Blog Abandonment, or How I Got More Traffic without Writing a Damn Thing
Posted: November 25th, 2013 | Author: Ryan | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »TL;DR version – Even when I wasn’t putting out new content, I actually attracted a solid audience of new visitors by authentically engaging in new communities.
This blog site is an amalgamation of the last ~8 years of my life, with content migrated from multiple previous forms (my apologies for old posts with broken images, just charge it to the game). It wasn’t until I got my job as a Web Analyst that I started apply common sense and science to my hobby, and put Google Analytics on the site.
Coincidentally, with the new job also meant a lot more self-directed learning, and less time sitting idly at my desk, which was the method I most commonly used to think up things to blog about. If I were a data scientist, I could probably make you a chart showing how my learning path as an inbound marketer correlated negatively with my output on this site. (I put up 2 posts in my first 14 months as an inbound marketer, hardly practicing what I preached).
What was very intriguing, though, was what I discovered when I started to get the bug to write again this past summer. Â Looking into the stats for this site, I noticed something pretty remarkable. Â I actually had a surge in visits during the time (late 2012 and 2013) when I wasn’t writing. Â My first thought was that this was only accidental traffic, but when I did put out fresh content, I found that I wasn’t able to meet the same levels of traffic as I had during the “hibernation” period. (If I call it hibernation it sounds more natural than if I said “laziness” or “neglect”.)
The best I can correlate, while I wasn’t putting out new content on the site, or overtly marketing existing content, I was doing one thing very right. Â By engaging with others on their sites, reaching out and meeting other folks in the industry, and in general participating the communities others had built, I ended up directing some folks back to my site completely unintentionally. Â If I were Mack, or someone else great at community building, I could probably tie it back to a principle of reciprocity or tell a story about how I engaged as an actual person across a spectrum of sites and was able to occasionally attract some love back to my little corner, but I didn’t capture any specific referral data for that. (Damn you “channel data not available before X date” message!)
The lesson I take from this is that while we’ve all been told to find our niche and serve a specific, highly-passionate community, it can pay massive dividends to branch out, listen to lots of sources from divergent parts of the web and always engage as a real person. You just might find new fans/friends/readers/etc.
Next up, to figure out how to get a mentor.
(PS: included the first link below because I couldn’t believe that in late 2013 we still have to publish articles like that.)
Related articles
- Relevant Inbound Links Help You Rank Higher in the Search Results (business2community.com)
- Why You Can’t Be A Fair Weather Fan of Inbound Marketing (business2community.com)
New on RelevantWit – http://t.co/dqwe232tqS how I got more traffic w/o writing a damn thing.