All Things Cahill

Building Blog Readership – An Evolving World

When I started this site in March, after I stopped working with Vario Creative, where I had previously been blogging, I expected that the same traffic building steps that had worked for me before would work here.  After 5 months, I can safely say, that’s not the case.

You see, when I started blogging at Vario, the important keys to getting readership were Technorati position and getting trackbacks from other sites.  In today’s world of sploggers and spammers, the trackback is dead, and Technorati is increasingly irrelevant.  In fact, now Google Blog Search is really the source for accurate linking information, so much so that WordPress has a feed of links from them in the blog dashboard.

My stats have been looking really good, upwards of 240 readers a day, but when you dive into them, you’d find that the majority of the traffic is coming from Google and is associated with an image of a shark eating someone.  It’s driveby traffic, they come into the site, and it’s one and done.  No long term readers, no comments, no added value.  Yesterday, Google realized the error of their ways and my image is no longer showing up in Image Search.  The Google well has run dry.

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Tags: blog readership development, field test, online community building, reader involvement, traffic strategy

10 Sep 08 | Blogging, Community Building, Content Management, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Web Design | Comments (31)