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There is structural growth and then there is seasonal (cyclical) growth to traffic. Structural growth happens when you are doing things to affect growth e.g. you create a new product, more content, host a giveaway etc. Seasonal growth is the natural ebb and flow of online traffic throughout the year.

Based on analysis of millions of pageviews a year of data for the past couple year I’ve come up with the following high and low season layout. The data pertains to not only personal finance blogs. The traffic differential between low season to high season usually varies between 10%-25% all else being equal. Of course, nothing is always equal with the constant changes in search algorithms, competition, news, and promotional activities.

High Season

January: All those new year’s resolution folks.

March-May: People looking for tax help.

September – November: Catching up with all the things people should have done while on summer vacation.

Low Season

June – August: Summer vacation.

December: Winter vacation, but gearing up towards the new year again.

SUMMER: THE MOST DANGEROUS SEASON OF ALL Read More

If you’re looking to migrate your Feedburner email subscribers to Aweber, it’s not as complicated as it might seem. I’m not the most tech savvy blogger out there, so I know how stressful and overwhelming this type of technical stuff can feel. The good news is moving your subscribers over to Aweber isn’t hard when you break it down into steps, which I’ll go over here with helpful screenshots. If you’re wondering why Aweber, check out these fantastic Aweber benefits.

Step By Step Instructions To Move Feedburner Email Subscribers To Aweber

Step 1: Identify which email/password is linked to your Google Feedburner account. Hopefully you already know this. If you’re not sure, login to Google with each of your usernames/passwords, go to your Account page, and select Products.

Then you should see Feedburner as one of the choices. Click on it. Read More

Before I get into my step by step guide on how to setup RSS email delivery for your blog with Aweber, I want to give you a little background on why this topic has been coming up more and more lately. As bloggers, many of us love subscribing to RSS feeds by email and through Google Reader. But as you probably know, the much loved Google Reader is being shutdown July 1, 2013. While this caused a lot of initial panic, it’s not as bad as it sounds as there are many free alternative service providers such as Feedly.

Around the same time the shutdown of Google Reader was announced, a couple changes happened to Feedburner as well, which many blogs use for their RSS feeds. The APIs were shutdown on October 20th, 2012 and AdSense for feeds was discontinued on December 3rd, 2012. While many people started to think Feedburner itself would get totally axed as well, that isn’t the case…at least not in the foreseeable future.

There’s still no need to panic though because if Google ever decides to shutdown Feedburner completely, myself and many experienced people in the blogosphere are confident they will make a formal announcement and give everyone plenty of time to migrate their actual RSS feeds off. So let’s not won’t worry about Feedburner going up in smoke for now. Read More

Matt Cutts, Head of Webspam at Google officially announced on his site that the latest version of Penguin 2.0 is out. Supposedly about 2.3% of English-US queries are affected, which is relatively huge. What’s interesting to note is that several of us in the forum noticed some movement at the end of April even before Matt highlighted a Penguin update was imminent. It certainly looks like Google rolls out their algorithms before making an official announcement. Did you notice any changes in your search traffic at the end of April?

Perhaps it’s too soon to tell, but I’ve heard relatively minimal complaints about the latest Penguin roll-out. Since the Exact Domain update in Fall 2012, I’ve observed a huge improvement in new content across the web. Freelance SEO writers have upped their game to write longer content that better matches a site’s style. Bloggers have also increased the length of their average content with more in-depth material as initiatives such as the Yakezie 5,000+ Words A Week Challenge materialized in November 2012.

BULLISH ON BLOGGING Read More