This Had the Single Biggest Impact on My Website Traffic

I've been actively building my website for almost 6 months now, although I've owned my site for at least 2 years.

I got sidetracked with family and FT work until this year gave me the perfect opportunity to focus in. Especially as I've been getting an increased number of freelance opportunities thanks to getting more well connected on social.

I can do front-end and some back-end website work, but I generally prefer to keep my personal site low lift as far as any required effort. WordPress, theme, basic setup.

And I didn't set up an SSL cert until midway through last month.

Main reasons are because (1) I was being lazy and (2) I didn't want to invest much money into my site without it being positioned for revenue gen. GoDaddy and some other hosts charge for SSL certs.

Finally last month, after having numerous people on Twitter tell me to go with Cloudflare, which offers a free SSL cert that can be integrated with almost any host, I took the leap.

And my SEO traffic since then has pretty much doubled.

I've been testing out a variety of ways to build my site traffic. Right now the main sources are social media (I'm most active on Twitter) and referrals, thanks to use of Zest and getting featured in a few articles (including one in Yahoo last month).

But setting up the SSL cert has had the biggest, fastest impact that I've noticed so far.

Charting the rest of my growth strategy and what I'm testing in my newsletter, plus talking about marketing + branding in general as I get myself prepped to take a leap from freelance work to entrepreneurship within the next year.