I just did an analysis of my traffic over the past 30 days to see where it was coming from. Interesting reading. I discovered that nearly 88% of my traffic occurs from just these six types of sources. Let me explain what these types are.

1. Forum traffic provides about 13% of my total traffic. Forums are communities of people who share like interests. I’m a member of quite a few communities but I don’t always check in. Forumosa, Digital Point, Payperpost, Adsensechat, TESOLTeachers, Steve Pavlina’s forum, among others. I’ve joined other communities, too, but I can’t remember what they are! Typically, I include my web address in the profile section, but recently I started including the most recent postings as part of my signature file to generate interest.

2. Blogs of course provide a lot of traffic, too. About 13% but much of this comes from links in articles, blogrolls, and comment traffic. Backtracks also help. The blogging community is too big to really point to any significant blog traffic from one particular blog.
3. Direct traffic accounts for 20%, but I’m still trying to find out what that means exactly. Anyone?
4. Traffic Generators are sites like Blogmad and Blogsoldiers type websites which aggregate information about blogs and direct traffic in different ways. These account for 14% of the traffic to this blog. But Blogmad and Blogsoldiers also use a surfbar type method which displays the blog for a short period of time. They do generate traffic, and some visitors, but the quality of the traffic is poor. Typically, visitors only see the first page in the rotator script, and that’s it. Views per Visit are typically little over 1. I foresee shortly ending the website’s relationship with these types of website.
5. Technorati on the other hand is a blog directory and search engine website that really does generate better quality traffic. In addition, they help rank the blogs according to how many people have also linked to your blog. Technorati brought about 7% of the traffic to the blog.

6. Surprisingly, or not, search engine traffic brought large shares of the traffic, with the lion’s share going to Google search traffic. Nearly 20% of the traffic came from Google Search alone. Wow! I hadn’t done much to improve those rankings except the obvious stuff: linking, blogrolls, directories and postings. For the term “investorblogger.com” Google produces 16,100 hits… Mmm.

What activities do you use to generate traffic? Have you tried any of these? What worked for you? What didn’t?