Are you sure blog numbers matter?
Recently, the same conversation has crept up on me across various online platforms. It goes something like this.
Me: Something about a person’s blog
Them: Oh, well, my blog is still nowhere as big as yours. I only get x number of visits a week.
Me: Um…that’s about ten, 50, 100 times what I get in a month.
Them: Silence
Here’s a screen capture of my blog traffic from May 5 – June 4, 2012:
That big peak there is 480 visitors in a day, which is one of the highest traffic days I’ve ever had (might be *the* highest, actually).
To put it another way, from May 31st – June 4, a one-week period, I had 831 visitors. Some of the people I’ve talked to recently have 1,500 visitors over the same length of time.
Although my daily average number of visits has just about doubled since my first year of blogging, as far as traffic goes, I’m still very small potatoes.
And yet…
When I first started blogging, my blog traffic, which at that time was about 10 visits a day, used to really get me depressed. I couldn’t seem to figure out the magic formula of getting people to my site. I couldn’t get people to comment. Had I continued to focus on my blog traffic, I might not still be blogging, because boy can that be discouraging.
What came to matter to me more than the numbers was stuff like the fact that I can proudly say that all of the bloggers I respect most in the online world have commented here at one point or another. I can also say with no small amount of amazement that every blogger I respect most in the online world has shared one of my posts. I can say with a stunned sense of disbelief that I’ve gotten to blog on sites that I view as role models rather than a place where I rightly belong.
Would I trade any of that away for a higher PeerIndex score? Would I rather have an AdAge Power 150 badge? Would I prefer to have a little badge that counts out traffic or subscribers?
It’s not even close.
The little cafe where you’re always welcome
I like thinking of my site here as a little internet cafe – internet in that it exists on the internet. I’m not a Starbucks or a Caribou or a Panera. I’m not a McDonalds or any other big chain massive restaurant. I’m a pretty small cafe where oddly there is an infinite amount of seating room for you. We can have good talks together, and you can remind me every day how lucky I am to know great people like you. Sure, you might not get a Google Alert as your comment gets picked up by Google spiders, and it’s true that you might not meet 27 new people just by commenting here. But I think it’s safe to say that we have a good time here, even when we disagree.
That ads issue
A lot of people say that they need a lot of blog traffic so that their chances of getting clicks on their ads can go up. Their chances of getting more clicks on their affiliate links will go up. That’s possible, although statistically speaking a 20% conversion rate on such things is massive. Maybe that opportunity is enough for you and you are willing to plow ahead for big traffic on the chance it will pay off. There’s nothing wrong with that although it’s a basket I wouldn’t want to put all of my eggs in, financially speaking. If you are blogging for your business you might say that a lot of traffic is how you report the benefits of the blog to your boss, but I would argue against that too. A visit could be someone clicking and then leaving. A person leaving a comment means that they read and wanted to respond. Which would you rather count?
As for me, I am not at all disappointed that I’m small potatoes in so far as the numbers game goes. When I see 831 weekly visitors on a chart, I know who a lot of those people are. I know their faces and I even remember the comments they left on what posts. I know who tends to visit every time I have a post and who tends to stop in once a month or inconsistently, at any rate. I know that most of those 831 visitors probably either taught me something or encouraged me to think in a new way.
You’d have to be a fool to be disappointed about things like that. And hey – I ain’t no fool.
Whether you’re blogging for fun or for business, there’s more to the art than the numbers game. If you are feeling discouraged, think of why you enjoy writing and conversing with other people. Why do you keep sitting down to blog even though your numbers aren’t where you’d like them to be (and that can happen at ANY level)? Focus on THAT. Because that there is the magic of it all. Truly.
Don’t you think?
I’ve written a new e-book called The ABCs of Marketing Myths. You can read about it here!
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/grandmaitre/5846058698/ via Creative Commons
38 comments
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I stopped paying attention to traffic numbers LONG ago. It gets really annoying, self-defeating, and can drive a person crazy.
For the very reasons you talk about, I tend to focus on quality, not quantity, and would rather build 5 really solid relationships than have 500 visitors and meet no one.
Plus, I’m starting to use the “want to have a beer with” metric as the only one that matters. Am I the person someone wants to have a beer with? And, this site I’m visiting, do I want to have a beer with the writer?
NO? Carry on…
@davevandewalle Well fine. I don’t like beer anyway! 🙂
I just like to feel well-liked! That’s what the numbers mean to me 🙂
@sharongreenthal Take note, some of the people with the highest blog numbers are not necessarily liked. Cue in perezhilton < guy makes a living by being snarky, snide and rude. Most of the most blogs are like that – it’s like a collective bashing arrangement. we don’t like each other but we share the consensus that we don’t like Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber or anybody rich and famous. Then we take turns bashing them with our comments, hoping that it hurts their feelings.
That is the real state of famous blogging. Just my 2cents 😛
@danny you’re right. I was being a wee bit tongue-in-cheek – I guess it didn’t really come across that way. As a relatively new blogger (9 months and counting) I am always eager for feedback. I have found that the most interaction comes with the most controversial posts.
@sharongreenthal Aye, so true.
@sharongreenthal @danny that’s a big booby trap. You can find yourself perpetually tempted to write something you might not even believe just to get the eyeballs.
@margieclayman @sharongreenthal @danny I still get a ton of traffic from “controversial” posts I wrote years ago.
More than a few insults come in that way too.
@margieclayman @sharongreenthal For me, belief is a tricky creature. I’d like to think that it’s also a temporal creature with conditions and preconditions. Like, 60% of the time I believe that we are here for a certain purpose – a destiny. But that’s on a good day, which is about 30% of the time for me. When nonsense happens, my good day barometer is reduced thereby affecting my “belief-o-meter”
When I write, I tend to believe it’s 90% honest with a 10% margin of error.
😛
@TheJackB @margieclayman Good fer you Jack. In my experience, my ever green content seems to stem from people wanting to learn how to use their terminal interface to browse the web, play their music and chat. On an xterm interface! How 1337 must it feel.
@sharongreenthal Says Ms. Huffington Post blogger 🙂
@margieclayman *blushing*
Expand out the argument, not only am I sure that blog numbers don’t matter I don’t believe blogs do, at least in terms of a popularity contest.
There’s no accounting for the general public’s taste, writing styles are incredibly personal and what works for one might not work for another. The sheeple will go to the popular sites and convince themselves that what they’re reading there is better than an unknown blogger. In some cases this is undoubtedly true, in others it’s merely an exercise in self-justification.
We’ll look back on this time as people exercising their ability to self-publish. I read a SM “expert’s” profile on Twitter today. It basically made them sound like a DJ. Hosting your own show, having your own blog, having a vlog, all free, all giving you the opportunity to enforce your personality/impart your knowledge/inflict pain/massage your ego (delete as applicable) on the rest of us.
If people like what you’re doing, all power to you. Keep doing it. But most importantly you need to like what you’re doing. If you feel you can contribute, do so because to somebody you might very well be better than the most popular writer or you can break news quicker than the best journalist.
@NicWirtz “wow” *clap* *clap* *clap* very nice!
@NicWirtz I don’t know what you’re talking about, Nic. My entire sense of well-being relies on this blog and how many people visit it 🙂
I was just talking to my friend Jill about this yesterday. If you have a blog where you’re just giving information away, you might be well-liked (might) and you might get a lot of traffic, but you’re not going to make money giving stuff away. And we know what happens when you try to start charging. People don’t like that too much.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens as people realize that you need to “do social media” with some sort of purpose in mind. I’m looking forward to the ride.
I hate this conversation. Who cares really? Everyone who talks about their ten thousand visitors are swinging their dics. Seriously, it’s like wagging your penis length or bra size in public. WTF?
@geoffliving I hate it when you beat around the bush, Livingston. Stop keeping it all pent in! 🙂
@margieclayman Very good post.
When I had my chance to bask in my 5 minutes of fame, (not to swing anything I hope but for factual purposes only – 80,000 UVs in one day – thanks to Mr. Gates… ) One thing kept nagging me – this many people and
not even a single comment.
not one.
no ‘hello’.
no ‘good post danny’
It felt like I was in an ivory tower being read by zombies who just look at the pages, look at the words say ‘hmmm’ then ‘ok’ inside their minds then move on to the next diablo 3 meme.
I envy the amount of engagement in your blog, I mean, how do you do it?
What’s your magic?
@danny I experience that a lot when I do a guest post on another person’s blog. I always get worried if I don’t get any comments, but on a lot of the “big” sites that’s what happens. You might get tweeted into next week, but comments? Conversation? That’s not what those sites thrive on. I think that’s unfortunate.
Hey, I want to increase my blog traffic for a chance of getting chicks……..oh wait, did you say clicks? Oh well, I’m married and got the only chick I need.
Rock on……..:)
@bdorman264 I’m thinking of blog farms right now. With chicks. It has to be organic of course, they be running around munching grass, posting fb page updates, tweeting. Yes, chicks tweet a lot. 😀
@danny I’m in…………:)
@bdorman264 maybe “Chicks who Click” 🙂
I feel like I keep meeting my own goals and expectations. I do not have high numbers of people who comment. But, what am I am most proud of us the wonderful places that I have gotten to guest post on because of my little blog. Even though I am in this tiny corner, I have a much broader reach due to friends and cool people who let me tell some stories. That makes me feel good. So I continue on for another year.
@susansilver Amen Susan. I know just how you feel!
If you write for traffic you will never be satisfied.
@TheJackB True that.
I think this blog post by Jon Acuff offers great perspective on this topic.
http://www.jonacuff.com/blog/how-to-stop-worrying-about-your-blog-traffic/
@JoelFortner thanks for sharing!
Not sure about “Blog Metrics” but do believe you have the right attitude Margie. I am not crazy about guys with sleek sports cars or cigarette boats….ditto geoffliving!
@kevjkirkpatrick I hear ya 🙂
I like reading your blog. You don’t bloviate or try to glean traffic from the efforts of others. You have your own opinions and that is pretty dang cool. I haven’t checked my traffic numbers in months.. bust thanks to you, I just did. Meh.
@dogwalkblog Yeah, well….I aim to please. *snerk* 🙂
Now I’m just going through and reading all your old posts – but this one stuck out to me. I’ve had this same problem over and over. I start a blog, I keep it going for a couple months, it hits a level of daily traffic that I’m happy with (among my smaller social circle, I’m happy when my site reaches 100 page views a day consistently, which considering my blogs are usually fairly niche, I’m really happy with) and then at that point I slow down. I don’t know if it’s because I run out of ideas (since I packed them all in too early) or if I feel like I can rest, but I can never keep it going at that point.
It’s not like I’m trying to go after higher numbers, but I can rarely get beyond that point. Sometimes I’ll have really big spikes after certain posts (once I got over 600 page views one day, but I wasn’t able to sustain it) but more often than not, I just start riding that steady slope downwards. Never too extreme, but 100 views/day seems to be my plateau. Anyone have any tips for getting past that?
@AdamBritten Adam, my best advice is to take a month off from looking at your blog traffic. It sounds to me like you are writing to the numbers instead of writing based on what you want to write or how you are feeling about your blog. This is an easy thing to do when you start a new blog – when I first started blogging I’d check my traffic pretty much every night. The myth is that doing this will help you figure out what people like and what people don’t like, but in fact it will just drive you crazy. What you find is that you can write two posts in almost the exact same way and one will go over really well and the other one won’t. Why? Who knows!?
So, blog for blogging. Don’t look at your numbers at all for 1 month. See what happens. And then let me know 🙂
At the peril of sounding spammy and getting hit with a turnip by Margie, I am now proving how much blog numbers matter. At least until June 29th. If any of you would like to help me go crazy, feel free to massage me, er, I meant message me. Khathanxbai
Ouch! That turnip hurt!