This is part 2 of 5-part series on Successful Blogging.
Successful blogs reach their intended audiences, in due time. This is something you ought to be striving for. You might want to reconsider how you are blogging (including SEO and promotion) if you have been at it awhile and still have no or very few visitors who are in your target audience.
But by itself, a load of traffic doesn’t mean that much. Maybe you are just funny. Maybe you are the kind of person who attracts a lot of sheep. Maybe you have a high PR blog (due to say, age and a million back links) and people just like to use your blog for one-way links back to their own blogs.
Reach, in the way that I am using it, is a qualitative characteristic, rather than a quantitative one. However, for illustrative purposes, let’s use numbers. Reach is equal to the amount of your traffic x the quality of your traffic. Those factors have different weights. In all seriousness, your traffic numbers do have significance. They say something about the frequency with which you are communicating as well as your relevance and popularity in general. But it’s not as important as the quality of your traffic.
If your traffic consists mainly of people who are not part of your intended audience, then you’ve got nothing.
Let’s say your traffic is equal to 100 unique visitors a day. But, the people who visit are not at all interested in your line of work or your product, they never buy anything from you, and they don’t opt-in when given the opportunity. To add insult to injury, they never come back. So that puts your quality at 1.
100 x 1 = 100
Now say that your traffic is half that, at 50 unique visitors a day. But, the people who visit opt-in at high rates, leave valuable comments, interact with you on Twitter or Facebook, trust you and buy from you, or contact you for consultations, for example. That puts your quality at a 5.
50 x 5 = 250
You can see there that your reach is actually far greater with fewer, but higher quality visitors. That is the kind of reach you should be looking for. Trust me, throw your Alexa Rating out the window for a minute and concentrate on what matters – results.
How to Get That Kind of Reach
1. Don’t Compromise On Your Topics
This is a hard one, but it’s key. Write about topics that your intended audience is concerned with. Don’t jump on the popularity bandwagon, unless you are blogging for Coke or the NFL, okay? Stick to your niche no matter how badly you would rather publish a post that the whole world wants to read. Ultimately it is not in your best interests to do that.
2. Promote in the Proper Places and in the Proper Ways
Spend just as much time being selective about developing a following as you do writing. While numbers do matter, the right numbers matter more. So be selective and interact and make real friends – friends that will help you promote and make your messages spread further.
That’s it. That’s the not-so-magical formula for maximizing your reach so that every reader counts.
Your Turn: Truth or Dare
If you’d pick truth, answer this – when considering your numbers, do you ever look at ratio? For example, what is the ratio of visits to shares or visits to actions (comments, opt-ins, etc.)? Are you happy with it?
If you’d pick dare – share this post and don’t just share the link, add your two cents. Good places to do so are Facebook, Twitter, or the very rad Amplify. I will find your two cents – I’d be happy to go on the egg hunt for it! If you do, leave a comment so I know that it’s out there.
Image Credit: Daikrieg
About Tia Peterson
