Why lots of traffic isn't good for your content and why traffic doesn't matter
I've done many shameless things for attention. I submit a lot of my own content to places like Digg and Reddit and get friends to vote for them. I've written content with the sole purpose of gaining traffic with it (known in the industry as "link bait") and I'm not proud of it, but it's one of the necessary evils for developing and maintaining a blog in these rather competitive times.
Traffic can be comforting, but never stop writing
When you're riding high on the popularity of a specific piece of content it's tempting to sit back and ride it out and not write new content. This is bad in many ways - as everyone always says "content is king" and if you're not writing any then you're not building anything. I'm guilty of doing this and hate myself for doing it. Once the popularity of that specific piece of content dies down you've got nothing because you've not been doing your blog-housekeeping. This means you get a massive traffic drop and your motivation drops with it. Bad. Bad. Bad.
Lots of traffic means nothing, look closer
You may be having 15,000 unique visitors a day but how long are they hanging around? Are they viewing more than one page? It's likely that most are hopping onto your site for 3-5 seconds before navigating away - but you don't care because the statistics look good. All you know is you've got more visitors than ever before and that must mean everything is peachy. Not so, it's possible that the 15,000 visitors you've got now are actually reading less content than the 500 you had yesterday.
How not caring about traffic has let me reach one of my goals
This is really what this post is about. Recently I posted in 9rules notes that one of my main objectives for 2008 was to finally break the 500 RSS readers ceiling on Feedburner. Over the past few weeks I've focused on writing targetted articles following a set path; mainly covering SEO. I've written on a regular basis (almost daily) and while traffic has been dwindling, today I finally hit 503 RSS readers. While I know this is yet another seemingly meaningless metric it's one of my goals.
Lots of bloggers flaunt this statistic so it seems only fair that I care about it too. More-over I've been seeing my overall number of RSS views increase per day with a reported 310 users reading the site over RSS yesterday.
So while traffic has been a good 40,000 visits down on last month, a good consistent attitude towards writing has allowed me to achieve one of my objectives for next year. It will be interesting to see how this figure changes over the next week; hopefully this is achievement is reflective of my effort because my number of readers has steadily increased (with fluxuations of 15-30 readers per day). So I can only hope that things will continue going in the right direction but my advice is this - case less about traffic and instead care about getting the right content there and read by the right people. Everything else should fall into place.
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