Website Traffic is Like a Mountain, Stream and River

Today I was thinking of a good analogy between the idea of “traffic” and a real life scenario, in this case nature. To me, traffic is one of those things that appears finite to the outsider getting rolling, but as you gain experience in the online business world you truly realize how much abundance there is in terms of traffic.
To put this into perspective for you, I want to use the analogy of traffic equating to a Mountain, Stream and River. This is how I am going to divide up the different sources of traffic.
Traffic starts with a mountain. Snow melts when spring time hits and water trickles down the mountain, just like traffic truly starts as a trickle with your business.
There is this desire to get “traffic fast” and I can absolutely appreciate these wants, but the reality of it is that as you build out the initial framework of your website and start to get indexed and ranked in search engines, you can expect a mere trickle.
This trickle should be exciting though as the trickles are going to multiple with time and with content and truly start to connect with one another, forming something much more substantial.
The Trickle of Traffic Meets Up to Become a Stream
You have probably heard the term “stream of traffic”, this is what I am speaking about here. As you produce keyword rich content and you do so consistently, this is going to equate to many trickles making up a much more consistent stream of traffic.
The trickle from some posts on your site might be 1 click per year. Get over it.
The trickle from other posts on your site could be 100 clicks per month, or even a day. That is the reality.
Through time, these trickles create a lot of consistency in your business and before long you are going to have a regular 100 unique visitors per day, 300 unique visitors per day, 500 uniques per day...all as they start to meet up and build momentum in your business.
Then Something Incredible Happens, A River of Traffic
These streams meet up with each other, creating small rivers. Your streams of traffic, those that are getting 100’s of clicks per day start to compound. As you continue to put forth the effort, scale your content, and gain more and more authority in search, your traffic will continue to yield much greater flow.
1,000 clicks per day becomes a reality. 2,000 becomes a reality. And through time, this can continue to scale as you reinvest your earnings and your energy back into your content and scaling your efforts.
And ultimately these rivers will start to meet up and create much bigger rivers. This is how million dollar businesses are derived out of what was once a “trickle”. It is a very organic growth process and it will derive out of your hard work and approach the business as though one day you will have a river of traffic….because that is an absolutely reality.
Natural Website Traffic & 5 Things You Need to Know.
Being involved in first the Pay Per Click World and then the SEO World (combined for the last 15 years), I have had a lot of experience with traffic and I can appreciate the importance of it. You want a business, you need traffic. You want to GROW your business, you need more traffic.
A few things I have learned over the years about website traffic and in particular on the SEO side of things, are the following:
(1) Not every keyword you target will rank. That is a reality that all successful SEO have to deal with. Although you sometimes think you have put together the perfect page/post, Google can think otherwise.
(2) It is easier to write 5 new topical articles than it is to try to make ONE perfect. Not only this, when you have a wider distribution of content out there (more traffic tentacles), you are going to get indexed under many more keywords and subsequently get more traffic.
(3) Your website rankings will move as a large mass. Just like an iceberg or a continental shift, you are going to see your entire mass of pages/posts shift either up or down based on your authority in search engines. Google will reward you if you are active, creating quality content, and engaging regularly within your content.
(4) The first few months are the framework months. Before you can have a steady stream or river of traffic, you first need to experience the trickle.
(5) Keywords are unlimited. I have never found a niche where I have run out of keywords, rather I have run out of time or enough resources to tackle all the opportunity within a given niche. This will always be the case.
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So there you have it, my story about the mountain, the trickle, the stream and the subsequent flow into the river. Perhaps an unusual analogy, but one that I feel depicts the process of building a very successful and lucrative business.
If you can understand and appreciate the idea of generating website traffic and the direct correlation to your website's overall success, you are going to be able to create a long term and fruitful business within ANY niche.
There is an abundance of traffic out there, but it all starts with the initial trickle.
The reason I say that is because I've noticed recently that a number of my posts have dropped dramatically in rankings on Google, even my website as a whole has dropped a couple of pages in ranking.
It had me concerned because now that I've been posting very consistently since the very beginning of the year, I've noticed that a lot of my newer posts have been appearing on Google on like say page 5 or higher and some not even on the first 20 pages of Google even though I've targeted low hanging fruit keywords.
That's not to say though that some of my recent posts aren't ranking. There are a couple of them here and there that have shown up on the first or second page of Google that certainly did surprise me. Others however that I thought would get good ranking certainly didn't.
With that being said, I'm getting close to the 200 mark in the number of posts on my website and I certainly have some of them ranking on the first page of Google.
My thoughts on this are that I'm having to work to rebuild trust with Google, and also that with Google Analytics, I've had to resubmit some things such as an XML Sitemap that shows my website as being https now instead of http.
Regardless though I'm pressing ahead and adding content on a regular basis usually 3 or more posts a week and hoping that my traffic will steadily continue to build.
On my first WA site, I got an almost non-existent 'trickle' of traffic for the first 3 months, which slowly increased to a very small 'stream'. At around the 6 month mark, the 'river' started flowing and I now get a solid flow of traffic which keeps on growing. The hardest time (in my experience) was the first 3-6 months as you are hustling for (what seems) like nothing much, but it pays off with consistency. This stuff really does work.
Cheers
Giulia
Your analogy is cool. I've noticed this for myself.
Each post you publish makes your website a little bit stronger. As it gathers strength you see more traffic that you didn't expect to come for things like tags (I noticed in my analytics) even when you're not ranked page 1 for the title of the post and the keywords you'd hoped for. EG. Ranked on page 15 of google but ranked on page 1 for the tag...
Linking internally also seems to help to "strengthen" a website. I try to find 3 posts to link to within each new post. I also like to go in to those 3 posts and make a link to the new published post.
so when I publish a new post I'm creating 4 new links, 3 going out to 3 older posts. One going in to the new post. I am 100% sure this helps to strengthen a site in terms of SEO. I think it also helps to keep people on your site for longer.
Making sure each link is relevant to the post, is clear as a call to action so that visitors can actually see it (I make mine red in colour) you can actually reduce bounce rate...
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I use a mountain and snowballs as an analogy, similar.
When we first set out to climb a mountain we practice on a small mountain. What we have to do is roll a snowball up in our hands nice and tight. Then we set it off rolling down the mountain by itself (the blog is published)
As it rolls slowly down the mountain, it gathers more snow and gets a little bigger and a little faster...
While that snowball is rolling, you get on with another snowball, you make it a little better than the first. You set it off rolling and don't stop to analyse how it's going because that would slow you down on your your path to success in regards to time. You get on with another snowball.
eventually you end up with lots of snowballs rolling down the mountain simultaneously, some of them good ones that were made well and so are growing in strength as they get bigger.
Some of them will break open, they hit a rock or something and split, never mind, there's others you've pushed down the mountain.
In time, just about every snowball you push off the mountain will be good ones because you've had plenty of practice.
Sometimes, though, even the ones you thought were the best ones you've ever made, they'll smash into a rock and break. It's something you can't avoid, even the best cars in the world can crash.
And other times? Well, sometimes you make a snowball that you think is not good once you've pushed it off the mountain, but despite your expectations, it turns out to be the best snowball ever created in the history of humanity. (lol)
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How's my little twist on your analogy?