This is the first post with a photo on this blog. I took this photo when I was in France…I think it is quite funny, to say the least. The reason why I am posting this photo, is that I am arriving at a cross road, a “blogging cross road” to be exact.
The reason for all this blabbering is the dilemma I am facing; a “traffic effectiveness dilemma”. The number of visits has been increasing, the number of clicks have been increasing, the income has been increasing (I am still in same tax bracket unfortunately…) but it is still not enough, should I keep doing what I am doing or should I change my course of action?
To some extent I am happy with the traffic this blog is getting, 100-150 daily unique visitors is not that bad. Ideally, I would like traffic to increase. I shouldn’t say traffic but readers, i.e. visitors that actually read my content, people who actually find these posts helpful. Even when it comes to the visitors that read this blog, they are not all the same. By that I mean, that some visitors keep coming back, they write comments, participate, link to my posts, point out their posts so I can link to them and so on. Then, there is the other kind of visitors, people who are new to blogging. When they visit they read and possibly learn from what I have done, what I do, how I do it and possibly their blogging endeavours their firsts steps in making money blogging are made a bit easier.
The main source of traffic for this blog has been, and is, Social Networking and Bookmarking sites. Although, my main source of traffic at this moment is social networking and bookmarking sites, eventually I would like that to change. My goal is to get more and more search engine traffic. Think about it…Entrecard for example, is where most of the visitors come from. I get 50 to 100 visits a day from Entrecard, at least. Some stay a second, some 2 and some spend more time, up to 15 minutes reading my posts. Overall, the average time spent on this blog is less than a minute, around 45 seconds. The bounce rate is over 85%. Which means easy come easy go. That’s fine…I am not complaining about Entrecard traffic. Traffic is traffic, Entrecard brings in visitors, but it does not bring that many readers, search engines do.
Search engine visitors came here because they where actually looking, searching for the information offered. Although the number of visits have been considerably lower, these visitors are readers. They spend over 10 minutes here, they view at least 2-3 pages and they don’t bounce that much. Search engine traffic bounces at a rate of 25%. And when they do, they don’t bounce to the next Entrecard blog….They click on other things. Do you see what I mean?
If I was the only person in the world that wrote about making money online, or making money blogging, I wouldn’t have a problem. I would write what I had to write; slap on a few ads, optimized the site for search engine traffic, sit back and watch the visitors and the pennies roll in.
Sadly, this is not the case. There are countless ‘make money blogs’ out there. I bet you have one too!
So how can I, how can you get a bigger piece of the pie?
Think about it….I can easily get 100 hits a day just from Entrecard. I can climb the ranks of the Make Money Online blogs with just 30 minutes of “work” a day at the most. If I can do it, you can do it, anyone can. I have written an Entrecard tips post in the past. Climbing the ranks, means more credits which translates in more advertising, and results in even more Entrecard traffic. Ok that’s fine. But what are we achieving here? There are 4,000 blogs on Entrecard, that’s great. At most 4,000 members, which I doubt because some people have a few blogs, but still… that’s only 4,000 potential visitors. Even if you are one of the top 10 blogs, what cut of the 4,000 members/visitors or readers would you be getting? Don’t get me wrong I like Entrecard, what I am trying to say is that there are thousands more if not millions of bloggers out there, who are not part of Entrecard or other social networking sites that could be visiting your ‘make money online’ or any other kind of blog and are not.
I am not dropping Entrecard, and I am not suggesting that either. My conclusion and suggestion is not to focus all your efforts in getting traffic from Entrecard or other similar sites. Keep writing, optimize your content and always have in mind that even all of the social networking sites combined will help you approach a tiny fraction of the number of possible readers out there.
Since my last posts about search engines and keywords, the position of this blog has moved slightly upward and it is now floating between page 8 and 9 when searching for Make Money Blogging on Google. It was on 8 then 9 and perhaps 10 by now. It is at page 10 or 11 for Yahoo. Either way, it has moved up quite a few pages, from page 21 a few weeks ago. Make money blogging is a pretty tough keyword to rank high in, so I shouldn’t complain. Eventually I would like this blog to be at least on the 5th page for ‘make money blogging’ searches. Then I will proceed to optimize for the next one, the next key word. Moving up in search result pages should be pursued with as much effort, if not more, as getting known in any other social networking sites/communities. Because as days and weeks go by, the number of search result pages poor saps looking for advice on how to make money blogging keeps decreasing the number of new readers will keep increasing. Till then I will try and maintain a balance in my efforts. I will keep being active in the blogging communities, but at the same time keep writing and optimizing.
Subscribe to this blog and receive instant updates every time there is a new post.