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Quality Web Traffic vs. Quantity Web Traffic
by
Sant Qiu
As I apply various strategies to drive traffic to my
blog I can see that there are huge differences between Quality traffic
(targeted) vs. Quantity traffic (huge numbers but might not be
targeted). Depending on the purpose of your blog, one or the other will
be more useful for you.
Quantity traffic:
Many of the traffic strategies I see being shared in
articles, blogs and forums are geared to generate quantity traffic. That
is driving massive spike of traffic to a site or a blog. This will
result in a huge jump in visitors and your blog ranking will suddenly
jump.
Many bloggers do this to get good ranking and visitor
stats. However, most of the time these types of traffic won't become
loyal readers / subscribers to your blog. Following is one of the ways
you can do this:
Write about something of high interest to the general
masses (whether it is relevant to your blog's purpose or not). Eg.
writing a post on the latest celebrity scandal (on Paris Hilton, Britney
Spears, etc) or the latest hip news like the latest iPhone or new game
release like Halo 3. This will guarantee a huge spike in unique visitors
to your blog/site.
Another example: In Singapore, recently the Penal Code
is being reviewed. One of the topics being discussed is whether to
legalize homosexual acts. This created a huge interest in the general
public. Some people are against it, some are for it and others are
neutral about it. If I wanted an easy way to spike my blog ranking, I
could have easily write an article about this issue.
I would take a side and write a somewhat controversial
view on the issue and my unique visitors will go through the roof!
However, those new visitors will most likely arrive at
my blog once and never return again because the main focus of my site is
entrepreneurship and marketing. The huge spike in visitors numbers will
look great but those would be flakes.
I also came across strategies that teaches people to
go to social networking sites and post things that are controversial in
nature on purpose. Again the aim is to spike up the number of visitors
to your blog. A lot of the times this will also result in a one-time
spike that will immediately die down. (However, this strategy can work
if you just tweak it slightly. Read on below.)
This kind of quantity traffic (spike) strategies might
work well for blogs that are using adsense to monetize. The more traffic
goes to the blog the higher chance of people clicking those targeted
adsense ads. However, if your aim is to build a brand, then this
strategy is bad for you. Branding is about being consistency so you're
better off building quality traffic.
Quality traffic:
This is the kind of traffic I'm building. Quality
traffic means visitors who generally know what your blog/site is about.
What you're offering. And they decide to visit your site based on
articles, posts or comments that are consistent to the content of your
blog/site.
When they arrive at your blog/site, they have a much
higher chance of subscribing or re-visiting again and again because the
content you're offering is relevant to them. The strategies I've been
applying and mentioned in my previous 'Traffic Generation Challenge'
articles tend to generate quality traffic.
Quality traffic tend to last much longer and are great
for long-term growth and rebranding.
However, this does not mean that building quality
traffic has to be slow. You can use the controversial angle mentioned
above to generate quick spike in visitors. The trick is to be relevant
to your content. Just think about it, the report 'The Death of Internet
Marketing' by Mike Filsaime is a good example.
While most 'gurus' are going on and on about the
benefits of Internet marketing and that every one should go on the
Internet, Mike Filsaime decided to go the opposite way and be
controversial by releasing a report about the death of Internet
marketing. Obviously tons of people want to know what is the content of
the report. That spiked up visitors to his site. Is that on purpose?
Absolutely.
But are those visitors 'quality traffic'? Yes because
the ones who are interested in Mike's report are those who are
interested in Internet marketing. And Mike is promoting Internet
marketing stuff. That report helped to build Mike's long term branding
as a top Internet marketer.
So are you looking for quality traffic or quantity
traffic? Are the strategies you are using congruent?
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