traffic from commenting you need to make sure that your comments are valuable, and also that they appear right at the top of the comments thread, right below the actual content. By checking your RSS Reader twice a day you can usually make sure that you are one of the first people to comment on any new posts.

Since we only track total time spent on commenting, we also use a separate spread sheet to track how many comments we have left on a particular blog. This was we can estimate how much time has been spent commenting on each blog by pro-rating the total time in Toggl.

Using Analytics

As we have said, our main concern is the results. So let’s now go into Analytics. There is a lot of information in here, but right now we are just interested in referral traffic – that is; any traffic coming into our website via a link on another website.

As you can see, we get a very easy to follow list of all of the sites that are sending us traffic. You can view this data over whatever duration you want. Per day figures can be helpful, but you can view your per week stats if you have relatively low traffic figures.

For a more in-depth analysis it can be helpful to compare week by week to see how much your traffic from each referrer is growing (or shrinking). If you consistently comment on certain blogs you should notice the referral traffic gradually increases. Guest post traffic generally decreases, unless you post more guest posts on the same site.

In our case we can see that our top referrer is blogussion.com, mainly thanks to guest posts we have published. After that ukbusinessforums are next. Looking at our Toggl reports we tend to spend about an hour per week contributing to this forum.

Comparing Traffic Sources

You can see fairly easily that forums are working for us. You can also see a few of the big sites that we spend time commenting on, which proves that commenting can work.

Two of our top commenting sites appear to be Quicksprout.com and Problogger.net...

Using Toggl and our spread sheet I can tell you that we spend around 10 minutes per week on Problogger and only fove on Quicksprout. So does this make Quicksprout the better traffic source?

The short answer is no, probably not. When you consider the time on site and the bounce rate; here is a quick and dirty way to very roughly compare the traffic value:

• Quick Sprout = 57 Visits x 12 seconds on site = 11:24 spent on site
• Problogger = 32 Visits x 1:20 on site = 42:40 spent on site

So Problogger gives us 42 minutes of traffic each week for 10 minutes work and Quicksprout gives us 11.5 for 5 minutes work.

What will we do about this information? First of all we will spend more time commenting on the most effective sites and secondly we will try to find more sites like them to comment on.

Further down the Analytics page there are in fact a couple of sites which are providing relatively little traffic compared to the time spent on them, so we may try spending less time on these blogs and add a few new ones to our RSS reader account.

What About Guest Posting?

Guest posting on decent blogs is in our experience very effective. But how can you be sure where to spend your time?

Well the great thing about commenting like this is that we can get a feel for the traffic potential from each website. We all know that Problogger will be a good traffic source, but this is also a great way to compare slightly lower level blogs to see which ones have the most active audience.

For instance, if we find that a blog is producing traffic with a high bounce rate, we have to conclude that perhaps this blog's audience isn't a great fit for our blog, and any traffic gained from a guest post could be equally likely to bounce!

Going Your Own Way

There are a lot of ways to track your traffic, and there may be more thorough ways to compare your traffic sources, but we like this method for its simplicity. It takes very little effort to track time spent and compare it to our results...

Remember that you are not necessarily trying to decide absolutely how much value each traffic source brings, but simply which ones are more effective than others.

Using this basic framework you can see exactly how much traffic you are getting for your efforts and by tracking the time you put in you can work out an effective cost of that traffic. You can then make sure that you spend more time on the most effective strategies and less on the less effective ones (makes sense really).

Working Out Cost Per Visitor

We don't worry too much about the cost per visitor, since our primary traffic sources are free. As I said above, we mainly want to compare them for effectiveness. But if you are interested in estimating your cost per visitor, there are a few ways to do so.

Here's an example

We have spent a total of 14 minutes commenting on Quicksprout.com (it’s a recent addition to our blog list) and generated a total of 103 unique visitors. Pricing our time at $45 per hour, that means that this traffic source is costing $0.07 per visitor.

Of course if we never spend another second on the blog we will probably still get some more residual traffic, but it's harder to predict those numbers, so we won't bother for now...

A Further Example

If you have a shop or a sales page, you could set-up conversion tracking and actually work out the cost per conversion for each traffic source! You can set-up the conversion tracking in Analytics and display the total value of the traffic generated by each traffic source.

If you were to do this you could very easily work out which traffic sources are profitable and which ones are not... Just like you would do for your PPC campaigns. The possibilities are endless really.