Beyond Wine Talk: How to Increase Your Visitors from 1500 to 15000 per Month
Last night, I opened the last bottle of Jose Pariente Verdejo 2006 that came with our shipment during the move. I love this wine. It is refreshing, with a hint of sweetness, perfect for a quiet night of Internet surfing. I typed in www.notesfromspain.com in my browser to check out what Ben Curtis has to say on his blog. The post that caught my instant attention was published on 17 April, Online Business in Spain - Getting Rich from Google Ads.
We, at excelWines.com, have so much to learn yet about online marketing. After the initial crawling and fire fighting stage, we are finally seriously thinking about how to attract more visitors to our site beyond Google Adsense and Google Adwords. One comment on this post particularly caught my attention. The guy (Mr. J) said the number of visits per month to his site has gone from 1500 to 15000 in 3 months.
Of course, I immediately went to his website to check out how it is like because I would like to see that kind of increase on our site. I was rather disappointed to see the contents were not really that interesting in my dictionary. I didn’t even bother to bookmark the page. There were no comments at all as far as I could see. And yet his site had a Pagerank of 5.
I got really curious about the statistics Mr. J quoted so I did some digging and found out his site returned only 1 backlink from google.com. It was some web designing company with a Pagerank of 5. Yahoo returned 22 inlinks. Alexa.com says the reach of his website went up 807% in three months. I was really scratching my head hard, how did he do it? Is he a marketing genius? Does the quantity of quality links count in the Google Pagerank formula (this is a genuine question)?
I am still very naïve in the Internet marketing world, but I can’t help to think Mr. J has tricked all of us who visited his site, and all these mighty engines. Let’s assume for a moment 1500 (hmmm..) visitors per month was true initially. He then left a eye-catching comment on Ben Curtis’ blog that the traffic to his website increased dramatically from 1500 to 15000. Every single reader of notesfromspain (which got 25,801 Absolute Unique Visitors in March) who is interested in increasing the traffic to their websites probably clicked to visit Mr. J’s website, just like I did. And voilà, the number of visitors went from 1500 to 15000 almost instantly. What a tricky formula to increase the traffic if my guess is right.
We still believe the key to success is to provide quality Spanish wines combined with excellent customer service. Some day, words will get out, and we will be up there, too. And you can help by visiting us often 
(Yes, I know we still have to learn the ins and outs of online marketing).
April 24th, 2008 at 10:02 am
You got the trick it, it only takes a bit of social engineering.
If you read an interesting comment on a blog, don’t you usually check that person’s website? Many people do it…
April 27th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
@Jagoba, I also check the websites of people who post interesting comments. I am not against that. I am not even against tricking the engines. Maybe I didn’t make myself very clear in the post. What I don’t believe in is exagerating facts or making stories up to attract readers.
sandy