Blogging Metrics vs. Website Metrics: How to grow a blog
If you are like me, you watch your blog stats like a hawk. You probably have several sources that you use for gathering your information and you contemplate and toil over the results and calculations endlessly.
Well my friend, if you run a blog, let me simplify things for you quite a bit. The sheer page hits will come. While they are important, it’s time you stop thinking about quantity and start thinking about quality.
Source Matters
So today you’re hottest article on widgets made the front page of Digg. You had 20,000 page views in a matter of hours. You pour yourself a cold beer and log into Google Analytics to see what’s up. You see your huge spike in your traffic and take a big chug of that beer. Now do me a favor, look at your bounce rate. I bet it’s in the 90s right? Digg readers are, in my experience, on your page for about 30 seconds, they comment on Digg instead of your site, and they rarely ever view another page on your website. Let’s call Diggers the “Channel Flippers” of the Internet. Now if you were about to bank your new product on a TV commercial, would you put it on a show that people watch to the end, including commercials…or the show that they watch between commercials? That’s many of the social bookmarking sites in a nutshell.
You are going to get a bunch of traffic from search engines. That’s good traffic and you want it, but those guys are usually as attention deficit as the social guys. The traffic you want comes in two categories. The people you want are:
- The people who subscribe to your website
- The people who comment on your website
These people are most likely to come from sources they already know. This means it’s important to make yourself known, and considered an authority on your topic, on websites that serve similar content.
The more comments you leave, the more you will get, I guarantee it.
Communication is Key
I email other bloggers all the time. I could have a dozen reasons: an idea for collaboration, complimenting their site, asking a quality question and introducing myself. I will take a moment to say that it’s a good idea to understand your level, and communicate with your peers until you are further along. If you started your blog two weeks ago, don’t email Leo Laporte and ask him to guest post. If you see a site online with a similar page rank, content type and general traffic and comments, by all means email them and start a dialog. It doesn’t matter if it’s a text link exchange, a guest post, an article republish or just an icebreaker, make that connection. You will find even the upper echelon of bloggers to be uniquely approachable.
Be Your Own Publicist
If you aren’t out telling people how awesome your blog is, it’s likely no one else will either. Don’t be a jerk about it, but when you write a great article, don’t be afraid to send it to an expert on the subject and ask them for an opinion. More often than not they will leave a great comment on your site that’s totally on topic.
Respect The Community
The last one is common sense. The blogosphere is as approachable as it is because there is a general attitude among all but the most elitist of the group. The main concept is that links are king. If you have valuable content that I think people are going to read, I want you to link to me. In turn I will find a way to link to you when it’s appropriate. Don’t expect a one for one every time. Don’t link someone while expecting an immediate link back. A content provider is only as good as his integrity. Blindly linking anyone for anything will piss off your readers and eventually toss your reputation with the search engines.
Final Thoughts
I am sure if you made it this far you are thinking, “Jason, this is all common sense stuff, I knew it already!” Well, yes, I bet you do. I forget it all the time. Sometimes when I am toiling away trying to grow this monster I call Philoking.com, I get distracted from the main reason I do this and think things like, “If I had 100,000 hits a day I could make hundreds of bucks a month!” The important thing to think about is this. Very few professional bloggers set out to be professional bloggers. I started this site because I love to communicate with like minded people. The conversations and friends I have made through this website have been priceless to me. Sure it would be awesome to pay a mortgage with Adsense revenue, but I always remind myself that I would be doing this if it didn’t make a penny.
I will leave you with a cartoon and quote from Avinash Kaushik from Occam’s Razor:
Remarkable as in being noticed, being worth of a remark, as in “let’s give ‘em something to talk about“, being the first, the best, the really trying hard and then waking up in the morning and trying some more.
Being remarkable will make you a X…..
and the rest of us will be Y’s.
100 million plus blogs. Be you. Be remarkable. x is will be the outcome.
Good luck, may the force be with you!
Well said….and good luck to all.
If you want to collaborate, don’t be afraid to email me. I answer all of them.
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Comments
Hi Jason,
I’m really I meet you, a very open minded person and sharing similar interests. I’m not a very good conversationalist, so I hope you will teach me if I say something not appropriate.
Recently I’ve been questioning myself a lot. Especially about blogging and my future path… Then I come up with this post: Should I Migrate to WordPress MU? . The post links to prior posts related to the topic. I really need some professional advice on this, so could you please spare sometimes and leave your opinions on my site?
Thanks in advance. Once again, glad to meet you.
Binh
Nice article. Good thing I have Blogrush otherwise I doubt I would have arrived at your post. I agree with your assessment that most people arriving on your site via Digg will hit the back button after reading the single post. But some will “convert” and subscribe to your feed. So it is important to have the RSS button displayed prominently before the Digg-rush happens.