PB062: How I Lost 80% of my Blog Traffic Overnight and How You Can Stop It Happening to You

Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes. How to Diversify Your Blog Traffic Sources to Make Your Blog Stronger Today's episode is about how I almost lost my blogging business overnight. It was right after I had decided to blog full time and had quit my part time job. My traffic fell by 80% and my income fell by about 85%. It was an awful feeling and I'd like to share this story with you to make sure you know what to do if disaster ever strikes your blog. I share why it happened, what I did to recover from it, and what I do now to prevent it ever happening again. In This Episode You can listen to today's episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we'd also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today's episode: Why relying solely on one source of traffic or income source is risky How working out who you want to read your blog can make finding readers easier How creating content that solves the needs of readers can make your blog stronger How to appear on other peoples' blogs How and why collecting email addresses of people who visit your blog is so important Why having an email newsletter is so important How developing a presence on social media can strengthen your blog Why networking with other bloggers helps your blog, and how to do it Why, when and how you should share your blog posts with social influencers Why a content event can help your blog and how to do it Further Reading and Resources for How to Diversify Your Blog Traffic Sources to Make Your Blog Stronger The Day I Almost Lost My Blogging Business By Having Too Many Eggs in the One Basket Episode 33: 2 Questions to Ask to Help You Find Readers for Your Blog Episode 37: Grow Traffic to Your Blog Through Guest Posting and Creating Content for Other Blogs, Forums, Media and Events Episode 35: Turn Surfers into Blog Readers by Building a Sticky Blog Episode 61: How to Build a Culture of Community on Your Blog How to Create Reader Profiles/Personas to Inspire and Inform Your Blogging How I Use Email Newsletters to Drive Traffic and Make Money How to Pitch to Bloggers – 21 Tips   This graph shows my blog traffic at the time that it dropped overnight: Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and you are listening to episode 62. Today, I want to tell you a story of when I lost (I think it was) about 81% of my traffic literally overnight. It was back in 2004 just after I'd gone full-time as a blogger and it completely threw my blogging business, my brand new blogging business into a tailspin.  I want to talk to you about what I did to recover that traffic by diversifying my traffic sources and ask you a really important question that I think could potentially help you if a disaster was to strike you. You can find today's show notes at problogger.com/podcast/62. I want to tell you this story. It happened back in 2004. I think it was the 17th of December, literally a week before Christmas. I was in that winding down mode that particularly us Aussies do at that time of the year. Christmas is a time where we take our summer holidays, so I was getting ready to take a week or two off blogging and to relax.  In the last few months, I’ve gone full-time as a blogger and quit my last part-time job to completely dedicate myself to blogging. I had no other forms of income, my wife was a brand new lawyer and not making a whole heap of money, so my blogging was now my family's main source of income. Then, it happened.  One morning I woke up—a week before Christmas—I checked my blog stats and something was wrong. I knew it immediately as I saw it. My stats for the day which was nowhere near what they normally were. At first,