I’m always grateful to the people who choose to keep up with what I have to say, either by visiting my blogs, or subscribing to an RSS or email feed. But just like everyone else doing business online, I’m always interested in ways to increase the quantity and quality of traffic.
By “quality” I mean that a reasonable proportion of the people who visit are people I’m wanting to attract, which as for any business includes people who may be interested in engaging my services at some time, now or in the future. As a consultant, coach or speaker. Or perhaps interested in buying one of my books.
A corollary is that I’m interested in the quality of the experience visitors have. Do they find what they are looking for? Do they feel better informed, challenged, entertained, inspired? Do they stay and look around? Do they come back for more? And what can I do to improve the quality of that experience?
I’m no expert on how to achieve all this. But I’m happy to say that I know where I can get good information and guidance from people who are experts in attracting, retaining and building web traffic.
One of those people is Tinu Abayomi-Paul.
You know how sometimes, even if you don’t know a lot in detail about someone in your industry or field of interest, their name resonates with you as being that of someone who knows what they are talking/writing about and can be trusted? For me, Tinu is one of the people in that category.
And I’m currently reading with interest some posts on her site, Increase Your Website Traffic, which was established in 2004, with a really focused aim, namely to help small to medium brick and mortar businesses attract traffic to their new location on the web.
Tinu has kicked off the New Year by offering her 8 New Traffic Resolutions for a Profitable 2008 – well worth the read.
Of her eight resolutions, the ones that jumped out for me in terms of my own priorities, and in terms of the advice I give others (!) were:
Comment and Trackback More
- I do try to do trackbacks fairly consistently but my sense is that lately I’ve not been commenting as much as I used to
Write Shorter Articles in Your Blog/Newsletter/Etc or Blog Less Frequently
- Guilty as charged: it makes a lot of sense for me to do, for the most part, shorter posts, although I will continue to do some longer posts where I believe that could be more helpful to readers
Make a Plan, Then Tie it To a Schedule
- Less “so what will I post about today?”, more “so what have I scheduled to post about today?”
If you are interested in getting more traffic to your site, do yourself a favor and subscribe to Tinu’s blog.
Wishing everyone lots of quality, recurring traffic!
Some Comment Spam is So Odd It’s Amost Amusing
Me, obsessed about comment spam? Not really. Although if you do a search here on the term, using the excellent lijit search tool in the right sidebar, you will see I have posted on it quite a few times.
What I now find not just annoying but quite creepy is that there seems to be an increase in the number and frequency of “comments” which appear to have been generated automatically from some kind of word recognition or phrase scraping, and which when you read them are nonsensical or at least incoherent. But they are “intelligible” enough, it appears, to get past the otherwise very efficient Akismet comment spam buster.
I thought it might be helpful for others, especially people new to blogging and looking for some clues on how to manage their comment stream, if I provided a few examples of what I’m talking about here.
They range from the “phony praise” ones, through the mysterious, to the completely weird.
(Update: in fairness to Akismet, some of the examples in this post may actually have been trapped by Akismet, but I still find enough odd “comments” getting past Akismet to make the exercise of vigilance necessary.)
One feature of some of those generated, apparently, by software robots is that they pick up on part of a blog post title and include that – for example a post the other day whose full title was PayPal: Don’t Leave Home With It.
Among other interesting sidelights of this little exercise, you might notice that my trip to Las Vegas last year for BlogWorld Expo and posts about that seem to have attracted a number of purveyors of Las Vegas related services.
I’ve put the “comments” in quotation marks:
Apart from “comments” such as these, there are certainly some which are a bit in the line ball department. One thing I’ve found helpful for checking these out is to take a phrase from the comment and google it – with quotation marks to get results for an exact match for the phrase. This is one way to pick up examples of more grammatically coherent exercises in spam.
But whether or not I find with that test that a doubtful comment is spam, the doubtful comments still have to pass the criteria of my comments policy (see sidebar):
For new bloggers who might be told they should or must, in the interest of open communication and transparency, leave all comments on their blog (I don’t know whether people still say that, but just in case…), my advice is to remember it’s your blog, your brand and your reputation. If in doubt, I frankly choose the option which is more prudent in safeguarding my brand and my name.
How do you handle comment spam? If you are on WordPress, do you use any software in addition to Akismet? If you are on another platform, is comment spam a problem or do you have it solved?
(Update August 3, 2009: ironically, this post seems to attract spam, so comments are now closed.)