How I lost 30% of Website Traffic within one day thanks to Wordpress
Not you could think that this blog did not receive many visitors in the time I was not posting (and while I was enjoying my vacation) but actually the traffic did not decrease. Of course I had more visitors in the period where I was pulling out 1-2 articles every day, but in average the visitor number did not change. Normally you will see a website traffic decrement after loosing a lot of positions in Google search engine results for some of your major keywords. For this blog something different happened September the 3rd.
At the beginning of March I spent some time designing Wordpress themes due to the fact that it was a very good moneymaker and that it was bringing a quite good traffic to the designer. In fact, everytime I created a Wordpress theme, I added a “designer link” to this blog in the footer. With the right promotion for each Wordpress theme, it was possible to get some good traffic and lots of backlinks.
Wordpress was used to have some pages with Wiki technology (registered users were able to modify these pages) on their website, were designers were able to add a link to a free Wordpress theme (to the page containing the description and the link to download the theme). This page was the Wordpress Codex Theme List which was divided into 4 sections: Widget ready themes, 2 columns themes, 3 column themes and finally something like “theme collections”. The first Wordpress themes I created, were all 2 column themes and had names such as “Moony”, “Orangeview”, “Flowerwords” and so on. The Wordpress Codex Theme List page had the same structure as a dictionary so that you had to add a theme beginning with “F” , after all themes starting with the letter “E”. When I noticed that I was receiving a lot of traffic from those “theme lists” even if all my themes were at the center of those long long pages, I realized that those pages were getting a lot of traffic.
When a visitor comes to your website or blog, and you have a really long page, he won’t probably scroll it down to read it all. That’s the reason why I had the idea to create several Wordpress themes, and choose a name for each of those starting with the letter”A”, with a number, or even with a “symbol” such as the “@”. That’s why within a week I created 3 themes called “@net”, “Abacus” (A-B-A, first theme of the “A” list) and “1984″. Those themes were followed by “@rctic Business” and “Acid Green Pro”. By getting one theme at the very top of three lists (Widget, three column and two column list), I started to receive some serious traffic (and with “serious traffic” I mean several hundreds of visitors each day). I never thought that it was possible to get so much direct traffic, with such a simple trick.
September the 3rd Wordpress finally decided to give their Theme Viewer a traffic boost, and closed the Theme Lists. Closing the theme list decreased Linkrain’s blog traffic by 30%. Those visitors were actually not converting into anything (they did not subscribe to the blog feed because they were only interested in the Wordpress theme and they did not click any advertisement because of the same reason) but they were still visitors.
Hopefully I will find a new little traffic bringer soon
