Quality Traffic VS Quantity Traffic
Posted by Sant Qiu in : Traffic Generation on October 29, 2007 , trackbackAs I apply various strategies to drive traffic to my blog I can see that there are huge differences between Quality traffic (targeted) vs. Quantity traffic (huge numbers but might not be targeted). Depending on the purpose of your blog, one or the other will be more useful for you.
Quantity traffic:
Many of the traffic strategies I see being shared in articles, blogs and forums are geared to generate quantity traffic. That is driving massive spike of traffic to a site or a blog. This will results in a huge jump in visitors and your blog ranking will suddenly jump.
Many bloggers do this to get good ranking and visitor stats. However, most of the time these type of traffic won’t become loyal readers / subscribers to your blog. Following is one of the ways you can do this:
Write about something of high interest to the general masses (whether it is relevant to your blog’s purpose or not). Eg. writing a post on the latest celebrity scandal (on Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, etc) or the latest hip news like the latest iPhone or new game release like Halo 3. This will guarantee a huge spike in unique visitors to your blog/site.
Another example: In Singapore, recently the Penal Code is being reviewed. One of the topic being discussed is whether to legalize homosexual acts. This created a huge interest in the general public. Some people are against it, some are for it and others are neutral about it. If I wanted an easy way to spike my blog ranking, I could have easily write an article about this issue.
I would take a side and write a somewhat controversial view on the issue and my unique visitors will go through the roof!
However, those new visitors will most likely arrive at my blog once and never return again because the main focus of my site is entrepreneurship and marketing. The huge spike in visitors numbers will look great but those would be flakes.
I also came across strategies that teaches people to go to social networking sites and post things that are controversial in nature on purpose. Again the aim is to spike up the number of visitors to your blog. A lot of the times this will also result in a one-time spike that will immediately die down. (However, this strategy can work if you just tweak it slightly. Read on below.)
This kind of quantity traffic (spike) strategies might work well for blogs that are using adsense to monetize. The more traffic goes to the blog the higher chance of people clicking those targeted adsense ads. However, if your aim is to build a brand, then this strategy is bad for you. Branding is about being consistency so you’re better off building quality traffic.
Quality traffic:
This is the kind of traffic I’m building. Quality traffic means visitors who generally know what your blog/site is about. What you’re offering. And they decide to visit your site based on articles, posts or comments that are consistent to the content of your blog/site.
When they arrive at your blog/site, they have a much higher chance of subscribing or re-visiting again and again because the content you’re offering is relevant to them. The strategies I’ve been applying and mentioned in my previous “Traffic Generation Challenge” articles tend to generate quality traffic.
Quality traffic tend to last much longer and are great for long-term growth and branding.
However, this does not mean that building quality traffic has to be slow. You can use the controversial angle mentioned above to generate quick spike in visitors. The trick is to be relevant to your content. Just think about it, the report “The Death of Internet Marketing” by Mike Filsaime is a good example.
While most ‘guru’s are going on and on about the benefits of Internet marketing and that every one should go on the Internet, Mike Filsaime decided to go the opposite way and be controversial by releasing a report about the death of Internet marketing. Obviously tons of people want to know what is the content of the report. That spiked up visitors to his site. Is that on purpose? Absolutely.
But are those visitors ‘quality traffic’? Yes because the ones who are interested in Mike’s report are those who are interested in Internet marketing. And Mike is promoting Internet marketing stuffs. That report helped to build Mike’s long term branding as a top Internet marketer.
So are you looking for quality traffic or quantity traffic? Are the strategies you are using congruent?
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