High Traffic Does not Mean Good Marketing
In this post, Melvin discusses the importance of good marketing and properly targeting your audience and readers (editable).
It has been a huge misconception that a good number of traffic (pageviews and uniques) is the result of good blog marketing. I, as a blogger, have seen a lot of bloggers attributing increased number of traffic as a success for the promotions that they do. Although we can say that it is somehow a factor, we cannot just completely base it there. Here in my short post, I would explain why good marketing IS NOT just about getting good amount of traffic.
Most new and intermediate bloggers make the mistake of doing what I call as “hard promotion” (kinda similar to hard selling). Aggressive promotion is when a blogger considers quantity more than quality. If you’re into the blogging for fame or money, you probably have heard of the cliche statement “Blogging success doesn’t happen overnight”.
The problem with the statement is that many people, including myself, think it’s already obsolete! Tell me, are you going to wait for some period of time to implement new methods when you can do them now? The same applies to bloggers on getting traffic. They see other bloggers get ahead of them, they become impatient and they do things “aggressively”.
Why it’s harmful to your blog?
Just like the saying “Slowly but surely”, it goes completely the same the other way as well. I’ve spoken with some of my blogger friends and they describe the aggressive marketing as “annoying”. The harm here is that if your target audience gets annoyed, they would more likely tune you and your blog out. This is bad especially if you’re trying to establish a brand for your blog. You may not want to be known in the blogosphere for all the bad and wrong reasons, do you?
Good Amount of Traffic/Pageviews/Hits Doesn’t Mean Good Promotion and Marketing
Sure we can get a thousand unique hits to my blog in a day, but is the quality of traffic we are sending to my blog a good one? Or are we targeting the proper audience? During some point last year I know I made this mistake and the problem you would normally get is inconsistency in traffic and a very high bounce rate. These factors are crucial, especially if you’re working out on a certain goal to make your blog well-known.
Talking about increasing traffic and all the stuffs about it has become really mainstream. We, oftentimes read ways on how to get a thousand hits doing this and doing that but the real thing here is conversion. Are we converting on the traffic that our blog gets? Whether you’re focusing on building subscribers or having a good lively and interactive community, it’s imperative to assess whether what we are doing is worth it or not.
What about you and your blog? Yea, you’re getting more traffic than I do and that’s given. But are you converting enough and reaping the benefits of having a well-trafficked blog? Do you have a lively interaction on it? If not, maybe its time to re-evaluate. Maybe time to list the marketing strategies you did and evaluate whether it’s proper or not. After all we (bloggers) live altogether with one goal in mind, which is to benefit from something that we’ve done.
Melvin is a young entrepreneur and student who has been doing internet marketing related stuffs for more than 2 years now. He shares his experience and ramblings in his blog located @ MelvinBlog.com in w/c you can subscribe to. He also uses Twitter and hopes to get followed by more people.
Hey, I am Syed Balkhi, The guy who is behind Balkhis Inc. I entered the industry back in 2002 not knowing a single thing. I barely spoke English at that time. In the past six years, my language barrier has been eliminated. Aside from English, now I also speak html, and php. Along with the languages I have also managed to master a few arts. Art of web-designing started when I first entered. Messing around with photoshop, I learned how to create my first web design. Now I founded a web designing firm Uzzz Productions. After running numerous amount of websites in various niche, I have mastered the art of web-development. Now I am compiling a resource of what I already know, and what I am learning on this blog. This resource is to help me if I ever need a guide to look back to, and it is help my fellow webmasters.
I agree its all about the right sort of traffic.
Yes nice post, the best traffic is the one that converts. That is why optimizing your site is important because organic traffic converts more…
I agree with this post. It does not matter how many people visit your blog if they don’t convert into conversions. Your blog should be set up to achieve your goals. Whether it’s converting visitors to subscribers or improving your alexa rating to get more for selling adspace on your blog.
Marcus I have to disagree. There is value in visitors at least in the short run if you are running PPI ads. Some companies are more than willing just for the name exposure that comes with PPI. Conversions may make more money but don’t underestimate the power of a large amount of visitors.
Nice post Melvin! I have to agree that sometimes we get too caught up in quantity that we forget about quality!
I am definitely not converting enough – I really need to get more readers to link back to me and go find like-minded individuals for more readership. I kinda feel like nothing is emerging in terms of “buzz” or being recognized by word-of-mouth.
That having been said: there are several people who are helping me promote who are the salt of the earth. It is awesome to have a few who are really willing to work on one’s behalf.
For a negative post, this packs a powerful message. One keeps getting messages about what to do, and this punctures some nice balloons.
When someone says that they get “X’ amount of traffic to their website, the first question that I ask them is, is it targeted traffic? If that answer is no, then the amount of traffic will not mean that much because most of the people that are visiting the site have no interest in the subject
Yes, an important distinction. The question however then is, why do they visit at all?
yeah, anyone can just buy a traffic and then boasts he has a good stats for traffic
That having been said: there are several people who are helping me promote who are the salt of the earth. It is awesome to have a few who are really willing to work on one’s behalf.
Whether it’s converting visitors to subscribers or improving your alexa rating to get more for selling adspace on your blog.
I kinda feel like nothing is emerging in terms of “buzz” or being recognized by word-of-mouth.
Whether you’re focusing on building subscribers or having a good lively and interactive community, it’s imperative to assess whether what we are doing is worth it or not.
And what better way than to see whether you convert or you do not?
Nice post, you are quite right. It all depends if your traffic converts…
If you blog for earning money with AdSense (for example on visitors from Google) extremely high traffic can be really good – as long as you have high conversion (Good CTR for your ads)
Also, keep in my that it is always ROI (Return on Investment) you should look at in the end.. If you put time and effort into getting a lot of traffic, but nothing converts, you will get a vey low ROI = bad idea. Some people should really look into conversation optimizing instead of just trying to get more traffic..
Totally right. And thats the whole point of this post. Check whether you’ve met your goals with the traffic your blog receives. If its all traffic and no conversion (whether more subscribers or whatever) then its useless
In my marketing class, we all have to pick a marketing problem and do research. We have to follow the format on how to conduct the research also. What would be a good topic for me to choose? My topics of interest is finances, future career(s), and sports.
I agree that traffic level is not a true measure of successful marketing. The quality of the traffic is extremely important. You could flood your site with extremely cheap PPC traffic, but it wouldn’t do any good. You need visitors who are actually interested in what you have to say.
It’s such a common rookie mistake to look primarily at the traffic volume (I made that mistake myslef). I’m glad that you outlined it so well, remember guys, it’s the targeted traffic that converts that matters.
I must say that it was a great article… very informative. I completely agree with you that great traffic doesn’t necessarily mean good money from it. For example, many people visit my blogs from referring sites, like google images. I don’t have to explain to you why it means nothing, do I?:) On the other hand, as someone has noticed, even if someone visits your page for the content only, it might not turn into a conversions. And the conversions is what we actually need. Cheers!
Syed. I totally and completely agree with you. High traffic doesn’t mean good marketing since we get unwanted traffic, page views and hits by performing traffic exchange task to our site. But, I believe that this kind of traffic is of no use and can be harmful to the site as you mentioned in your post. I consider getting moderate and targeted traffic to the blog site is absolutely harmless and useful.
You can do something along the lines of “how do tobacco companies attract new users even though they have a negative consequence?” Also, look at how tobacco companies sponsor the ads that say that tobacco is bad….
They have a spam control generator which shows your a color coded spam setting of each email you send out, you simply have to tweak things that get labeled as spam before you send it out.
You can do something along the lines of “how do tobacco companies attract new users even though they have a negative consequence?” Also, look at how tobacco companies sponsor the ads that say that tobacco is bad.
Usually quantity coverts into quality.That is the law of dialectics.So there is a perspective.
I agree its all about the right sort of traffic.
I am totally agreed with your post. That doesn’t matter how many visitors visit your blog, if they don’t convert into sale.
Getting high traffic isn’t good unless the traffic is targeted and you get conversions. But its always good to get your blog name out there but make sure it is done in a way that doesn’t give your blog a bad name.
yes! you are right. because mostly people though that the treffic is most important for good marketing.
Someone is looking for a job, someone else finds them one and gets a little commission. This is what typical affiliate marketing is about: getting a commission for selling a product.