Author Topic: How do you get traffic to your site?  (Read 1128 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline UpstateWeather.com

  • Signature
  • Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 146
    • Upstate Weather
How do you get traffic to your site?
« on: February 06, 2018, 09:18:23 AM »
Good Morning WXForum! Down here in sunny Atlanta - soon to be rainy Atlanta and wanted to pick your brains on something.

What does everyone do to drive traffic to their site? For me, I try to post on our Atlanta Weather Reddit sub-community every now and then and then I utilize Twitter (@EastCobbWeather) as well.

I want to get the word out and drive more people to my site, but struggling to find good ideas / resources that really help. I've tried to search the forum and incorporate the ideas I've found, but honestly most previous posts seem to be pretty old.

Would love to know what everyone does.

Thanks!
Eric
http://www.ericboettner.com/weather/index.php






Offline CNYWeather

  • Forecaster
  • *****
  • Posts: 2295
    • CNYWeather
Re: How do you get traffic to your site?
« Reply #1 on: February 06, 2018, 10:30:03 AM »
TBH, I really dont do much to drive traffic to my site. I let it take care of itself.

* A catchy and easy to remember domain name
* I've got the webcams which have been up for almost 10 years which draw people on their own.
* My site was the first one around here in 2006 that updated the weather.
* Twitter Wx reports and severe weather warnings seem to draw people on their own also.
* I added school closings which on a bad weather day draws 5-10,000 extra pageviews
* Luck



Don't take this the wrong way, but what about a domain name like EastCobbWeather or something like that for your site?




Tony




Offline UpstateWeather.com

  • Signature
  • Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 146
    • Upstate Weather
Re: How do you get traffic to your site?
« Reply #2 on: February 06, 2018, 10:58:27 AM »
TBH, I really dont do much to drive traffic to my site. I let it take care of itself.

* A catchy and easy to remember domain name
* I've got the webcams which have been up for almost 10 years which draw people on their own.
* My site was the first one around here in 2006 that updated the weather.
* Twitter Wx reports and severe weather warnings seem to draw people on their own also.
* I added school closings which on a bad weather day draws 5-10,000 extra pageviews
* Luck



Don't take this the wrong way, but what about a domain name like EastCobbWeather or something like that for your site?






Thanks @CNYWeather! I've been doing twitter and just got WXMesg set up to start tweeting warnings, etc so hopefully that will help. How did you add school closings? That's a great idea! Though in Atlanta, we don't close often, unless of course they call for ice or snow. Then everyone panics.

And about the domain name. YES! I've been wanting to do that but honestly, I don't want to have to make all the changes in my scripts to update. I guess I could buy a new domain and redirect to my current domain, but that's not a great option either. I should have thought about that much earlier...oh well, you live and learn.

Thanks again!

Offline CNYWeather

  • Forecaster
  • *****
  • Posts: 2295
    • CNYWeather
Re: How do you get traffic to your site?
« Reply #3 on: February 06, 2018, 11:11:37 AM »
I run school closings in an iFrame from a couple of sources that let me use the data.

My site desperately needs a makeover also. I'm been chipping away when time allows
getting rid of pages nobody bothers with and making a nice clean responsive design.

Closings tomorrow also means my site will get bombarded starting around 4am and
mobile device visits vs desktop will be about 8 to 1.  Thats something also to keep in mind.

Tony
Tony




Offline Bunty

  • Forecaster
  • *****
  • Posts: 2429
  • Stillwater, home of Oklahoma State University
    • Welcome to Stillwater Weather
Re: How do you get traffic to your site?
« Reply #4 on: February 06, 2018, 05:12:32 PM »
Put up a page even more popular than the weather.  The earthquake page is easily the main driver of hits to my site.  In two days my earthquake page had 340 hits, compared to the home weather page with 96 hits.  The earthquake page would have even more hits if more of them would hit in the Oklahoma City and Tulsa areas.  But most of them are weak and happen well out in the middle of nowhere where few people live.  I'm certainly not complaining about that. https://stillwaterweather.com/okareaearthquakes

Needless to say, what the weather is doing or about to do is the biggest driver to your site.  When the weather for the day is normal and not acting like it wants to act up in a severe way, there is not much demand for weather forecast info.
« Last Edit: February 06, 2018, 05:25:09 PM by Bunty »

Also the 2nd home page using modified AltDashboard 6.95 at http://stillwaterweather.com/2ndhome.php

Offline UpstateWeather.com

  • Signature
  • Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 146
    • Upstate Weather
Re: How do you get traffic to your site?
« Reply #5 on: February 07, 2018, 08:24:25 AM »
Put up a page even more popular than the weather.  The earthquake page is easily the main driver of hits to my site.  In two days my earthquake page had 340 hits, compared to the home weather page with 96 hits.  The earthquake page would have even more hits if more of them would hit in the Oklahoma City and Tulsa areas.  But most of them are weak and happen well out in the middle of nowhere where few people live.  I'm certainly not complaining about that. https://stillwaterweather.com/okareaearthquakes

Needless to say, what the weather is doing or about to do is the biggest driver to your site.  When the weather for the day is normal and not acting like it wants to act up in a severe way, there is not much demand for weather forecast info.

That's a great idea, thanks Bunty!

Offline UpstateWeather.com

  • Signature
  • Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 146
    • Upstate Weather
Re: How do you get traffic to your site?
« Reply #6 on: February 08, 2018, 11:46:35 AM »
TBH, I really dont do much to drive traffic to my site. I let it take care of itself.

* A catchy and easy to remember domain name
* I've got the webcams which have been up for almost 10 years which draw people on their own.
* My site was the first one around here in 2006 that updated the weather.
* Twitter Wx reports and severe weather warnings seem to draw people on their own also.
* I added school closings which on a bad weather day draws 5-10,000 extra pageviews
* Luck



Don't take this the wrong way, but what about a domain name like EastCobbWeather or something like that for your site?

I took the plunge and got a new domain. Thanks for pushing me to do it!

http://www.eastcobbweather.com


Offline CNYWeather

  • Forecaster
  • *****
  • Posts: 2295
    • CNYWeather
Re: How do you get traffic to your site?
« Reply #7 on: February 08, 2018, 12:06:04 PM »
Cool!

Who is your host also? Took a good 10 seconds or so for your main page to show.
Tony




Offline Maumelle Weather

  • Forecaster
  • *****
  • Posts: 1824
    • Maumelle Weather
Re: How do you get traffic to your site?
« Reply #8 on: February 08, 2018, 12:23:52 PM »
Cool!

Who is your host also? Took a good 10 seconds or so for your main page to show.

Hi Tony,

Looks like he has Bluehost as his webhost.  He also has an error in his top.php file, which maybe part of the long load time.
GR2AE, GR3, Cumulus

Offline UpstateWeather.com

  • Signature
  • Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 146
    • Upstate Weather
Re: How do you get traffic to your site?
« Reply #9 on: February 08, 2018, 12:46:35 PM »
Yeppers - I'm on Bluehost. Talk about a bad mistake. The load time is driving me CRAZY! I think part of it is my fault (working through that to improve the code) and a part is just Bluehost in general.

I think I fixed the top.php error - made an update and messed it up but it should be fixed now.

Have either of you ever had issues with load time? Any suggestions? It's killing me....

Thanks!
Eric

Offline Maumelle Weather

  • Forecaster
  • *****
  • Posts: 1824
    • Maumelle Weather
Re: How do you get traffic to your site?
« Reply #10 on: February 08, 2018, 01:12:50 PM »
Hi Eric,

Your site on my 3Mb UVerse connection took about 15 seconds to load. Tony's site took about 3-4 seconds to load for me. My site took about 2 seconds to load.

Tony, nor I, use a CDN on our sites, so I do not know if that has anything to do with yours.

My site is almost 100% HTML 5 compliant, which means it can be looked with any modern browser (IE is not modern, and I do not know about Edge) and it looks all the same, including mobile devices. My site is a responsive web template, also.

I constantly test my site here. This site shows you what could be improved on your site in terms of load time, overall speed, etc.

John
GR2AE, GR3, Cumulus

 

anything