PageRank 4, 80k Alexa and 20k Visits – All In 3 Months. Detailed Report.

Some say it’s “AMAZING!”… For others it’s just “OK”… For me it’s “ACHIEVABLE” and I think you can outperform me quite easily if you want to.

This post is nothing else but my monthly report of the progress with BloggerJET. (Here are the past ones: 1st week, 1st month, 2nd month.)

The third month is closed and half of the challenge is behind my back now. As I turn around to look at it I have to admit I could do so much better, but that’s a different story. Let’s look at the stats!

Traffic Overview: 3rd Month of Blogging

During this month I’ve only published 7 posts on BloggerJET, 2 of which were guest posts actually. I did not promote my posts the way I should and did not submit any guest posts to other bloggers, yet I managed to almost double the traffic of the previous month:

There are 3 “viral” spikes you can see on the graph and I’m sure you want to know what caused them:

• 1st Spike – “Steve Jobs’ Tribute” post went semi-viral on StumbleUpon;
• 2nd Spike – “Your Post Was Stolen?” disturbed the blogging community a bit and went semi-viral on Twitter (+ a bit of StubmleUpon as well);
• 3rd Spike – “Your Post Was Stolen?” got popular on StumbleUpon this time.

So basically, this month was a success mostly because of the traffic from StumbleUpon, and it’s not an accident actually. I think I’ve developed my very own (dead simple) StumbleUpon Ads strategy, where you can generate tons of traffic at miserable budgets. I’ll share it in my future posts. Subscribe and you won’t miss that.

Top Content This Month

I find it quite amusing that my “hottest” post this month was the one I’ve published a week before that. Again I attribute this “success” to the smart StumbleUpon Ads strategy I’ve mentioned earlier.

Must say I’m a bit disappointed that the “success story of PassivePanda” didn’t work so well – “Zero To Hero: How To Get 120K Unique Visitors In Just 8 Months [Infographic]“. The research took me quite a while and I even paid a designer to create the infographic, hoping that the post will get tons of attention. Yet it didn’t. Perhaps the “success story” that I’ve shared wasn’t outstanding enough. Or else…

Another post that I’ve expected to skyrocket was this one – “99 Dazzling Blogs Every Blogger Should Dream Of Guest Posting For“. Despite the countless hours I’ve spent on it and the trick with “pay with a tweet” button it didn’t generate enough tweets to satisfy me.

All I can say at this point is that producing viral posts like “50+ Amazing Steve Jobs Tribute Artworks” where people don’t even have to read is a hundred times easier than compiling the so-called “valuable” content and spreading the word about it.

Top 25 Traffic Sources This Month

If you compare this report to the one from the previous month you won’t find any new “secret sources” responsible for traffic growth:

The difference lies in the growth of each individual traffic source:

• StunbleUpon – 470.17% growth
• Direct – 20.35% growth
• Twitter – 25.48% growth
• Google – 220.88% growth

Finally my Google traffic is improving! Though I’m quite good at SEO I didn’t do anything special to improve my traffic from Google: didn’t optimize my texts or headlines for particular keywords, didn’t use any dodgy SEO plugins, didn’t build links, didn’t comment on dofollow blogs. This growth is 100% natural and I’m quite happy with it!

Similarly I didn’t do anything special to get such a high PageRank for a 3 months old blog.

What next?

After studying the success of James Clear with PassivePanda.com I no longer think that I have to grow my traffic each month to reach my goal of “100k visits on the 6th month“.

There’s a major traffic drop in the center of the graph and I can clearly see that guest posts is what made PassivePanda skyrocket “from zero to hero”.

That said, in the next 3 months I’m going to focus on hardcore guest posting and as usual I’ll be sharing all my wins and failures here at BloggerJET.

Other than that I have a crazy idea that should help me to reach my goal, but I’ll keep it a secret for now :) Stay tuned and you won’t miss it!

This is it for now! Wish me luck and feel free to email me if you need any advice on growing your blog – I’m ALWAYS happy to help!