How to Set Traffic Goals

excerpt from IFB

Higher traffic on your blog means a greater possibility of making your blog a self sustaining business. So, what’s the magic formula behind getting higher numbers? There’s a myriad of things you need to do, but one way to grow your reach is by setting tangible traffic goals for yourself. Here’s how to strategize:

Set concrete numbers to hit for both your blog traffic and social media followers.

Just having a vague idea of “I want to have more traffic” won’t do anything, but if you set a numerical goal for yourself, you can work on gaining more followers in a formulaic and mathematical way. Make sure you are setting numbers that you can actually hit — for instance, if you have 40 page views daily, it’s most likely that won’t have 2,000 page views daily by next week. The same goes with larger blogs, 27,000 page views daily this week won’t mean a million the next. Pick numbers that make sense, but are also challenging.

Example: If you have 10,000 daily page views, try to hit 11,000 a day seven days from now. That’s a 10% increase — a tangible and reachable number. If you continue this every week, your site will only keep growing!

Give yourself a high five every time you reach your goal, and if you don’t reach your goal, figure out why. Was the goal to high? Or did you post less content? What can be adjusted so you can achieve your desired number by the next week?

Make a spreadsheet to keep track of your growth and your potential growth.

Write down your current numbers, along with short term goals and long term goals. Say your goal is to hit a total of one million page views on your site within the next year, calculate how many page views you would need every day to reach this goal. Then ask yourself, “is this goal possible?” If you think it is, plan your trajectory accordingly.

Check your traffic every day.

This should seem obvious, but sometimes when you’re blogging you can get caught up in your content and forget to check your stats. If you are below your daily stats, you can try to make it up the next day.

Example: Your daily goal (based on your long term goal) was 700 page views, but you only hit 620. Tomorrow, your goal should be 780 to make up for the loss you suffered the day before. You may need to use social media more or beef up your content that day to make up the gap.

Write down which posts do the best, and which ones do the worst.

Have you ever experienced a spike in traffic? What about that day made your traffic go up? Did someone retweet you? Was it a certain accessory you talked about? Did you change the style in which you presented your post? Using your analytics tools, hone in on which posts have had the best traffic and which posts have had the lowest traffic. Then use these numbers to quantify what to repeat and what to avoid when you are publishing your content.

Keep a list of anything you notice that has hurt or helped your traffic.

Did you work with a brand or a fellow blogger and it boosted your stats? Or perhaps you uploaded a really great photo on Instagram? Or is there a certain key word that drives traffic to you? Keep a list of what affects your blog and how to stay in tune with what resonates with your readers and what doesn’t — this will be most helpful in the long run.