Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Increase web site traffic by dramatically upping your blogging rate
Web site owners complain constantly that they don't get enough traffic. Indeed, if you don't receive sufficient visitors to your web site, you won't sell anything. And if your web site is designed simply to build your reputation, you won't get far if you don't have many people reading what you say.
Blogs certainly help you get increased attention. They are search engine friendly, for a start because they provide regular, fresh content. That's what search engines love. However, even if you blog every day you may not get the traffic you want or deserve.
Interesting analysis on the relationship between blogging and traffic levels comes today from The Blog Business Summit. This shows that the blogs with the most traffic are those which have the greatest number of postings. The blogs that have multiple posts per day get to the top of the traffic rankings. But the blogs that only have a handful of postings a week are way down the list. I've done a quick correlation coefficient calculation and it is reasonably positive around +0.7, using the figures provided by The Blog Business Summit. What this means is that the more you blog, the more people you get visiting your site.
To start getting significant traffic you need to blog three or four times a day, these figures suggest. They also show that you are not going to get extremely high traffic unless you blog 25 times every day...! Now, that takes some doing if you are on your own and blogging is only a part of your business.
But it's worthwhile remembering two key factors. Firstly, getting the highest ranked site is not as important as getting the right visitors. If your web site is making money by targeting 50 people who spend lots with you, there is no need to chase traffic rankings. Who visits your site is much more important than how many visitors you get.
Secondly if you get tons of traffic from writing 25 posts a day, they are not going to keep returning if your blog posts are just drivel. You need quality content to get people coming back. If your aim for high traffic and then just write 25 or more posts each day just to achieve that, you will quickly drop down the rankings as people give up reading your nonsense.
So, what should you do? Well, if you only blog occasionally you certainly need to increase your blogging frequency. If you blog each day, you need to blog more than once a day. That may sound difficult to do and time consuming. So I have added a ten-step programme on how to easily add extra content to your blog which you can find in my in-depth section.
Labels: blogging
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Graham,
Thanks for the link! You got at this a little bit, but I think it's worth noting directly that the highest-trafficked blogs are out there as publishing businesses (Gawker Media, Weblogs Inc, BoingBoing) - their business model depends entirely on getting tons of pageviews.
Most business bloggers want to use their blog as a marketing tool to sell their primary product, which means you don't need to fight for astronomical numbers. Having a couple of posts a day is fine for that, because you'll get enough traffic to make a difference in your sales.
I see that you're in the UK, but if you're interested in hopping the pond and coming to our Chicago conference, I can arrange to get you a discount on any of our attendance packages. Let me know if you're interested: jason (at) blogbusinesssummit.com