Why I'm Not Impressed by Your Traffic Numbers, Bubba!

Getting tons of traffic to your blog is tempting. But is it the right traffic?

Excerpt from the post is below. Much more available at the original URL. I'd love to see some unique takes on this topic! Cheers, Tia

"Successful blogs reach their intended audiences, in due time. This is something you ought to be striving for. You might want to reconsider how you are blogging (including SEO and promotion) if you have been at it awhile and still have no or very few visitors who are in your target audience.

But by itself, a load of traffic doesn’t mean that much. Maybe you are just funny. Maybe you are the kind of person who attracts a lot of sheep. Maybe you have a high PR blog (due to say, age and a million back links) and people just like to use your blog for one-way links back to their own blogs.

Reach, in the way that I am using it, is a qualitative characteristic, rather than a quantitative one. However, for illustrative purposes, let’s use numbers. Reach is equal to the amount of your traffic x the quality of your traffic. Those factors have different weights. In all seriousness, your traffic numbers do have significance. They say something about the frequency with which you are communicating as well as your relevance and popularity in general. But it’s not as important as the quality of your traffic.

If your traffic consists mainly of people who are not part of your intended audience, then you’ve got nothing.