How to Marinate a Website for Traffic Explosion - Step-By-Step Guide

byel-jefe-Kyle

17.4K followers

Updated 5 years ago

So I've been marinating one of my websites for several months now and have had some pretty good results, which is why I think I'm now qualified to share with you how I went about this and I'll show you the results--which consist of a nice boom of traffic (10x the traffic!) without doing anything.

Let's start off with the short step-by-step guide to marinating your website and then I'll go over my experience with this.

Note: Marinating a website is when you create some content on it and then let it sit (marinate). This isn't always a good choice for all types of sites. For example, if you have a blog that requires weekly or even daily postings to keep your visitors up to date, this might not be a good choice.

Website Prep

Before letting your site marinate you want to pump out some content and fill it out some.

How many posts should you write? Well, there is no real number to give here, but can tell you that my site (which I'll go over soon) has 35 posts. Based on my observations and seeing what others do, I think that 20 posts is probably a good minimum amount, but of course if you are writing longer posts you could get away with less.

Again, this is by no means a set number and sometimes I even wonder if I know what I'm talking about here.

I would suggest creating a "web" of content, as this is best for SEO. What I'm talking about here is including lots of internal links linking your content together.

For my particular website I have probably about 30 small posts (about 1k - 1.5k words) that are on small topics--and then I have 5 or so large posts that are longer and that I link many of my smaller posts to.

Once you have your site up with a good amount of content, good content targeting good keywords, you are ready for the marination process...

Marinating Your Website - 4 Steps to a Juicy Site

If you are a cook or have some experience with cooking this is going to be a lot easier for you. It's not much different from marinating a steak--just it's a website.

Step 1: Choose Your Ingredients for The Sauce

Step 1 only consists of planning. First you are going to want to think about what taste you are going for.

Spicy, sweet, sour, salty? How do you like it?

Choose your ingredients and proceed to step 2.

Step 2: Blend Together in a Blender

Now what you have to do is blend everything together. Simple enough.

You can choose to puree your mixture into a fine sauce or go a little less and leave it more chunky--this is all preference.

Step 3: Drizzle Onto Your Website

I think this is where people often get it wrong and mess up the entire procedure.

What I've found works pretty good is using a laptop, opening it up to the homepage of your website, and then drizzling the marinade all over the keyboard. You want the marinade to really soak into your keyboard.

The more it soaks in, the more it is absorbed by your website--so apply liberally.

Note: If it doesn't soak into the keyboard much you can try drizzling some over the speaker are--or even tipping your laptop on its side and putting the marinade right into the USB outputs seems to work good as well.

Step 4: Let It Sit

Generally speaking you are going to want to let your website marinate for a couple weeks. This will really let it soak up the flavor and is a best practice. However, by no means are you limited to just 2 weeks.

If you want you can even let it sit over a couple of months then that is completely do-able.

According to foodsafety.gov, chicken shouldn't be marinated for more than 2 days and beef & pork shouldn't for more than 5 days--but they don't know a darn thing about marinating a website, and unfortunately there isn't much information on this out there.

During this time refrigeration is a must. And be sure to keep everything sealed so that evaporation doesn't occur. Something as simple as putting your laptop in a trashbag and tying off the top works just fine.

Results

*First off, let me say that I know the session duration and bounce rate aren't very great. This is a new site that is a bit difficult for me to write for, but I'm confident I can improve a lot on that.

*Second, results are going to vary greatly depending on many variables. So don't expect the same--especially because I'm not disclosing my secret marinade sauce.

As you can see, I wrote my last post on March 29th.

At that time I was averaging less than 10 visitors per day.

During the marination period traffic slowly increased for a while and then there was a BOOM, which is now giving my site around 100 visitors per day on average--a 10X increase!

I'm not 100% sure for the recent BOOM in traffic. Maybe it was the excess salt I mixed with the marinade--or perhaps the hint of ginger I added for some spice.

Most people say that a website will start to experience some nice growth around 3 months or so. This is when Google really starts to trust your site if you are doing everything right and following the training here at WA.

I created this particular website on January 6th, and published my first post then as well. So the 3-month mark would be April 6th. If you look at the chart above, that is pretty accurate. Right around that point the traffic slowly started increasing--even though I wasn't doing a thing other than letting my computer marinate in my refrigerator...lol.

Key Details

• Website Birth: January 6th
• Niche: Health & wellness
• Number of Posts Total: 35
• Avg Post Length: Anywhere from 1,000 - 1,500 words
• Last Post Written On: March 29th
• Marination Period: About 3 months
• Traffic Increase: About 10x (Avg of less than 10 visitors/day to an avg of around 100 visitors/day)

Originally I blogged here at WA about this new website I was creating and about how I thought it had good potential (original blog post here). My plan was to keep everyone updated with the progress, but after a while I got busy with other things and, to be honest, I was losing hope that it would do very well.

So I let it sit and this is what happened.

Pro Tips:

Tip #1 - Use Chromebooks

Marinating a site can be worth it in the long-run, but at first you will lose money. The problem is that it will require 1 laptop per website that you take through this process.

Because of this I would suggest a cheap Chromebook laptop. You can even go out and buy one specifically for the occasion, which is what I do.

Tip #2 - The Right Consistency Is Key

When you are making your marinade be sure to use enough water. If it is too thick it will not be able to seep into the keyboard of your laptop and as far as I know, this will mess up the whole process.

Tip #3 - Use Caution

When you go through this process you are going to want to have your computer on. As you apply the marinade, you may hear some strange sounds, you might see sparks and you could even see smoke. This is part of the process and it is good to see this. Just be careful.

On Second Thought...

Now that I really think about it... I wonder if the part of the marinating process could be left out.

Is it really that important to drizzle your laptop with marinade or would it work just fine if you created a website and let it sit?.... without ruining a computer???

I'm not completely sure and all I know is that what I did seemed to work. So I'll be doing it again.

What do you fellow WAers think about it?

Is the marinade necessary? And if so, what ingredients do you suggest? Or is it best to skip that part?

So obviously I'm joking a lot here. But I hope this post gives some people out there some hope. Like I said, I was disappointed in this site's performance and didn't plan on doing this. I just got caught up in other things and decided to leave this alone for a while--and to my surprise this happened.