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How fast does web traffic grow? (And how to grow your monthly visitors quickly!)
Most bloggers, developers and webmasters will look at the stats of competing sites and say “I can do that too”. And yes, you probably can. And while much has already been written about “how” you can create compelling web content, and “how” you can grow your traffic — in this post we’ll talk a little bit about “how long” it takes to grow your web traffic, and how to accelerate your traffic growth.

For starters, there’s no simple answer to this question because there’s no simple answer to “What is content”? There are hundreds of different types of content from blogs, to online applications to social networking sites, etc. But there are some truths that are widely understood:

…

1. The more “social” your site the faster your traffic will grow:

Social aspects include invites, friend lists, community authored content, comments sections, messaging tools, etc. It comes as no surprise that sites like MySpace and Facebook have seen such explosive growth.

There is no way a single author can ever hope to compete with the explosive growth that comes from thousands of users creating content, messaging, commenting and inviting each other to participate. Should you be building the next great Facebook competitor? No. (Well, ’sure’ if you want to… but good luck with that). But there are plenty of social components that can be added to any website, from MyBlogLog on down the line. Which ones are right for your site is something we’ll cover in another post.

2. The more “connected” your site the faster your traffic will grow:

The web is a connected medium. A website that is not connected to dozens (or thousands!) of websites will have a very hard time building traffic. Many new web publishers are afraid of linking their site to other sites because they feel they will lose traffic to those other sites. This is a fallacy. Do not fall into this trap. Put it this way — you’re going to lose visitors anyway. Web surfers come and go — they click on and click off dozens of sites per ’session’. Worry about getting visitors first — stickiness (the ability to ‘keep’ visitors) is a distant secondary concern. It is always a good move to exchange and share links with other publishers.

3. Watch your “repeat visitors” stat for clues to traffic growth. (But don’t watch too closely).

On one hand “repeat visits” are an extremely important part of website growth. For example, if you’ve been getting on average 1000 visitors per month, and you’re getting 20% of them returning each month — you’re growing your site exponentially. Your traffic will be 1200 this month, 1440 the next month, 1728 the next month, etc. At the end of one year you’ll have over 10k visitors per month. Right? Well… sort of. While it can be educational to build mathematical models for predicting site growth, they’re seldom accurate over the long term. Mathematical predictions are never very good because there are so many other factors involved, like ‘How good is your site over time?’, ‘How viral is your site?’, ‘How many competitors will appear’, etc.

But here’s why the ‘repeat visits’ stat can be misleading in terms of predicting growth (and you shouldn’t look too closely at it): The potential for ‘new visits’ is infinite. I’ve had sites on the front page of Digg and other social news sites. The effect of a massive amount of new traffic can permanently alter your site’s popularity, Google Pagerank, and visitor base. So focusing on new traffic generation should always be the focus. Obviously, the goal is to build a consistent base of repeat visitors — but the only way to begin that process is through the generation of new visitors.

4. Study the charts

There are loads of statistical sites out there. My personal favorite is Quantcast.com because it has good charting capabilities.

(To analyze any site using Quantcast just use the url query: www.quantcast.com/siteyoureanalyzing.com ).

Looking in the ‘traffic’ tab will give you historical traffic data for any site. One of the first things you’ll notice with just about any site is that traffic goes up and down. (A lot!). It can be discouraging for new web publishers to see their traffic numbers drop from a pathetically small number, to an even more pathetically small number. As you can see from analyzing the charts of competing sites — short term volatility is very common even for the big players. The long term trend is all that matters. In other words — daily, weekly and even monthly trends are not all that reliable as indicators of growth. Annual trends are what matter. If you remember the math we did in step one, the difference between month #1 and month #2 wasn’t all that great — but the exponential growth becomes obvious on a larger scale.

Here is two weeks of old traffic data from one of my websites, which illustrates this volatility.

week one	3172
	3060
	6856
	4447
	3254
	2931
	2846
week two	3675
	4110
	4203
	4585
	4200
	3160
	3027

As you can see, I ended week two with less traffic than I had at the start of week one. However, this site tripled its traffic over the course of one year. Those daily ups and downs are rarely representative of a greater trend.

So… how long does it take?

The only way to predictively measure your site’s growth is to make some basic assumptions. First we would have to assume that your current practices of promotion,and regular updates are constants. Then we would have to assume that the rate of growth of visitors is also a constant. (Both of these assumptions are ‘big’ assumptions… but for the sake of prognostication, we’ll have to swallow them). Then we’ll have to rule out any and all possibility of a ‘windfall’ event. (ie: Fortune Magazine gives you some press, you get on the front page of Digg, Paris Hilton puts a bumper sticker with your site name on her car, etc.). Then we’ll also have to rule out the far more probable negative events like ‘your server goes down for a day’, or someone fills up your comments section with comment spam driving regular commenters away.

There. Now we have a totally unrealistic fantasy world in which we can make mathematical predictions. (I’m just waiting for the real math-geeks to show up and tell me that each one of those events is actually mathematically describable in terms of probablilities…. sigh).

And we get the formula:

(Regular Monthly Visitors + (Regular Monthly Visitors * Rate of Growth)) = Next Month’s Visitors.

Make that recursive for as long as you’d like, and you’re good to go. You’re a regular savant — provided reality complies with our fantasy scenario.

All this having been said: I have sites that started out with less than 100 visitors in their first month, which now get over 100,000 a month after two years. I also have sites that got a few hundred their first month and two years later, are getting less than 2000 a month. Much of this has to do with content — and much of it has to do with how much time and effort I’ve put into that content.

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