Traffic, that’s the bloodline of a blog. As long as traffic (steady and regular) is there, even a blog that does not make money can be monetized with changes. It’s only a matter of time and trying out different things before you hit on a winning formula that will bring in the money but the prerequisite is to have traffic in the form of regular and loyal visitors and also new visitors coming in frequently. Cut the traffic from a blog and you might as well strangle its throat and suck out the very life from it. Without traffic and readers there is no reason for the existence of a blog. What’s the use or even the purpose of blogging if no one comes to read your posts?
While it’s essential to have a steady flow of traffic to your blog, the figures in terms of traffic are pretty disappointing to say the least in these days even for blogs that have been here for some time. What’s more the traffic is coming down too though I’m not sure if that has anything to do with the ongoing recession or not. In such a scenario what is one to do? Well for starters try and identify if the drop in the traffic is a short term or a long term phenomenon. If it’s short term then nothing to worry about right away or plan on some drastic action. The fact is there are ups and downs in every blog’s life and with it the traffic too varies from time to time. Give it some time and the traffic should come back.
Sometimes it is possible no one wants to read what you are blogging about (it happens to everyone). In such a scenario it’s worthwhile to see what people are searching for using tools like Google Trends and choose a topic from there to blog on. While I will not say this is the right way to blog since my personal opinion is that you should blog from your heart and not from your head and really share what you want to say instead of speaking what your readers want to hear, it’s still a good thing to see what people are searching for as that will at the very least give you some ideas to work out and blog about. The reasons for this being that anything that makes news also gets searched for in the search engines. These days Michael Jackson is hogging the headlines like nobody else and a site that has a lot of Michael Jackson content will naturally get a lion’s share of the search engine traffic. But let me caution you here that such traffic is more headlines dependent and news blogs will rank high in the search engines for such content. Just because Michael Jackson is the headlines right now does not mean you change all your content to Michael Jackson because that alone will not bring in the traffic. You will also need to rank well for the particular search terms and if SEO is something you do then it’s also possible that by the time your blog is ranked high for those particular terms something else might be making the headlines which would mean people would be searching for something else. This would only mean the cycle will start all over again. The best workaround to this is to have a regular and loyal readership for the blog unless of course you can predict the future and start blogging about such headlining events and also be ready with SEO for them. This will however be very worthwhile for news making events that you know will take place for sure and are prepared with content for it say like the latest Harry Potter movie release or even newsworthy topics like elections, sporting events, etc.
Another very common reason is the frequency in terms of your posting. My very good friend Ajith Edassery has posted about this very topic. If you frequently post and update your blog, you will also have a steady growth in visitors and also build up a loyal readership base. If you post continuously for a while and then take a sojourn you can be sure the number of visitors will drop too. I experienced this personally when I did not post for a while a while back (even though it was for very valid reasons). Now this does not mean that you post some 10 or 20 posts every day, but anything in the range of 20-25 posts in a month is good.
Another variation of this is post quality. Yes the content should be good, useful and relevant too. You do need to post what readers will be interested in otherwise any number of posts and it will still amount to nothing. I’m not saying that all my posts are great or are read the same, but yet I do try to make my content interesting. Do spend some thought on what you will be blogging about and realize we do have a responsibility to post useful and relevant content.
All round SEO is another important factor, yes all round SEO. By this I mean while your site may be indexed and ranked well in Google, the users may be searching on Yahoo or another search engine. Similarly the users maybe be searching for the content you have on your blog, but may be using other keywords that you are not ranked well for. While I’m no expert on SEO and really cannot give any expert tips on it, it will be worthwhile to read up on it and work on optimizing your blog in SEO. Too many people depend only on Google for their traffic, but my blog gets a fair amount of traffic from Yahoo and another good source is Google Images, yes even image search brings in the traffic so I make sure even the images on my blog are tagged right. Also, it makes sense to not depend on such one source right? What if Google disappeared for a while because their servers took a hit? You would not want your traffic to disappear too right.
Advertising your blog is also very important. By this I don’t mean Google, the other search engines or SEO. Visiting other blogs and leaving comments, taking part in other blog competitions or having your own competition, using traffic exchange tools like Entrecard, using Twitter, using Technorati, using other social media tools, having a guest post on your blog, or you guest blogging for others, networking with other bloggers, all of these help in promoting your blog and ultimately bring in the traffic. If you use WordPress then lots of tools and plugins in WordPress too help like the All in One SEO Pack plugin for starters. Don’t just write content and do nothing else. Great content works better than anything else, but other factors like I’ve mentioned can give the much needed push and impetus for your blog in terms of traffic.
Please do share your views and thoughts too…
@Rajiv,
First of all thanks for the shout out
With a good post frequency and good content you can tune both search bots and humans to visit your blog on a regular basis. However, equally important is the last part you mentioned i.e. the public relations and networking part. All the points you mentioned here in are good and a couple of other things that recently worked for me are:
1) Interviews – I had the chance to give interviews (more opinions) to two bloggers and post those events the suscriptions to my blog went up. Alternatively you could do guest post, ezine articles to achieve the same.
2) Networking on a continuous basis is very important – basically you need to establish good relationships with 20-25 blogs/bloggers and things will build from there on. Things like Twitter, friendfeed will work wonders as well though I am still against some of the motives behind these tools.
3) Exploit the RSS feed directories and twitter directories to the maximum…
Thanks again,
Ajith
You are very much welcome bro. As for the points you've made, rightly said!!!