Traffic versus subscribers - which means more?
Related entries in Social networking, Making Money with Blogs, Professional BloggingI was reading this post about the over-reliance on traffic by many bloggers - and how, in many cases, this traffic-is-the-only-goal mentality has meant community falls through the cracks.
When it comes to what blogging means to both readers and writers, the numbers ultimately matter very little. I don’t go up to someone and say "hey, I found you because your traffic is increasing this month" - I’d be more likely to say "hey, that was a great article" or something. The difference is apparent - it’s not just the focus, but also the dialogue.
When bloggers get focused on increasing their traffic, they will be meme trackers - following whatever is hot enough to bring in spikes in traffic and subsequent links. But their all-over-the-place-ness can leave the readers who arrive and decide to subscribe a little confused. "Traffic whores" don’t really care about the subscribers - about inviting comments or dialogue - but more about climbing in Google.
When you shift your attention to an abstract thing called PageRank and away from actual people, you lose something. Your point becomes only money and not community. And, to me, that misses the great opportunities in blogging.
Now, you might bash me for following these lines with blogs like this or this, but I have trouble straying too far away from the importance I place on community. I’ve added new content areas when readers ask, shared emails with readers, and started up an active set of polls to keep readers having fun. So, while I may blog anything hot on the gossip pages for the money of it, the community of it is just as enriching.
In other cases, traffic is completely unimportant to me. This blog, for example, is highly skewed towards subscribers rather than search traffic. And that’s great by me. The goal of Blogging Help is really not money - nor has it ever been.
So - do you place too much reliance on traffic for your goal setting? How do you think that could bias what you write about or how?
Tags: traffic whore
March 4th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
Traffic= Google loves you, high page rank, good SEO, lots of refferals, and money
Subscribers= loyal readers who are going to comment at your blog, and who aren’t going to disapear every time google starts dancing
traffic is what you want for a tech blog, subscribers is what you want for a blog like this one
March 4th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
Why can’t you have your cake and eat it too?
I mean, there’s nothing wrong, imo, about having the dual focus of climbing up in SERPS and PR while at the same time encouraging and promoting interactivity and subscription services.
I’m doing both, though admittedly I started with the latter. Only in recent times have I been actively SEOing and directing traffic to my site. I get more readers, subscribers go up, more comments, discussions, e-mails to me (ranging from flames, spam, asking for advice, and props).
I don’t see it as one must choose either/or. You CAN have your cake and eat it too.
March 4th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
The search engine spiders focus on the content of your site. This is important because that is how your readers find you, they are searching for good quality content.
If you focus on whatever is hot at the time and not on creating good content you are not only going to lose your traffic but you will also lose your subscribers that found you because of your content on a certain subject.
Stay focused on your subscribers and getting new ones because this will make you more money in the long run.
March 5th, 2006 at 6:33 am
Great point Arieanna. For business bloggers the concept of targeted traffic is something that’s drummed into you. You can do more with 100 targeted visitors than 1000 untargeted.
Your points about community for community’s sake and not just traffic are very important. It’s easy to get caught up chasing the traffic and forget why you want it in the first place.
March 5th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
I think that the question is one of revenue model.
Yes, as Yaro says, targeted traffic is good — but people who search are finding you because of a topic you covered. That’s pretty targeted.
Subscribers become ad-blind.
If you’re looking to make money by blogging, and your readers have become ad-blind, then are you more likely to actually change the content such that you’re hawking something that’ll make you money?
Is it a greater transgression to hawk products in your editorial than to pander a bit?
March 5th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
Great post and very informative since I just recently created a blog and I’m attempting to build its traffic count. I personally think in my limited knowledge of this area that you should try to do both. Afterall if you cna’t get the traffic in the door in the first place then how cna you attract subscribers.
Right now I’m just mainly focusing on building up some content and thne we’ll see what happens once I have sometihng for 1 people to come see and 2 hopefully they will decide they want to come back and read some more.
Bruce
March 5th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
It depends on why you’re blogging. I have some blogs for the purpose of earning an income, and other blogs for the purpose of creative outlet. Both purposes are good purposes.
Of course you can do both with one blog, using your creativity to foster community growth, and using your marketing skills to foster traffic growth.
March 6th, 2006 at 10:52 am
You know, I have blogs that are for money and some that are not. And I am not saying you cannot have traffic and satisfied subscribers, but to me it’s like balancing a scale.
I think the two main components add to 100% in terms of contributions to your content. If you add more traffic-generating content, you may do so at the expense of covering something your readers might find interesting but may not bring in traffic. Maybe not the best example, but to me there is some tradeoff. I think a balance can be achieved, but it will come at perhaps a more slowly growing blog - and that is good, to me, because you end up with a successful blog over time, able to bring in new readers and keep existing ones.
Where I see the biggest tipping in scales is in areas that, to me, actually don’t really make the biggest revenue so the tradeoff is odd. Some business areas, for example, are highly competitive and the revenue from ad networks is farily poor, so traffic for the sake of money to me seems irrelevant. Perhaps it’s more to bad choice of topic than anything else that we can attribute these actions.
March 6th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Subscribers matter more… the money’s in the list. My Viral Copy report was about subscriber acquistion at its heart — I could care less about page views or raw traffic.
March 7th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
The main ideea is : “Concentrate on value, and other things will come with time.”
http://www.necromanc.blogspot.com
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