on the rise, what do I do?

I'm currently on the rise, but I'm afraid of losing momentum. I'm running a tech blog, but not the kind that just reports on whatever the immediate hot thing is for today. I post how to's, youtube videos, reviews for laptops or phones, things that people could Google in the future and still hopefully find my site. I also distribute my own software on the site and advertise it out to other forums, blogs or videos.

What you're seeing in that spike is I changed the Wordpress theme from a dark broken theme, to a nice clean white theme, added tags and descriptions to my posts that I didn't do before, along with a tag cloud widget and started putting my articles on reddit. Before I was posting maybe once a month, now I hired someone to do an article every day. So now I'm really pushing for some profit to pay content providers for the site.

What would you, the community suggest I do to continue this increase in traffic? The last thing I did was add a sumo.me slide-out newsletter registration, but no one has signed up yet. I was hoping to get a newsletter going to get people to return.

Are you doing some social media promotion for your website , try that too you will get some good response from there.

I have a facebook account with 380 followers and a Twitter account with 87 followers. I tweet and post on facebook every other day. Beyond that, I don't know how to accelerate followers or really push promotional content.

How you can increase traffic depends on how your different channels are doing. No real point in telling you to focus on one over the other if we don't know how they are performing. Do you have an overview of channel share? Under Google Analytics -> Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels

Most of the direct traffic is coming from my programs that show ads on them as they are frames that are positioned at the banner ads.

Hey if you any downloads on your site or such premium content, add a share locker.
i.e Like or Share to Download
It helps a lot and most users dont mind it.

https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/social-locker/

Wait, people just started coming more when you changed your WP theme? I mean sure it could be correct, but seems weird. Did people actually come more or did the bounce rate decrease?

You may try inserting freebies such as distributing free eBooks in exchange for their e-mails etc.

Peace,
VXS

that seems like a good idea