HOW-TO Grow Your Blog's Audience - Guest Post

This post is by Amy in Arizona, also known as Rocketwife. We've swapped posts this weekend, taking part in the 20somethingbloggers' Big Blog Swap. Thanks to Ben Boudreau for organizing it all! And thanks Amy for the fabulous post.

My post on Amy's blog can be found here.

I'm pretty new at this blog thing. I had a Blogspot account for a long time but it was more of a place to post pictures of my dogs and talk about "feelings" than anything else. I think the most readers I ever had in one day were three. (Hi mom! And dad! And mom again?)

I made the decision to buy my own URL and start blogging a little over a month ago. I figure out how to use Wordpress, learned what a file manager was and even set up my own email account. I was all set! Except, well, nobody was reading the website.

I would wake up each morning and say to myself, "TODAY is the day that hundreds of people read my blog! And they will love it and think that I'm SO funny!" But, each morning I would check the stats on my blog and realize that I wasn't getting any more hits than when I had my "puppy" blog.

At that point, I sat down and began to realize that readers just don't show up, you have bring them to you. It's sort of like making friends. You can't sit at home and hope that someone knocks on your door and wants to go to brunch with you. It just won't happen. You have to be proactive.

And that's exactly what I did. I started first with some very cheesy "blog" companies that promised thousands of hits per day. All I got was spam, and very vulgar spam at that! I DO NOT recommend this.

What has worked best for me is, like I said before, being proactive. I make the effort to engage in other blogs and in return, they engage in me. I post comments but not just any comments. What you say needs to be something that adds to the conversation. I don't think something like "YOU ROCK!" on a random blog would produce any more traffic than saying nothing at all.

In conclusion, I think the best things that have worked for my blog marketing have been:
1. Join websites that relate to you. If you're a 20-something without kids, don't join a Mommies-R-Us blog service.
2. Be PROACTIVE. You have to leave comments to receive comments.
3. Relax and be yourself! When it comes down to it, WHO CARES if anyone reads your blog! If you enjoy posting, then that's really all that matters!

It's just about goals

Carman’s post about planning campaigns or creative based on what you or your peers or your friends will believe to be “cool” got me thinking about something we all have to ask ourselves and our clients all the time.

What’s the point?

I left a comment on his post saying that I was critiquing a client’s website (as it’s incredibly hard to use) and was told that it won awards (or was recognized in some way) at Cannes.

That’s a fabulous honour but it matters not at all. Nobody who actually tries to engage with the site, only to be confronted with a loading page and then a non-existent nav structure in a fully-Flash page (no direct linking, no image/text copying) cares at all that the site won some awards. They might be intrigued with the look of the site, briefly. But they’ll never come back. Best case, best case, they pass the link along to a friend because the site looks cool. Worst case, they never enter the contest, their friend never enters the contest, no one sends a direct link to the contest.

And that worst case is just about the current case, it turns out.

If your campaign has a goal, which should almost never be to drive traffic to a micro-site, build around that goal. If the goal is to get information on your customers through a contest, make getting to the contest, sending the link to the contest, and entering the contest the easiest friggin thing in the world.

That simple.

Glossary: % Comp UV

% Comp UV: (Or, Percent Composition of Unique Visitors) The percentage of a site’s visitors that are in your target demo.

This is why reach ain’t everything. If you have a small demo especially, you might not want to blow a ton of money on big sites with huge reach to hit them. If you try to figure out smaller sites whose visitors are highly-composed of your demo, you can probably buy on a bunch of those sites for cheaper, and still end up getting the same (or close to it) reach.

Glossary: Reach

Reach: The percentage of your target demo that visit the website you’re advertising on.

If you’re looking to hit as many people in your demo as possible by buying on as few sites as possible, reach is your metric of choice. If your target is pretty broad, you’re going to be looking at buying on the big sites like Yahoo! or even Facebook.

But reach ain't everything.

If you have a very narrow target, you can still hit them usually by going on the big sites (my Yahoo! reps tell me that when you combine all their properties together they approach 100% reach), but it’ll cost you a decent chunk of change. Why not find a bunch of smaller sites that your demo visit, and buy on them for cheaper? That’s where % Comp UV comes in.

Traffic Ain’t Everything

In fact, it's almost nothing.

“How much traffic does your site get?” This is a question commercial websites get asked a lot.

And it makes sense, right? If you’re paying to put an ad on a website, you want as many people as possible to see it, so you’d want to make sure that lots of people visit the site.

Well, that’s just not how it works.

See, most of these sites sell on a CPM basis. This means that you’re only paying when someone sees your ad. So if you buy 10,000 impressions (or 10,000 instances of someone seeing the ad), then it often makes little difference how much traffic the site gets.

If you’re considering purchasing ad space online, “traffic” is simply not a thing to worry about in most cases. Reach might be. %Composition UV should be. But traffic? Not so much.

If it is a crucial part of your decision-making process, you’re thinking about the wrong things. You’re thinking that you’re buying space in a newspaper, or on a TV show. You’re thinking about Gross Rating Points. You’re not thinking that you’re advertising on the internet.

Internet advertising allows you to measure every single time someone sees an ad, every single time someone clicks an ad. You can see where they’re from (down to the postal/zip code), you can see what browser they’re using, whether they’re on dial-up or broadband, and so many more things. And many sites offer all of these things and more as targeting options. This is not TV, this is not radio.

Traffic isn’t a thing, people. Hitting your target demo precisely, and only paying when you do -- that’s a thing. That’s the thing that matters.

Slashdot has a ton of traffic, but if you’re selling nail polish*, that just doesn’t make a difference.



*Sorry to whip out the No Girls on Slashdot cliché, but you get my point.

HOW-TO Remove Twitter Followers

Just a heads up, if you try to get people to stop following you, you might get accused of being a “Twitter snob.” But frankly, that’s a risk many of us are willing to take. Social media tools are just that, and it’s entirely acceptable to use these tools however you want to.

So, basically, if you want to stop people from receiving your updates unless you allow them to, just go into your Settings, and check the box at the bottom to protect your updates. You’ll be able to approve/deny people who try to follow you.

If that’s a little too proactive and not retaliatory enough (someone of us like a little spite), go into your list of Followers and block the ones you don’t want following your updates anymore.

That’s all there is to it.

What are you social media or web marketing questions?

Got any? Send me an email at joel@ingenioustries.com, or post a comment. If you're wondering about social media, web marketing and copywriting, or what I had for breakfast today (hint: light roast from Just Us! on Barrington St.), let me know! I'll answer it right here on my fancy internet website. Viewed by literally several people a week!