Over the past four months the traffic to "Carl's Product Management Blog" (this blog) has grown pretty steadily:

This has been a pleasant surprise and one I hadn't really bargained on :-) So, I've found myself asking "why has it grown?" Well, I think there's a handful of reasons:

1.      Luck and regular updates. I do monitor my stats. My blog comes with its own stats package (which I find very useful) and I also use Google Analytics. And it is clear that if I go a week without an update, interest drops off a little. So, I try and keep updates weekly. I mention luck because I don’t spend too much time worrying about things that I notice other bloggers writing about. I have found that quite simply subjects such as Product Management are popular.

2.      Working out, from keywords, what it is popular to write about. I guess you do this naturally. If I have written a post and noticed it is popular I have tended to mentally note the subject area and have probably been influenced to write similar/related posts.

3.      Subscribers are gold. I'd say from my stats this is probably the most significant way of sustaining page views and visits.  Below, you’ll see below a direct correlation between growth in subscribers to this blog and growth in traffic to this blog. 

4.      Back links on sites I have commented on. I consciously now try to leave comments with links to my related posts when I read a blog post I like. In some cases this has lead to traffic channeled from sites I have visited and is probably general good practice.

5.      Sites linking directly to a post on my blog. I suppose this is  harder to achieve.  However, it can have a big influence on traffic, as I am finding at the moment having a link to the blog on the BBC. In this case, my traffic has been quadrupled (temporarily) with one link.

6.      Social Media sites and blog aggregator engines. Perhaps the last meaningful source of traffic has come from posting my blog to Twitter, delicious, technoratti and other social sites. The traffic is regular and fresh.