Whether it comes at you steady or as a windfall, hitting that sweet spot for increasing a web site's traffic definately brings smiles to everyone's faces.

The Alexa graph above is from a real estate client we began to work with in November of last year. The challenge was to set their site apart from their competition in the "hot spot" real estate markets they were in, i.e. California, Florida, Maine, Hawaii, and so on.

Although Alexa is never 100 percent accurate (hell, probably not even 75 percent accurate), the graph is just an illustration of the results from a 3/4 month initial online marketing campaign designed to build moderate growth for the real estate site. The client's daily visitors went from practically non-existent with only 100 to 150 uniques per day to well over 5-7k or more unique visitors per day in about 2 or 3 months time.

The better part to this campaign was the challenge to set this client's site apart from the competition. To do that, we built a highly functional and easy-to-navigate CSS-based site design, worked on several solid link building campaigns with only top tier sites which included some contextual linking, and the most significant impact to their increased traffic was our ability to work with the client to help develop several real estate/agent tools that were unique to their markets and spread very well through viral marketing channels. These tools alone created a nice "buzz" for the site, gaining about 1/3 to 1/2 of our total inbound links we acquired for their site within a 2 or 3 month period. We also helped the client with press releases distribution and added more contextual advertising to diversify even more their inbound links. Press releases and other contextual link building helped to accomplish many excellent inbound links to the site from extremely well defined and respected target sites.

We're planning a Phase 2 for the client and will likely build several other vertical sites using Drupal to work along side the real estate markets they're in. I know we'll see their web traffic growth go even higher once these additions are launched.

Now if we could only work out a per home sale commission we'd be set. ;)