The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.  Everybody knows that.  But what I did not know, and just recently discovered, is that the price of traffic is also eternal vigilance.

As you can seen from the website traffic data page so far the traffic is coming very slowly.  At the beginning there was basically no traffic.  Then I started to post on a forum.  Each post ends with my signature which is a link to the website.  Every time I made a post, a few hours later my traffic would go up.

The problem is that the traffic does not stay up.  If I miss a day of posting then the traffic goes down.  Post then get visitors.  No post, no visitors.  Eternal vigilance – post everyday.

The website is still at its infancy and no traffic has come by search engines or word of mouth.  I can deem some interesting information with the threads I have created on a forum.  Since all my traffic has come from them.

So far I have started a total of 6 threads.  By taking the number of people that visited the website (147) by the number of posts (6) we can see that every post is worth almost 24 visitors.  This is sad.  Because so far it looks like I would need to create 41 threads a day to get 1000 visitors a day.  Unfortunately to make this possible I would need a team of a thousand monkeys typing a thousand words.

This means that the forum I am creating threads at is too small.  Not enough views.  Looking back at the last few days of my posts I can see that they have been viewed 851 times.  Out of all the people viewing my threads 17% of them click on the signature line.

All the above can be summarized as: for every thread created on a forum my website receives 17 visitors per 100 views.

Therefore to reach my goal of a 1000 visitors per day I need 5882 thread views.  Or to start 10 threads each receiving at least 588 views.  Still a lot but getting closer to being possible on large forums.

Two conclusions can be made:

1. By posting on big forums I will still need to be vigilant and post every day, but at least I will be closer to 1000 visitors a day and not 15.
2. I need to find other ways to get traffic.

Data used to for calculations:

• Unique visitors: 67
• Visitors: 147
• Threads created: 6
• Clicked on Signature: 23
• Number Views in forum: 851

Note: The only way to explain the discrepancy between ‘unique visitors’ (67) and ‘clicked on signature’ (23) is to assume that some of the visitors that clicked on the signature emailed a link of the website to their friends.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used, Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this

I just checked – WordPress 2.7 (a blog creation tool) has been downloaded 1,175,343 times.

This does not necessarily mean that there are 1,175,343 WordPress 2.7 blogs out there.  Lets try to figure out how many people have downloaded it and have a blog.  Some assumptions: 

1. Half of all the people that downloaded it had to download it twice.  Who knows, maybe the first time they downloaded to a folder which later they could not find.  Actual blogs: 881,507
2. Half of those people download it but never bothered to go further.  They had a dream of creating a blog and 1000’s of people reading it everyday.  That dream, like most, will never be realized because they do nothing after downloading.  Actual blogs: 440,753
3. Half of those people create a blog but do not do any proper advertising.  So there is no way to find them.  Only their family and friends know about it.  In Google search it is on page 16.  Actual Blogs: 220,376

Ok, so after all this assuming is done we are left with 220,376 actual blogs that can be found on the internet.

How many successful blogs are there.  This is hard to determine, because the definition of a successful blog is quite relative.  So lets say a blog that makes enough money to suport the webmaster and his family confortably is considered successful.  So:

1. Of all the blogs in my niche (making money online) I can think about 5 of them that have enough traffic to be considered a success. But since I have probably not found all of them lets say there are 10.
2. There are hundreds of niches with blogs that are popular enough to be considered a success. Lets say 500.

Therefore of all the blogs created (220,376) only 500*10=5000 can be considered a successful.  That is 2%.  The above can be summurized for Wordpress downloads:

• Of all the WordPresses downloaded only 0.42% will become successful.
• Of all the WordPresses downloaded and blog created only 2% will become successful.

Of course all these are just rough numbers full of wild assumptions, but I would not be too suprised if the real figures are much different.  Actually my gut feeling is that the percent of successful blogs is even less.  Expecially since these are only WordPress blogs.  A lots more other types of blogs are competing to be the 10 best of every niche.

The point.  Do not be suprised if this blog is not around next year.

Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, What YOU Expect vs Reality