Getting more blog traffic not just for stats

When starting to post content, one of our first goals is getting more blog traffic. People who watch the content and take specific actions like subscribing to our newsletters, or filling out a form, or answering a survey and of course, clicking on affiliate links or buying our products.

Whatever is the initial intention is easy to get lost over time about what the purpose of traffic coming to our website was. Because we tend to see traffic not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. In the beginning, when our sites are empty of content, their stats are dead, zero. However, as we start writing post and pages, indexing and positioning naturally occur on search engines. Our pieces of information are exposed to the world, and they get more and more views.

Stats become the sign that our website is coming to play a role even a modest one, within the whole internet, and it is exciting or should be… at first. What happens when we shift this excitement into anxiety to get better positions in SERPS, for instance? We have lost our primary purpose: generating useful content for people instead of just writing content to get people pushing our website up in rankings.

Where the traffic comes from to your blog?

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The traffic, that is the people who come to your blog can do it from many different channels as you can quickly see in one of the charts of Acquisition Overview page within the particular Google Analytics dashboard of your website. Mainly they could come from the following sources:

• Direct: When people for some reason have the exact URL of your site or a specific page or post of it, and write it or

  

  paste it in the URL bar of the browser
• Email: when people click on a link that takes them to your site from an email message.
• Organic Search: when the address or URL of your website was found circumstantially or for an intentional search using alphabet soup technique or keywords in the search box of a search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo.
• Paid Search: when people come to your site from CPC, CPM, PPC, etc
• Referral: When people follow a link from another website to yours.
• Social: When people click the URLs of one of your messages shared on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media.
• Affiliates, display or another kind of advertising: traffic coming to your site from any other channel not mentioned above.

The meaning of any of those traffic sources would be different in terms of demographics, needs, preferences, and of course, purchase intent, among other markers. So it’s essential not only to look at your traffic as a whole but to segment it based on various criteria.

I share an informative video about Google Analytics Acquisition Reports (Traffic Sources)

What is the meaning of your main stats?

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There are three categories of stats which practically any data refer to:

• Acquisition: where your visitors are coming from?
• Behavior: What are your visitors doing on your site?
• Conversion: how, where and when the actions your visitors do on the pages of your site contribute to any goal that you have previously set up

Acquisition: essentially tells you what you saw in the previous chart. That is the different channels where your visitors come from which by themselves are informative enough to know better your audiences and adjust your content for it. ‘Acquisition’ also tells you if traffic is recurring or new and how many sessions are people involved in. Do you think if it’s relevant to know if you are getting more new visitors or users to your site? Does it change something that you do with the content on your website? Does it change the way in what you let the world know about your site either via social media, organic search, or paid search?

Behavior: Your visitors can click on a specific URL of your site and do many things on it. From nothing till read, browse, click on another link within your content to go to another post or page, fill out a form, or purchase anything you have in your e-commerce. Any kind of action that your visitors take on your site are motivated by many things. How well do you understand every one of those actions and their causes? Are your visitors taking steps by default, or are you doing something to stimulate your visitors to take any specific action? How are you doing that?

Conversions: As relevant as knowing what your visitors come from or what they do in your site, it is to set up goals of performance of your website. Either about getting authority and influence on the internet, or increasing the list of subscribers to your site or influencing the opinion of people or selling more of your own or affiliate products, etc.

It could happen that you are working hard on your site and people are doing many things on it. However, if you don’t set up goals, first of all, you won’t know what the real impact of that work is. But also and more importantly you won’t know what are you doing wrong to fix it or what are you doing well to potentiate it.

What traffic stats are you paying more attention to?

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What is the first you look for in your stats when it comes to traffic to your site? If you are in the growing phase of your business, what you look first is the whole volume of your visits, isn’t it? How many visits are you getting today compared with yesterday, or this week vs. last week, or this month vs. last month, and so on?

While this is a natural and expected behavior, at least at the beginning, it could be useless if you are doing nothing to improve them. As we pointed out in the last section, there are much more than just the plain and a simple number of visits per date range.

It is true that as your business grows and become consolidated, it will reflect in the whole volume of traffic. However, it is only a part of the performance of your site. For many online entrepreneurs, traffic would be massive due to different strategies without having good conversions or any at all. What happens there?

You could do a very successful campaign attracting people to your site by telling them bold statements about how beautiful your information, products, or services are. Or maybe promising them a gift for visiting your website; or hooking them with spectacular secrets to uncover; or with hype or even worst, lies. So many strategies have been out there for years to get traffic to your site both white and black hat.

So incoming traffic at this point it is not more than the answer to many of those aggressive strategies, but Is it what you really want for your business? Or maybe you want a very segmented and targeted people within a well-defined niche who are not coming just because of the bells and whistles but for the valuable content of your site?

What are you writing blog posts for?

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Seems evident that what we want is to thrive with our business by influencing people to take specific actions about the service or product that we are promoting in our content. However, the significant difference between a seller vs. an influencer is that an influencer is giving people more than just an offer. She/he is bringing them useful information to solve a problem.

What is it to do with traffic? If you are creating offers in your site with the sole purpose of selling any kind of bargain, no matter who the people are and what their needs, problems, or intentions. In this case, one strategy would be to build a massive campaign to attract any kind of visitors who randomly could get interested in your offer. At least for a while.

Perhaps you’ll get the right amount of money. Although it is very improbable that you can become rich instantly with a single event like this. And I would say more. If you intend to accumulate a certain amount of money out of one occasion so, maybe there are less complicated ways to do it. Perhaps by just posting ads on Facebook or Twitter (GAZ review) without necessarily bother in writing content in blog posts.

But if what you are looking for is to build a long-lasting online business there are two things you must always keep in mind:

Who can get you the results you want for the days, weeks, and years to come, it is the very targeted audience. That one with a question, a need, a problem or desire already in mind, susceptible to be answered fulfilled or solved by you. Not the general public.

What gives you the authority as an influencer is a trust you build with your audience. Those people eventually become your customers, keep coming back for your content and recommend you not only by electronic means but also by the old fashioned word of mouth.

Correlation between stats and results

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So coming back to the statistics, think of them like a window reflecting the world. As you get closer to that window and open it, wider the view would be. Go deeper for what your stats mean, but not just in terms of volume but regarding the thinking and behavior of people.

An excellent strategy to realize what are the preferences, needs, or intentions your audience have is by doing A/B Testing. It basically consists of comparing two versions slightly differents of the same things. That doesn’t mean that you duplicate your posts, for instance. You can write two jobs similar in structure that refer to the same product or service but changing the keyword in the title, or the imagery, or including a video in only one of them. Or maybe by creating your own infography, or determining specific locations for your links, etc.

What is important to stress out here is that these two slightly different versions are experiments which can give you a lot of information regarding the behavior of your audience. So you can decide which change or technique or strategy was better, what induced more time per session, what lead to your audience deeper in your site, etc.

Improving performance

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Understanding the big picture of your stats should not only give you the satisfaction of doing a good job. It also provides you with the tools to straighten those procedures that are not working or at least not as good as they could. They can teach you what things are harming your business and should be avoided or replaced, as well as those that represent just a waste of time, energy, and money.

Remember, the traffic it’s not the same as excellent performance. Therefore high or massive traffic shouldn’t equal success. Taken alone traffic is (and must be) just another index of your site. Meaningful traffic should be analyzed in terms of the sources and behavior of your visitors. But above all in terms of the achievement of goals, that is C-O-N-V-E-R-S-I-O-N-S.

Learn more about the traffic that reaches your website and how to make it impact your business profits. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION