A couple of weeks ago, along with a lot of other people, I signed up for BlogRush, which was then the latest and greatest hope for a system offering the prospect of generating amazing traffic to your blog while you sleep.
In BlogRush: Traffic Klondike or Fool’s Gold? I rounded up a range of comments on the new system and indicated my mixture of mildly hopeful curiosity and scepticism.
A few days later I read a post by Yaro Starak who had been an early adopter of BlogRush. When I saw the stats Yaro displayed for his BlogRush account, including credits of nearly 300,000 and 733 bloggers in his BlogRush network, and then saw how pathetic my figures were against that, I thought it was game over, shut the gate, at least as far as I was concerned.
But further on in the post in question, Yaro made the point that because BlogRush is set up to display post links, from other blogs, with some affinity with your own blog’s topics, one of the benefits of BlogRush could be to help us find other bloggers of like mind or similar interests, whom we might not otherwise come across.
Tonight I’ve put that observation of Yaro’s together with a contribution he made last Friday when, moderating a discussion at the Australian Blogging Conference, I put him on the spot to come up instantly with three key ways people could use to increase their blog traffic. His first point? “The best source of traffic is another blogger linking to you”. And what’s the first thing that has to happen before a blogger can know about me/my blog, and vice versa? We have to find out that the other exists.
So maybe BlogRush could even be helpful for bloggers like me, who do not have the large numbers Yaro and some others can boast.
What is a bit frustrating is that I don’t have any idea what figures I may now have. And tonight when I logged in again in the hope of getting some up to date figures, I got the following message.
We don’t yet have enough data for your account. Please check back soon for custom reporting.
Odd, that. They had figures a couple of weeks ago.
Actually, on most of the occasions over the past couple of weeks that I’ve logged in to get a report there’s been some sort of “we’re working on it, please be patient” type message. No doubt they’ll have it all working properly, one of these days, but the lack of availability after the breathlessness of the launch reminds me that cautiousness may not be such a bad thing in the face of heavily hyped Great New Traffic Things for the Web/blogosphere.
I’ll leave the widget in place for a while, just to see if there is anything of interest. And if it helps me make contact with some interesting new bloggers I might not connect with otherwise, that can only be good.
I have however dropped the widget well down the page, out of the prime space it was taking up for a short while. That will mean even less traffic, no doubt. It will also mean I won’t need to fret about it.
Who Else Wants More Traffic in 2008?
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:
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!