And we believe we’ve been relatively successful, considering that our unique visitors are up 16% and pageviews, 25% from June to July. Also, if you look at the following two traffic graphs, you’ll see that the incoming traffic line is a lot flatter in July compared to June. Weekends will obviously be more quiet, but the aim is to even get visitors to your site then…

June traffic showing considerable decreases in traffic over weekends

The traffic graph for July shows a much more consistent, "flatter" line

*Yellow lines above shows the days on which we published new content.

In June, traffic on the weekend dropped about 22% (per day) in comparison to the average weekday, whilst we managed to decrease that to about 14% in July. That means we’ve already gotten a 36% improvement in just one month! Here’s how we did it…

1. Publish regular content

Seems like a silly thing to say, but most people ignore this. We’ve tried to publish content regularly during the week and then at least once over a weekend. Also – instead of publishing 2 / 3 posts on one day, we’re spacing that out to different times during the week, which means that the site is getting more clicks & pageviews on an increased amount of days.

2. Publish often

This may also seem kinda obvious, but the more fresh content you add to your site, the better your chance to improve your traffic stats. In July we published 18 new posts on the WooThemes blog, compared to the 15 in June. So whilst not a massive difference, the 3 extra posts definitely brought in additional traffic and pageviews.

3. Engage your readers

Here the aim is to ensure the reader actually comes back to the same post a few times, because they’ve left a comment and want to continue to conversation. Looking at comments on WooThemes, we managed to go from 378 comments in June to a whopping 669 in July. So assuming that increased conversation is directly related to increased pageviews, engaging content is a definite if you’re keen on getting a steady influx of traffic.

4. Be interactive

We’ve found that posts with voting polls or another element of user feedback works great, because you are involving the reader and in this way they have a kind of “stake” in the outcome of that post (meaning they might come back to check up on progress or an end-result).

5. Split posts into 2 (or more) parts

Another way of ensuring multiple pageviews from the same user, is to split posts into more than one part. Not only does this add value (since the content is more), but when the first part is very good, you’ve sold the user and you’re assured of getting that second click on the next part in the series.

This is a good recent example: We show you teasers – Part 1 & Part 2.

6. Contests & freebies

Nothing beats free stuff and it definitely has a very positive contribution to a site’s traffic. One of our recent competitions (it had two parts as well) really upped the traffic on the blog last week, whilst the icons freebie on WooCamp has gotten almost 4500 unique visitors to date.

7. Publish at appropriate times

Check where the majority of your web traffic is coming from and publish posts during work hours in those countries, not in the middle of the night, since your content then gets lost on Twitter (i.e. most people don’t check past tweets the next day). Alternatively, tweet about your content twice during different times of the day, so that all your potential users will see the tweet / link.

8. Interlinking

We’ll finish off with another rudimentary tip, but one that is often neglected. I think we’ve managed to use quite an efficient strategy now, whereby we link to content on the WooThemes blog from WooCamp and vice-versa (this would’ve been evident from above as well). You’re not also pushing your content to the reader in this way, but you’re actually providing contextual, additional value to the reader.

We’d love for you to try these out on your own websites sometime; whilst we won’t make any concrete promises, we can assure you that if these tips are executed properly, you’ll definitely see an increase in your traffic. We’d also love to hear from you with regards to ideas on how we could take this up another notch!