After the last post, I have been pondering. Did I pay enough attention to the kind of traffic I am getting? Apparently, a blog like this needs readers that takes a liking to the post I write and I think by far, this is the most difficult kind of traffic that one can ask for and it will take years to build unless I can come up with articles so unique that they can’t be found anywhere else. Which is quite impossible really, at least for me.
Then of course if I go down he path of link baiting and ruthless SEO-ing I might get lots of search traffic, but those, in my experience do not convert. Taking the recent fiasco of the scandal by a certain Malaysian cabinet minister, tons of people jumped in on the opportunity to come up with numerous postings, knowing fully well it will be the hottest searched word for the following days and of course they got what they wanted for 2 or 3 days. The thing is, what happens after that 3 days of euphoric traffic jump? Absolutely nothing. No increase in subscribers, no increase in Ad clicks, okay maybe one or two extra clicks by curious onlookers and that’s about it. Is this the kind of traffic that a blog like this need? I have serious doubt about it.
Frankly, many Internet marketers does that. Getting these kind of traffic, and I was taught it could be massive, to the tune of 30,000 uniques per day if the news is really hot, but then they are cashing in. A good example can be found in the article guest posted in SEOBook, by Ryan Durk, where he took advantage of this event, and which, I, like all noobs were oblivious of .
Starting New Years Eve, Google redirected all clicks on its homepage logo to a search for the term January 1 TCP/IP. Recognizing the opportunity to receive immense amounts of traffic (and Google’s endorsement), I devised a strategy to rank for this term. My site grabbed rankings at 1, 2, 3 and 4 within 2 hours and maintained spots 1, 3 and 4 until sometime Wednesday. As of right now, it has received over 2000 Diggs and 300,000 page impressions of traffic that converts terribly.
It just shows that ruthless SEO works and it works terribly well if they know how to go about it and how to take full advantage of their results. It need not be just this term. It could be a good publicised scandal or whatever that they know will take the world by storm.
Like Ryan, many marketers will start a blog in Blogspot, write some nonsensical keyword optimised article of about 500 words so that Search Engines can find them, put in their most lucrative and appropriate affiliates products or Advertisements and sit back. All this done within half an hour and like all smart marketers, they are not hoping for 30,000 sales from the 30,000 unique hits. They only need to snare 10 to 20 sales, make a quick buck and they are more than happy. Heck, for some high paying ones, they need only to make one or two sale. It doesn’t cost them a cent in investment and most of them have tons of these blogs.
So are these the kind of traffic I want for a blog like this? Definitely not. It will only be a big waste of bandwidth. This blog need traffic that converts into readers or subscribers, not people who are out looking looking for scandals. Having said that, I wouldn’t mind if it happened at my recently started niche blogs though.
The trick to link bait is to make relevant to your sites content and to embed links in it that point to other posts on your blog. This does to things:
1> The visitor will read another post and like that as well and may become a regular/subscriber.
2> You are building internal links which is good for SEO.
Perhaps what your blog needs are readers and subscribers that turn into buyers?
Great post.