over and over again.
1. Content - Because let's face it, if you're not writing anything, your
blog is going to be pretty lonesome
2. Traffic - The rationale being that if no one is visiting your content,
you can't do much, including make money
I'd like to toss something out there though that not a lot of people seem to
talk about, and that's quality in your content and in your traffic. You see,
if you are blogging for any particular reason, whether it's to build your
brand or to fill your wallet, you need to build a community of people who
will actually support your content, click on your affiliate links, and buy
your very first e-book. Right?
The two modes of blogging
Now, there are two ways that people strive for that goal. The more
predominant way is to play the blogging game as if you were a commercial
fisherman. The commercial fisherman uses gigantic nets, and he catches an
awful lot of stuff that you don't want in your fish sticks, like shoes,
syringes, and euglena. However, because he casts such a wide net, he's also
able to get the haddock that makes your tummy happy. It's a game of
statistics. With that huge net, you're bound to catch the winners.
Bloggers who blog like the commercial fisherman are after tons of traffic,
because, the reasoning goes, if you bring thousands of readers to your blog
every day, the chances of at least a handful of those folks doing what you
want are pretty good, right?
OK, so that's one way to go about it. And there's nothing wrong with that.
But just like Luke had a twin sister, there is another way to play this
game. It's not a traffic game. It's about the quality of the traffic that
you bring to your site.
The 25% objective
I've not made it a secret that my traffic is not quite up to a copy blogger
level. For a long time, when I was just getting used to the blogosphere, I
would look at my Google Analytics chart and they actually had to create a
sub-domain to show how low my numbers were. I couldn't figure this out,
because all of the comments I was getting were super nice. But I was
convinced that winning the blog game meant that you had to have tons of
traffic.
Now, here's the thing I started to notice. I'd have a day where a post did
really well for me. I'd get something like 13 re-tweets and 10 comments,
which is a total of 23 actionable items. I'd excitedly go running to my
Analytics account and it would tell me that I had 76 visitors that day.
I thought that was bad news, but in fact, it was the key to a secret door.
If you look at those numbers, what they are really saying is that my ratio
of actions on my blog to visitors to my blog was right around 25%. Now it's
true, some people may have tweeted and commented, but even if you assume
that, that means that maybe 12 people took TWO actions on my blog. I didn't
feel so badly after that.
Seeing is not believing
If you look at really huge blog sites, it's easy to be stunned by how many
comments and tweets each post receives. However, how much total traffic is
that post getting? What you might find is that a lot of the bigger blog
sites get a lot of traffic, but the majority of the people are not taking
any action at all on that post. They are the invisible masses. If you are
hoping for people to click on your affiliate links or your ads, this is bad
news.
How to Get 25% of Your Visitors to Take an action on Your Blog image 745498
68364313. How do you attract a more engaged audience?
In the engagement series I'm working on, I am talking about how to engage
outwardly with others. When it comes to your blog, you need to think about
how to entice other people to engage with you and your content. Here are
some things that seem to be working for me.
I let people who act on my posts know that I appreciate it: I respond, as
best as I can, to every comment that I get. Some fall through the cracks,
but I'd say I answer about 90% of my comments. I respond as thoughtfully as
I can, because the comments I get are extremely thoughtful most of the time.
I do not ask people to promote my posts 99% of the time: This might be
sticky for you, but here's the thing. If you ask someone to promote your
post, first of all, they may or may not do it, so you are risking that.
Second, if they do promote your post, they might not even read it. They'll
just tweet it out to get you off their back. And third, if they don't really
care about your content, they won't be able to sell it, which means that
even if their post gets re-tweeted, you're not getting people who really
care about what you wrote. You're getting the shoes and the syringes, not
the haddock.
I mention my readers a lot in my posts: If someone asks me a question on
Twitter or in my comments section, I'll often build a blog post around my
answer to them and note that they were the inspiration. If one of my
community members write a blog post that I want to riff on, I link back to
them and give them credit. This means that people who come here regularly
know that they are known entities and that they are appreciated. I think
that makes people feel more comfortable with engaging and conversing,
otherwise known as acting on a post.
I am not saying that it's my way or the highway. However, it seems to me
like driving huge numbers to a site doesn't really matter if they aren't
YOUR audience. If you have lots of affiliate links to Social Media books and
the traffic you're getting is from blacksmiths, you're probably not going to
see a lot of conversion there.
my motto is "Keep it simple" and "don't leave anything for tomorrow that can
be done today."
Regards Gerald Crawford
Stellenbosch South Africa
Cell: +27-0720390184 (mobile)
E-mail: gerald@webcraft.ws
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