Think Traffic Monthly Report – September 2012

Welcome back to another Think Traffic monthly report.

We have record numbers to share with you again this month and some exciting updates about the new project we launched a couple of weeks ago.

If you’re new here, each month we recap the traffic/growth stats for Think Traffic and share what we’ve done and what we’ve learned (see all the monthly reports here).

This is the report for September, 2012.

September was an exciting month around Think Traffic for a bunch of reasons. We ended up just shy of 68,000 visits for the month and broke last month’s record by 21%.

The surge in traffic over the past couple of months has come mostly due to merging my personal blog into Think Traffic. We carefully planned the merger to make sure most of the link traffic and search traffic would remain intact. September saw the full effect of that merger and we saw traffic increases from every source type including search, social media and referral, as you’ll see below.

Think Traffic turned 2.5 years old last month. Here’s a chart of how the site has grown since we started back in March of 2010:

We’ve grown the site using primarily a content-focused traffic strategy. We don’t believe in chasing traffic fads or looking for loopholes to exploit. Our approach is simple: create great content, make strong connections with readers and other bloggers, give people a reason to come back and challenge ourselves every month (read more about this approach).

Sizzle for Fizzle

Last month we also privately launched our new project called Fizzle.

We’ve been working behind the scenes for months on this new video training platform for online business builders. Our goal is to develop Fizzle into the long-term platform and essential library of training and resources and a community that every online entrepreneur should be a part of.

We decided to open up to a small group of about 150 charter members last month and were blown away by the response. We expected it would take a couple of days to sign up that many members, so we were shocked when the spots sold out in just four hours.

Inside Fizzle we’re working with our charter members to grow and develop the platform into something that’s ready for a bigger audience. The response so far has been fantastic, and we’re all very excited about the future of the platform.

If you’d like to hear more about our progress and get on the list for our next enrollment period, take this quick survey and you’ll be added to our insider’s priority list.

September Analytics for Think Traffic

Now back to the numbers for September. Here are the traffic stats for Think Traffic from Google Analytics for the month:

As you see there, we set a new record of 67,999 visits for the month. Pageviews also set a new record.

We don’t expect to keep growing at this rate over the coming months, but we should settle into a nice new base of 65k+ visits each month.

Here are the 8 posts we published in September:

• When Traffic Isn’t Enough: 3 Questions Every Blogger Should Ask Themselves (Guest post by Chris Ducker)
• Build a Better Mousetrap
• How I Quadrupled My Business in Less Than 10 Months by Blogging (Guest post by Peep Laja)
• The Not-So-Sexy Step That Every Profitable Entrepreneur Must Take
• Most Online Businesses Fizzle Out — Let’s Do Something About That
• 3 Essential Twitter Lists for Any Entrepreneur (Guest post by Tara Gentile)
• Think Traffic Monthly Report – August 2012
• From App Store Newbie to $35,000+ in Profit (Guest post by Nathan Barry)

I was really happy with the quality of and reaction to the four guest posts we ran last month. Thanks Nathan, Tara, Peep and Chris for the contributions.

Top Traffic Sources

As I mentioned before, we’ve gotten a nice boost over the past couple of months from most of our top traffic sources, including search, referral, direct and social media.

It is possible to merge two blogs, or to migrate your blog to a new domain name, without losing much traffic. The boost we’ve gotten here roughly equates to the traffic I was receiving recently to my other blog before the merger with Think Traffic.

Our process was simple: we exported our WordPress content from the old blog and imported into Think Traffic. We didn’t migrate everything, but chose the most popular posts and the ones we thought would fit into Think Traffic.

Then, you simply need to create 301 redirects from your old content’s URLs to the new URLs where the content now lives. The redirects can be manually coded into an .htaccess file, or you could use a WordPress plugin.

Google will get the picture after a while and should start sending search visitors to the new content. Referral (link) traffic will also automatically flow through your redirects.

Top Content

Here are the top 10 pages for the month:

Now Over to You

How was your September? Did your site’s traffic grow? Did you accomplish any important business objectives?

If so, please share. If not, let us know if we can help.

We’re happy to answer any questions about how we merged our two sites, about our new Fizzle project, or anything else you’d like to know.

Cheers and thanks as always for reading Think Traffic.

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