Blog Tipz

The “experts” will frequently tell you that all you need to do to see success is get traffic. That is, in a sense, a complete lie. You could have a million visitors a day and not get what you want from your blog, and you could, comparatively, get a hundred visitors a day and be happy with where your blog stands. In some ways, traffic is just an arbitrary figure that anyone can perceive to be higher than it actually is.

One key to all traffic is what you do with it. For example, I could place “thousands” of ads on this site and with the little traffic that I do receive, make a few bucks each month. However, it wouldn’t be the proper use of my traffic for what my long-term goals are. Comparatively, it would be under-optimizing your blog if you only had a few ads with thousands of readers each day.

Think about how you utilize your traffic.

Do you get a good return on it, at least compared to the number of ads/promotions you are running?

Traffic for Profit: Getting Your Users to Purchase/Click

If you find yourself in the situation where you have to decide whether you want more loyal visitors or you want to make profit form your blog, stick with a good in-between position. Don’t load up your site with dozens of ads that won’t be viewed due to where they are located, but lead your visitors into your ads, placing them in gradually and at locations where they have been deemed as more acceptable, more visible.

Whether you make money per click or you make money per sale, you should place your ads in places that make them easy to find, yet still slightly out of reach. The ads have or at least need to have a defined purpose for being on your site – a company wants to promote their product/service on your site, or you have placed them there yourself, making money off a service that you are providing to your readers.

Placing the ads in front of only a fraction of your potential customers means that only a fraction of the one hundred percent will see the ads, thus reducing the chance by that much.

Traffic for Readership and Subscription Growth

There is a different method for converting traffic to readers. Rather than forcing more ads and placing them in viewable positions, you need to get more of your content distributed. For example, you want more links pointing to your best content. Without these, you will find huge differences between the number of contents of Post 1 and Post 2. Readers are often guided by the number of comments that each of your posts receives, no matter how good your content may be.

Furthermore, they are also guided to the setup of your site. Make the subscription link easily accessible, but not flashy. Place it in a well-positioned area, such as the top portion of the page — often in the upper right sidebar.

Combine your feed link in other, smaller, but equally found areas, such as within your content or towards the end of each post. This makes it easier for your readers who have read your content to subscribe. It takes some time to draw in a new customer/reader, depending on how you value your readers.

Conclusion

Traffic that isn’t delivered to where it needs to go will likely find itself leaving your site just as quickly as it arrived. Some people refer to this type of traffic as “social media traffic,” delivered by any type of bookmarking site (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.). Bloggers rarely see much success in terms of working towards their goals with this sudden burst of traffic because they are un-prepared and don’t have the calls-to-action planned out on the landing page(s).

Be prepared and optimize your content ahead of time for increasing readership and traffic, and you will see more growth in these goals as your site becomes more popular and trafficked.