2 Blogging Myths: traffic measures success and content is King

Admit it — you think I am crazy for dogging two most common judgment blogger objective – traffic and good content. Let me explain before you roll your mouse on the screen, please.

Blog traffic is very important. With no traffic, how will anyone see your masterpiece on writing blindfold for improved focus? Your blog needs traffic.

But traffic is not a valid measure for success. If traffic is a valid measure of success, would be every bloggers starting point an immediate failure for months if not longer.

Success metrics must be applicable to persons at all levels of experience. High traffic is later a major challenge to you is successful (which ProBlogger has), but it is simply not relevant for new bloggers who want to know how to do.

Traffic compared to the experience and time online is also an outdated statistics, because it has more to do with luck and marketing than anything else:

Better marketers need to better traffic – especially in the beginning.I have seen horrendous Blogs (messy layout, weak content, horrible grammar, etc.) with thousands of subscribers.I have seen great blogs that are virtually invisible online because they don't know how you, or to gain exposure.Time separates the wheat from the chaff (unless you market never your blog, what goals, good luck).

For a beginning blogger, it's hard to see the big bloggers pull in thousands of visitors every day while you are reaching 50 on a good day. It takes time and effort to get your name out there so you can get a chance to be judged fairly by Web users. I know that many quality bloggers have simply quit because they equated low traffic with error.

63,494 Blogs started in the last 24 hours (according to blogpulse.com at the time of writing), and many of these bloggers will end during the first few months. The first months is important.

We have all heard classic "content is King ' point of view as well as the opposite," unseen content is useless "perspective. In fact both have some truth – you need a lot of content and you must ensure that people know about it.

But to say that content is King gives the author the wrong focus.

So, what is the best measure of success?

Success is measured by what the readers think about your content.

I have just Blogging (on my site) for a month, and as such, my traffic is hilariously low. However, I am very hopeful for retain and gain new readers because of how I measure my success.

When I read articles about content as King, I get the impression that we should write the best content we create. The problem is that the author's opinion of "best content" doesn't matter too much.

Content isn't King, nor traffic: readers is King!

Some would say that this is what "content is King" really means, but it is for interpretation. To say that your audience is King leaves no doubt.

Readers decide what they want to read, how much and when. They determine which Blogs and what incredible popularity soar Blogs bite the dust. The King because they control all bloggers fate. So how do we satisfy their interests? How do we know what they want?

You want to shape your content for your readers. Okay, but how do you get it?You do this by listening to what readers said.You listen by measuring the number of concrete positive responses (Facebook fans, tweets, comments, new subscribers, etc.) compared to the number of people who showed a record (individual posts views can be seen with Google Analytics, but make sure you block your own IP address views to prevent skewing the statistics).

This approach is mainly targeted at people beginning to like myself, but it is relevant for all bloggers.

Once you've "made it" and get lots of traffic, the positive responses in relation to your traffic (and increased traffic yourself via readers share) quite obvious indicators of how your posts are received. You have a much larger sample, in this case, and accurate calculations needed for prompt text cannot. But I'm sure you'll do them anyway because of how funny it is.

I think I will be a successful blogger. It is not because of my traffic — last Saturday, I had a whole six unique visitors (AJ, weekends).

My readers, not my traffic, prefiguring my success to respond positively. The first week, I told a couple who are friends with my blog was changing their lives. I take that over 1,000 visitors.

My last post was seen as only 22 unique visitors that day I posted it, but from that it had seven Facebook likes. My subscriber count doubled from seven to 14. Approximately 32% of the readers liked it enough to share it with their Facebook friends.

If I were to attract 2,000 visitors a day and maintained that 32% share rate (unlikely, but interesting), would that mean 640 Facebook like the post, which of course would be able to increase my traffic significantly.

I have had other posts was seen as a much larger number of people with a much lower response — it is a huge statement by readers. I would be a fool to ignore it and write what I want.

As a blogger, you need to have a willingness to customize your vision and substance on the market. Let's face it: blogging is a business. You have to promote your product (blog post), and network with other companies (blogger), and create value for customers (readers).

It is important to note that there are many other factors come into play here – the time the post was published, the length of the post, topic of interest, marketing, statistical variations, influential power that share your entry, and so on.

It is not an exact science due to the variables involved, but it is still the best measure of success for a blogger at any level. That is why I recommend allow comments on your posts or at the very least, add social sharing options to bloggers starting point. Disabling comments because it looks bad that have no comments, and you'll miss out on a chance to gain valuable feedback.

Even at low traffic levels, I found you can still get a good feel for your winners and losers. For example, the abovementioned entry with fewer views a much bigger response than any other entry with more views on my blog. The readers have spoken.

Note that different posts will have different reactions. The popular posts that I mentioned has zero comments, but people were sharing it and subscribe to because of it.

Another post I wrote the deeply thinking was shared less, but have more comments. Both records were successful based on the number of views.

I would like to hear from you about your experiences and get your thoughts and comments on this idea. If you are reading this, your feedback is King!

How few Tweets resulted in increased my traffic by 370%

The other night, I found out the author/marketer Chris Brogan was in town. I am a big fan of his and his book Trust agents, so I wanted to go see him. I will not go through all the details in the tweet Exchange — you can read about how I wound up not meeting him on my blog.

Photograph of Aidan Jones, licensed under the Creative Commons

As a result, to meet him, however, I had a conversation with him via Twitter. So I wrote up a post about what I learned from not meeting him, and I put his name in the title when I tweeted out to my followers. Chris had been notified, and he retweeted it to their followers, with the label, "very nice story."

That doesn't sound interesting, will it take? I mean, Chris doesn't know me, has certainly never met me, and it was a tweet. But by putting their stamp of approval on it, publicly urging people to Chris read my article – and he has over 177,000 supporters. In a few minutes, I had an influx of traffic (see screenshot below). These are not numbers to write home about, but when you are on average 50 to 60 visitors per day, 185 safe is a great hope – particularly in the span of a few hours!

"Brogan effect" – an hour distribution of traffic on that day

It would never have happened if I had decided to go meet Chris but do not tell him about this. I had to break the ice with him first and give it a shot. By that I was on their radar, and that is how my post was tweeted to his supporters.

It taught me some very important lessons about the network:

Don't be afraid to introduce you for large dogs. Chris Brogan, in small interaction I've had with him, seems to be quite a really nice guy, and my post only brought more people said the same thing to me about him. Twitter has such a low barrier to entry that it gives you the opportunity to connect with just about anyone who is there, and most of them are just ordinary people.You must be genuine. If I had gone in this interaction with Chris and pure was motivated by the thought, "Hey, maybe I can get some free traffic to my blog," he would have sniffed that out pretty quickly. He would have nothing to do with me – and he would be right. Sometimes you have to catch it and remind yourself of motivation for your actions. The rest of it will take care of itself. Just focus on building the relationship. It was an opportunity that I saw when I found out Chris was in town.Be active in your efforts. One of my favorite stories of networks is my friend Jacob Sokol adventure with author and well-known entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk, a New York Jets football game. He reached to Gary proactively and regularly get spectacular – and on Garys conditions. Sometimes, it feels like a throwaway. Chris, I tweeted that I Centre to see him just on a whim, where he controlled his Twitter feed while he was out. I never thought that he would respond, let alone do something of this. But it happened because I took action.Don't ask for anything. This goes along with authenticity. I asked Chris not to tweet my post. I hope he would read it, but I did not ask him to read it. I just let him know it was there. It is the same thing I did when I got 19 other people to share their small performances with me: I told them, ' this is it, this is done, read it if you want, and thank you. " Most of them took it upon himself to share it with their followers. Instead of asking for something, work hard to do what you do to be noticeable and different. Let your sincerity show through, and this is what motivates people to share your stuff – not because you asked, but because they want to.

As a result, I have new readers and a few new followers on Twitter – and I never even met the guy.

Do you have any experiences like this, where a small contact led to a burst of traffic for your blog? I would like to hear about them in the comments.

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