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Traffic vs. Readers
By Matt Margolis | March 16, 2005
I was amused by this post over at Dean’s World written by Michael Demmons who gives his own trick to increase traffic to your blog.
When people give advice on increasing blog traffic, usually they will tell you things like: “Write what you know” or “Send good posts to higher traffic blogs” or some such thing. Sure, that work on occasion, but I’ve found another way: Mention “Mario Vasquez.”
Demmons says he’s receives thousands of hits because of search engine queries that put his site at the top of the list of results. It’s clever, amusing, even comical—however, as a blogger, I’m more interested in readers than I am hits. Getting a link from a high-traffic site helps your hits in the short run, not your reader base in the long run… more often than not anyways. Similarly, getting thousands of hits via Google over a popular search term isn’t going to give you more than a short blip of higher traffic.
Topics: General |
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March 16th, 2005 at 11:48 am
Have you noticed what the new MSN search is doing? I’m getting three times the number of visitors now and they are all hit and runs. I only have a handful of readers. It’s hard to keep track of them when people find my site searching for “how to talk to teenager” and “is my dog pregnant?” Those are real examples of what my tracker shows today…
March 16th, 2005 at 8:50 pm
It’s a tough thing to balance.. traffic is always nice… more numbers makes you feel good in some respects… but the more hits you get–particularly from search engine queries–the small the avg visit length on your site is… bottom line, i like readers more than hits…
March 17th, 2005 at 12:05 am
Matt,
I originally found your blog when I did a google search on the phrase “John Kerry is an asshole.”
March 17th, 2005 at 12:32 am
Nice, Kahn. Later today somebody found me by searching for “how do you kill unborn child”. It was a good day…
March 17th, 2005 at 1:16 am
Some amusing google queries have brought people here. I’ve forgotten a bunch of them, but they can be amusing sometimes.