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May 10, 2007
If your objective with your website or blog is to create a revenue stream, there are certain things you need to monitor and certain things you need to do to make sure you stay on the right path. Otherwise you're just shooting in the dark.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important, but don't let it be your overriding preoccupation. Don't make concessions on the quality or readability of your content because you think it may help with SEO. You may be tempted as you write to stuff a few extra "keywords" in your sentences, don't do it. Make your content flow and read naturally. You want real, human readers to enjoy reading your content and to come back to your site. Stuff your copy full of keywords and the readability factor drops and people get frustrated with your writing. Frustrated readers don't usually keep coming back.
Speaking of retaining regular readers, do you see the form in the top right corner of this blog? That's a key component of maintaining regular readers. Go ahead and fill it out and click the submit button. You should have one of these on your blog or web site. I wrote my own because I'm hardheaded and a programmer, but I recommend using www.aweber.com, they are the standard for mailing list tools such as this. Their low monthly fee is well worth all the tools they offer. Each time you make a new post or update your site, you should send a short email to your list. You should prompt people to sign up as I just did. One more thing you should do... always keep a backup of your list. As your list grows, its value becomes greater and greater and its loss would be very detrimental to your income. Multiple backups are smart, put them in different locations.
You should try to gain new readers who will hopefully become regular readers. There are thousands of reports and eBooks that you can download for free or purchase that promise to tell you how to drive traffic to your web site or blog. There are lots of forums that have post after post from various "experts" telling you to do this or do that. Some have good advice, most do not. How do you tell the difference? Use your common sense. If someone's bragging a lot about something, it may be a good indicator that they don't know what they're talking about. Usually people giving advice have a web site or blog, check it out, does it stack up against the sites listed in my blog roll? If their ideas for traffic are free or inexpensive, then test them out (more on that in the next paragraph). You can purchase ads on other sites to bring traffic to your site, however you can really spend a lot of money doing this and I'd avoid it until you have a lot of experience. My advice is to participate in discussions on other blogs that have a similar or related topic to yours. Build relationships with those other blogs by posting comments and trackbacks that are meaningful. A trackback is a link back to another site in a post you make on your site, your blogging software will "ping" the other site letting them know you have included a link to a post of theirs in the content on your site. This is called a trackback. Sometimes, depending on your blogging software, you will have to manually enter the other site's trackback URL for their post. Please read my post on turning off the "No Follow" tag in your blogging software to learn why this is important to your traffic building and SEO efforts. My best advice is to always create quality content. Over time, it will bring people who will keep coming back!
You need to measure and monitor where traffic is coming from and what happens once they're on your site. Depending on where your blog is hosted, it may come with monitoring or stats software to let you see where traffic is coming from (referrers) and how many page views and uniques (individual PCs) visited your site each day. Some packages have a javascript snippet that you can add to your pages to give you additional information on links that were clicked. Without knowing this information you are shooting in the dark. Without monitoring where traffic is coming from, you run the risk of spending the majority of your efforts on activities that you THINK are driving traffic to your blog, but in fact are not. This is how you should test various traffic generating ideas that you come across. Try it and if you don't see any results in your stats then you know it's not for you (it may have worked for someone else, but that does not mean it'll work for everyone). You want traffic that is matched to your site and the information and/or products that you offer. This is called quality traffic. If you get thousands of visitors but not one of them sign up to your mailing list, and none of them view any other pages, and none of them buy any products, then you're not any better off than if you'd had only 10 quality visitors. In fact, if a few of those 10 quality visitors bought something and signed up for your mailing list, then they're more valuable than the thousands who did not. Remember, the QUALITY of your traffic is more important than the VOLUME of your traffic! You don't know the quality if you're not monitoring your traffic stats. I use www.myBlogLog.com. Their stats are simple and easy to add to your blog. Plus, it's a social network of mostly bloggers that you can use to expand your readership as well.
The most important thing is to keep going. Don't get discouraged and stop because you're not getting the results you want. Keep posting, keep learning, keep monitoring and you'll get there!
Until next time,
Fred
About the Author
Fred Black is an experienced online business operator, programmer, web site developer, father, husband, musician, and songwriter. Visit his Internet Business Blog at: http://www.pqInternet.com.
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Posted by Fred on May 10, 2007 | Printer-Friendly
TrackBack: http://www.pqInternet.com/Blog/mt-tb.cgi/47
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