Forget blog traffic. Focus on something else instead. NOTE: All of the content is in the video. The text below just explains how and why this video was made. Watch the video, then please share it with your own blogger friends!
Let me be perfectly honest…
This video is insanely hypocritical for a few reasons.
First, I set an arbitrary website traffic goal every month as a minor check into how I’m doing. Today is the last day of January 2018, and I noticed I still have about 500 pages left to go till I hit my monthly goal.
What to do???
(Actually I went on Twitter and asked my followers what I should do, and got lots of replies like “hey me too let’s have a refresh-page party!” While they were obviously joking, and it was a funny joke at that, doesn’t it also highlight what a stupid metric traffic is?)
This video and this blog post is a direct result of me trying to get 500 extra page views in one day…just because.
Just because.
Yes, I still stand by everything said in the video above. Forget blog traffic.
Even as I found myself concerned about hitting my monthly traffic goal…In the back of my head, I was laughing.
I knew it was a stupid thing to want in the first place, hence me going on Twitter in the first place. Still, I’m glad I had the realization that traffic was coming up short for the month, as it prompted this topic.
Blog traffic is a metric to test things.
- To test what types of posts are performing better than others.
- To get an idea of what your audience wants or cares about
- To get a general sense of where your efforts are best spent on your blog
Traffic should have NO EFFECT ON THE FOLLOWING:
- Your sense of self worth as a blogger
- How good your actual blogging is
- How good your actual content is
- Whether you should quit or not
- Or anything else.
Traffic does not matter. Here’s what does:
Two things, and two things only in the long run:
- The quality of your fans.
- The quantity of your fans.
Not the quantity of your website visitors, or the quantity of your downloads…but the quality and quantity of your fans.
If you wish to care about anything in connection with your blog, let it be those two standards.
Thank you for watching and reading Do You Even Tribe.
I love you!
Pete
P.S. Please share this blog post and help me hit my monthly traffic goal.
P.P.S. lol
14 Responses
Count my pageview in. I really appreciate your podcasts and have been listening regularly.
Ha yay!
Thank you Doc. I appreciate your listens and your compliment 🙂
Keyword: Fans
Create true fans and the rest will take care of itself.
From listening to your podcast (and gleaning who your influencers are) I’m sure you’ve read Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans” post.
Every blogger should read it.
Totally Nick! I keep a link to it on my bookmarks bar in Chrome to always remind me about it 🙂
Without page views as a metric, how do you measure quality and amount of fans?
Excellent question Jason!
In an ideal world, I’d answer “I don’t.” (and that’s honest to God what I’m aiming for, but it’s hard). I’d much prefer to produce the work I want to, saying what I want to….all the time.
Bad news is that’d be dumb to start with before one even has a built-in audience who does know and trust them already.
Long answer –>
I do use traffic! But it’s a small part of a much larger engagement metric (podcast downloads are up there, comments, responses to podcasts via email, even Twitter). I just hate the thought of bloggers confusing correlation with causation as far as website traffic is concerned.
I.e. you do need traffic to build fans, but just because you have traffic doesn’t mean they’re becoming fans, etc.
Hope that answered at least 3% of your question 🙂
Great reminder! I think I need to lay off the analytics and create some worthy-to-read content. Thanks, Pete for always bringing it back to what matter, people.
De nada Javi. We all need that reminder from time to time 😉
This was so reassuring to hear as I’m in month 7 of blogging.
But how do you know if you have a quality fan/audience? Is it purely on if they engage with your content?
Totally an important question. Going to respond by adding it in the post lol. I’ll let you know when it’s up?
Sitting at Emergency Care right now :/
Lol checking this out now.
Totally with you on the SEO. There’s also SO many stories of great bloggers achieving killer SEO results entirely without trying…
Really just confirming that they focused first and foremost on content quality and relevance…and that Google is smarter than us and Yoast anyways 🙂
It’s funny. I was just telling someone how I am trying to grow my blog traffic. I will start on building true fans instead. Thanks Pete.
You are very welcome Shawn.
But you (and we) should still focus on trying to grow blog traffic. Wanna make that clear…I just don’t want us to obsess over it and think of it as a “be all and end all” sort of metric!
That’s all of course 🙂
I’m not sure how to measure fans but my post would get a certain number of reads. Low being 80 on the first day and high being 200-300. So I have maybe 50 fans that will read anything I dish out, even half thought out posts…I can’t ask for more for a girl ranting on the internet.