The 2 Kinds of Bad Traffic and Ways to Fight It

Everyone hates having a high percentage of those annoying hit-n-run visits. You invested your soul in your blog, picking and tweaking with your theme, gathering all the popular plugins to make everything ready, writing those first dozen of articles to get things going, but, behold! You check your site stats and you go, “Hey, this can’t be right?!”, 60 visitors stayed for 5 seconds and went bye bye…

What did you do wrong? Probably a mix of things, but that doesn’t matter. Those 60 visitors will not come back in the near future anyway.

What you can do is to plan ahead, and make those hit-n-runners stay long enough to get interested, and maybe even subscribe to your RSS.

1st Kind – Referrer Specific Bad Traffic

Use your stats to identify the source of the “bad” traffic. Look for traffic sources and analyze each traffic source separately. This way you would be able to see if it is a certain referrer that is sending you that “bad” traffic. (e.g. Entrecard Chain Droppers). Depending on the outcome of your analysis, you may be in luck. Knowing that it is one or two referrers that are sending you those bad guys, there are a few tricks to grab their attention:

• Example 1:

  Welcome, StumbleUpon visitor! Please consider giving this article thumbs up if you find it useful or interesting

• Example 2:

  If you came here through Entrecard, receive a free *whatever* for subscribing to Net-Entrepreneur.com via email

*whatever* can be short review, a blogroll link (for a month), 125×125 ad (for a month), etc.

2nd Kind – General Bad Traffic

If your problem is not referrer specific, and assuming your content is readable, I have the following suggestions:

• If your articles are long or you want the reader to click to view your article (i.e. advertising concerns), use the more tag instead of the_excerpt tag. It is way more flexible and friendly (Find more on WordPress)

• Link your articles to your previous, related, articles.

• Use one of the available Popular Posts and Related Posts plugins.

• Use the above the fold space of your blog to grab readers’ attention:

  • Create a custom header for your blog, if you still have the standard one that came with your theme

  • Incorporate pictures and graphics into your articles

• Use your available ad space to advertise yourself:

  • Offer giveaways to new subscribers

  • Offer weekly/monthly giveaways to randomly chosen commentators (could be ebooks, reviews, ads, links, etc.), use a banner with a pitch like “this week’s winner commentator is..”, “this week’s prize is…”

Good luck people!

- Alex

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