We live in a traffic-centric world populated by very intelligent people that blindly assume traffic is the answer to everything and traffic metrics are the only thing we should worry about when measuring our online marketing strategies. This is a delusional attitude and lots of business people suffer from it.
It's good to have traffic, but it's not an indicator of success in your core business objective - UNLESS of course, your core business objective is to create clicks on banner and AdSense ads. Most realtors are not trying to earn a living three pennies at a time with banner clicks. Traffic (in and of itself) is almost as irrelevant as the number of people that happen to glance at your sign while trying to see what suite number their dentist is in.
Like cholestrol, traffic comes in two forms - good traffic and bad traffic. Driving traffic to your weblog based on relevant conversations that occur through natural and common interests is good traffic. Traffic acquired though participation in a link farm only ads to your delusions. Spending a lot of time trying to squeeze more clicks through to your blog or website is (for the most part) a fabrication of traffic and it serves only to feed your sickness.
Most "bloggers" (i.e., people that blog all day) would have you believe that you must establish a large audience and high (and always growing) traffic numbers to be successful at business blogging. This is true if you want to be a "blogger". But I've learned that the vast majority of business people don't want to become bloggers - instead, they simply want to benefit from participation in the blogosphere. Traffic will naturally find your voice through long tail queries (search referrals on things you write about) and through participation in the blogosphere. But it's possible to leverage blogs successfully without spending a fortune in time doing it. The traffic you earn naturally is the traffic you [really] want - these are the people that are looking for exactly what you know or what you sell.
I recommend a balanced diet of metrics because our websites and blogsites are used interchangeably to build brand, create awareness, promote products, sell stuff, and oh yea - my favorite - provide a high tech place where someone can grab the phone number to your circa 1968 technology known as the FAX machine. ;-) The variety and types of complex interactions that come from blogsites and websites are too diverse to lump into one measure that incompletely and inadequately describes business performance. Your traffic-centric sickness has convinced you that a click to your contact page about buying a home is of equal importance as a click to download a Rolling Stones ring-tone. Please... [sigh]
You can escape the traffic affliction by looking at three basic business metrics for the last 12 months. As an exercise, try this:
- Divide your gross sales commissions by the number of page hits in each month - put the values in a column chart.
- In a separate comparison column, plot your page hits by month.
- In a third column, plot your gross sales commissions.
These three data elements will tell you many things about traffic - you're all bright people - I don't need to explain what sales-to-hits tells you. Some of you will quickly conclude that traffic is meaningless when measured against sales. In fact, some might discover that traffic is rising rapidly while sales remain the same. And some of you might find a positive correlation - good for you! You might not be delusional! Don't get too excited -- correlations are often not causal, so investigate deeper.
My advice -- take a chill pill on traffic and focus on measuring things that actually tell you something. Here are some examples that are blog-centric:
- Ratio of comments to total blog posts
- Ratio of comments to total blog page hits
- Ratio of contact me page hits to total page hits
- Ratio of total page hits to sales
- Ratio of pages indexed to sales
- Ratio of blog page hits to property search requests
- The number of new names in your email archive month over month
When tracked month over month, these metrics will tell you new things about your blogging effort and its relationship to specific business activity. I suspect you could create some new and creative measures for your web site as well.
Get well. ;-)
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