How to build a blog part 2: What do people search?

This post provides an update on my current blog project and my aim to produce organic traffic. Over the past three weeks I posted on average three reviews per week on my blog and made a few backlinks (<10) in relevant forums. I was trying to write reviews of approximately 300 to 400 words length with 1 to 3 pictures, depending on my ability to take them myself or relying on other sources. This worked out for the past month and I am quite happy with my results. The organic traffic of my blog went up and it feels great to see that my reviews actually do increase traffic. The chart below does show the increase of organic traffic (not overall traffic) of the past 5 weeks. Note that I did not post any reviews between March 10 to 19, as I spent a few days traveling. I am not sure whether the lack of updates directly relates to the small decrease of organic traffic, but I will keep an eye on that.

Organic traffic from 2.22 to 3.30

How to find the "right" speakers?
There are hundreds of vintage speakers out there, some of which are totally unknown, information about them is lost and people don´t search for them. On the other hand, there are many vintage speakers that are rare, but frequently searched for. For some of these speakers you can already find much information in forums and websites, for others you won´t find a lot and have to do some research.

To differentiate between speakers of low interest and those that might attract many viewers, I am using the normal google keyword tool. I use lists of  specifications for vintage speakers , brand names and type specifications. After exporting the results to excel, I look at first at the competition of my potential keywords. The keyword tool lists the competition from 0 to 1, one being a very high competition. As I do not want to compete with other websites that already provide the information I have to offer, I choose keywords/ speakers with very low competition, preferably <0,1. My second look goes toward the number of exact global searches for the specific speaker. In the example you can see the keyword "dynaco a25", which is a vintage speaker that has been sold very successfully in the 1960ies. I chose to write a review on this speaker, as the competition is very low with only 0.06 and 880 exact searches. The post on this speaker is currently one of my most visited reviews and a major part for the strong increase of organic traffic during the last weeks of March.

 General objective for the coming month:
I will continue to post reviews, one at a time, hopefully on average two per week. I will also try to create some more effective backlinks, which is not as easy as it sounds, as many websites have "NoFollow" tags for posted links.A second goal for the coming month is to achieve an average of 100 organic views per week.

Day 263: Organic Traffic and a Lot to Learn

Today I am blogging about my decision to open a blog about vintage speakers and the reasons that led to this decision. This blog, the challenge blog, does now exist for nearly 9 months and during this time I played with google analytics and figured out some changes that occured during the past three months.
About 96% of visitors during June 2011 (the month this blog went online) and November 2011 have been referrals from pokerstrategy.com, who either clicked on the link in my signature or used a link in the relevant thread. Since November 2011, the origin of my website traffic started to change. Have a look at the following pie charts of November, December, January and February.

Traffic in November 2011:

Nov. 2011: Referral traffic: 91,18%; Organic traffic: 4,71%

During the month of November, organic traffic (viewers that were linked to my website by a search engine, such as google) appeared for the first time. However, 92% of traffic is still coming from referrals (pokerstrategy.com). Some occurances of organic traffic exist before November, but those were mostly generated by myself, trying to find my own blog on google.

Traffic in December 2011:

Dec. 2011: Referral traffic: 77,97%; Organic traffic: 12,99%

During the Month of December, you can see how organic traffic rose from ~5% up to 12% and took over much of the share of referral based traffic. It is not clear to me yet what the medium (none) means. Is this traffic that typed the url directly into the browser?


Traffic in January/ February 2012:

January 2012: Referral traffic: 67,94%; Organic traffic: 22,22%

The described development continued during January and February and I am looking forward to see how the distribution of traffic will be in March. Organic traffic is now more than one third of my total traffic. Interestingly feed traffic did not exist before January and I am curious whether feeds will play a bigger role in the future.

February 2012: Referral traffic: 56,58%; Organic traffic: 32,56%

Considering the changing distribution of traffic that enters my blog I was curious what the reason for this development was. Looking at the keywords and the posts that the organic traffic looked at it became quite clear why more and more traffic is coming from search engines.
The common theme is that organic traffic has in about 98% of the cases searched for vintage speakers, the fisher speakers or the bose speakers, which I blogged about during the last months. During Fall, a short wave of traffic entered my website because of the keyword "Irene", after I posted 2 videos about hurricane "Irene".
Overall the blog got over 300 organic viewers during the last 3 months and so far the amount of organic traffic seems to continue to increase. The graph below shows the incoming organic traffic per week, starting last year in September, where the first organic traffic appeared and ending with the first week of March.

Increase of weekly organic traffic from October 2011 to now, March 3, 2012

Conclusion:
Based on this development I decided to open a Vintage Speaker Review blog which focuses solely on vintage speakers, their specifications and small, subjective reviews of them. Many of the organic traffic of my current challenge blog comes from pictures, as in particular my Fisher DS-826 speakers rank No.1 and 2 in googles image search, but also the pictures of my Bose speakers rank usually somewhere on the first page. Therefore, I will try to make many photos of vintage speakers, whereever I can find some. I will also review newer speakers and other "more vintage" audio equipment, as I already did with my yamaha RX-395 receiver. I read on several SEO blogs that it would usually take up to 3 months until organic traffic appears more regularly on a new blog, so I am going to be patient. I created a mental schedule to write one review at least every 4 days, if possible more frequently. As soon as I have about 10 to 15 reviews, I will start creating some backlinks in comment sections of other reviews about the same speakers.
I would assume that the organic traffic coming to this blog will rather decrease during the coming weeks/months, as I won´t post too detailed about speakers here, but on the new blog. However, I will keep posting anything related to the challenge here, which also includes the repair of the old receiver.

Furthermore, I am coming close to the minimum payout limit of google adsense. As soon as I reached that limit I am planning to invest the money into my first own webspace and a .com domain.

I´d love to get some comments about my thoughts here, as I am very new to SEO and all that. So please let me know if there are any crucial mistakes ;).