Appealing title, isn't it? I always wanted to use a title like this. It's the typical title which should attract readers to read the article and in the end make them buy something. But I have to disappoint you. You won't find a magic trick here how you can increase the traffic to your site with 50%. The good news is that I'm not selling anything. It's just a story about something I experienced last week and found rather amazing. So I wanted to share this with the visitors of this site.

As you know, this site has some free joomla 1.5 extensions on them. The majority of the traffic to this site is generated by these extensions. Not through some search engine, but almost all traffic arrives here through direct links on the official joomla extensions site. This is important to know, to understand why my traffic increased. So last week I decided to make a small change to my site. Not because I wanted to increase the traffic, as I'd never thought this would make a change in traffic. I decided to change the thumbnails I used for my extensions. I did this for 2 reasons: first one was that I thought some of the thumbnails were just plain ugly. Second reason was that I thought it would be a good idea to have all thumbnails in a similar style. Below you can find an example of the change.

I guess I don't have to tell you, but for the ones who would doubt: the right one is the new thumbnail. I made this change for all extensions, changed also the thumbnails in the extensions directory on the official Joomla site and was rather pleased with the result. The next day I saw an increase with 50% of the traffic on my site. First I thought it was a coincidense. Now we're one week later and it's clear this is no coincidense. Simply using a better looking thumbnail for my extensions really increased the traffic with 50%. For marketeers this probably won't be such a surprise: if the package looks better, more people will check it out, although the contents is exactly the same.

This change is specific for this site, so probably it's not to much use for your own site. But still you might learn one lesson from this story for your own site: details really do matter and can make a huge difference. So just experiment: try to make small changes to your site and check the effect on the traffic. Most of them will make very little difference, but suddenly you'll find something that does make a difference and probably it will be something that you didn't expect.