What's a good goal to have for a new website in the first month?

[aliveself]

Obviously I am no Steve Pavlina when it comes to attracting traffic.
How many unique visitors should I aim for for the very first month of my site being live?
I find that even 30 unique visitors per month might be too hard (unless I cheat with real life friends).
I feel like talking to an empty room. :P
for those of you who have more experience, how long did this emptiness last? :P
just want to have something to look forward to.

[MyEyeIsOpen]

It'll be sort of exponential, so if you think 30 is a reasonable goal for the first month, do that -- and do it any way you can, including getting friends to look at it, or make them promise to tell just one other person about it. Next month shoot for 60. Then 120, then you do the math. You'll get it, just keep plugging away.

[GrigoriySidelnikov]

Originally Posted by aliveself

Obviously I am no Steve Pavlina when it comes to attracting traffic.
How many unique visitors should I aim for for the very first month of my site being live?
I find that even 30 unique visitors per month might be too hard (unless I cheat with real life friends).
I feel like talking to an empty room. :P
for those of you who have more experience, how long did this emptiness last? :P
just want to have something to look forward to.

The number of unique visitors will depend on the traffic sources. If you have an interesting article, don't be surprised to receive 100 unique visitors in 1 day, if you talk about it (or perhaps, ask people how it can be improved) on a forum where people discuss related subjects.

Organic traffic from search engines takes a long time to build, but it's not unrealistic to anticipate 1-5 visitors per day in a month from the time you put your website online. If you submit your website to digg, it might even get indexed within 1 to 24 hours. This doesn't always happen, but sometimes it does. Posting on a popular high-traffic forum will also get you indexed within an hour or a few hours. And you get a back-link!

Don't underestimate the power of newsletter traffic. Usually newsletter traffic is extremely targeted -- given you do a little thinking on what words you should use to market the opt-in form, and what page it's located on, what type of traffic that page attracts, etc. I suggest adding an opt-in form right away, because building a list will take a long time. The benefits of a list are incredible. Targeted traffic on demand: 1,000-3,000 targeted visitors in 3 days from the day you broadcast a message. Might take between 1 to 3 years to build such a list. Don't be discouraged by big numbers. In 3 years from now you will probably think: I should have done it 3 years ago.

Create content that people like to share on Twitter or Facebook. That means images, or something people would want to show to their friends. Like a famous painting. And add appropriate share buttons to each page of your site. Every once in a while, someone who has 1,000+ friends will share your site, and that can gain you several unique visitors in one day. Then, if the content is worth it, those people will share with their friends, etc. If you post something incredible on your page, you can get up to a million views in 1 year, or sooner.

[aliveself]

Thanks for the amazing detailed advice guys.
I will try the tips you mentioned and see how it goes.

[jacare]

You need to promote yourself. Facebook, twitter, rss feeds, blogs, SEO. If you spend as much time doing promotion as you do creating quality content, you will build traffic.

Plus you need to be cognizant of what your keywords are. And you need to make sure you SEO your URLS. T

[LauraJane]

I agree. Any goal that you think is reasonable for yourself is a good one. Don't get discouraged. It takes a lot at first, so keep generating valuable content.

Once you really want to take your traffic up to the next level if you want a complex but effective free marketing strategy you can check out this how-to by Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income.

But for now since your site is so new I would focus on creating really great content and not worry about marketing so much. Good luck and keep us posted!

PS: I just checked out your Alive Self blog. I wanted to leave a comment on a post but I didn't seem to see the option. You may want to activate the ability to leave comments (if you haven't already).

[Brutha]

I think your goal should be about something that you can directly influence.
It might be to have a certain number of pages on your website.

[ChrisGinsburg]

With my site, my only goal in the first month was to create 10 quality articles. I fooled around with themes and such but I was focused on the articles. I didn't hardly care if anyone visited my site because that wasn't my goal. Now that I have passed that mark, my goal has opened up more to marketing my site.

Looking back, my only wish is that I had made my first goal to thoroughly research SEO first. However, being highly focused on the posts kept me feeling good about what I needed to do and kept the momentum going.

[aliveself]

Thanks for the detailed feedback! I read all of your posts and they were all helpful.

SEO - I haven't decided on a specific set of keywords yet. I am still trying to narrow down the identity of the blog by writing a range of articles and seeing what I feel most connected. But I should decide soon I guess.

Commenting - I disabled it because I wanted a minimalistic blog, but I will activate it. :P I guess I should, since my blog is so small! LOL.

:P

Thanks everyone!!

[ellie]

I didn't have any goals for mine. But I was averaging about 2-5 a day if that helps.

My numbers have jumped to 100-150 a day, since my site was featured on a really popular bloggers site. Which is rather cool

[ancksunamun]

My sole aim for the first month of my site is to write approx 10 articles on the key content for my niche. I am focussed on building that first and then I will worry about marketing what I have.

There's no point marketing what's not there.

[Curtis2011]

Originally Posted by aliveself

Obviously I am no Steve Pavlina when it comes to attracting traffic.
How many unique visitors should I aim for for the very first month of my site being live?
I find that even 30 unique visitors per month might be too hard (unless I cheat with real life friends).
I feel like talking to an empty room. :P
for those of you who have more experience, how long did this emptiness last? :P
just want to have something to look forward to.

I think a lot of SBI sites get around 10 visitors/day on average in their first month. It really depends on how much content you publish, how good your keywords are, how well-educated in SEO you are, etc.

[Agota]

I can't access your site for some reason, is it already up?

Trend Micro Security, my anti-virus software, is blocking it and I still can't access it even though I removed a block. Wazzup?

It's hard to say for sure, since I can't see your website, but in my opinion, you're aiming too low.

I've had 750+ unique visitors so far and my blog is less than two weeks old. Most of my traffic was generated from a guest post on dumblittleman. I'll repeat myself I guess third time in one evening in these forums (please don't ban me for this ), but guest posts are the most effective way to generate traffic, so focus on those. The easiest places to get published are those which are made from guest posts, like dumblittleman.com, pickthebrain.com and thechange.com (I guess there are many more, but hey, I'm the new kid on the block so I don't know everyone).

Also, it's very helpful not to focus on your direct goal (number of unique visitors), but focus on doing things which will lead to it (write one guest post a week/every two weeks/month depending on how much time you have). You can't really control the number of visitors directly, but you can control how many quality guest posts you write, right?

Also, my suggestion is to drop the "I'm no Steve Pavlina" attitude. What helps me a lot is having an attitude of "Oh so Steve did it in six months? I'll do it in three!"

[Agota]

Also, before you go on a traffic building craze:

1. Make sure you have enough core content first. There's no point in focusing on guest posts if people come to your site and see that there's nothing interesting there. Have at least 10-15 good articles on your site first.

2. Write a decent about page. People can connect with you much better in this way, since readers want to know the person behind your articles. Also, it helps them to remember you and your blog better, which is very useful since people are bombarded with new content everyday.

[Fred Tracy]

I recommend learning the basics before you start.

I started a blog a year ago, and failed miserably. I just didn't know anything about SEO, marketing, etc.

Now that I've started my new blog last December, I did a lot better. Most of my traffic comes from google and guest articles, if that helps any. Oh, and this forum.

Secondary would be places like facebook, twitter, random comments on blogs, and so on.

You really have to market yourself in a number of places to get quality traffic.

I listened to a podcast Pete Michaud did, and it is legit. Pick something reasonable, then double it, and make sure it doubles. You'll eventually get so much traffic you won't know what to do with it.

[Lucidism]

For your first month, a good goal to have is to be consistent with writing content. No matter how many unique visitors you get, you want to start off right. So it's really an internal goal. Good luck!

[danthony]

My suggestion would be this, work on traffic for as long as you do a blog post. For example, if you take an hour to do a blog post, work on promoting traffic to that article for an hour through social media and so on. On your off days, you can do little things like guest commenting on other blogs or even guest writing, this all helps. You can try blog carnivals and syndicate a couple of posts put together as a free report to somewhere like Scribd with a backlink to your site. Just a few tips

[SnerpGoodWord]

Originally Posted by LauraJane

Once you really want to take your traffic up to the next level if you want a complex but effective free marketing strategy you can check out this how-to by Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income.

Holly spamfest, batman!

Seriously - that "marketing strategy" is to create tens of spam copies of your article all over the web, have them link to spam-blogs, and then point those spam-blogs at your website.

The more luck google has deep-sixing all that crap, the better off the web will be.