Is your blog inviting?

People like to hang out where they feel welcome and where other people gather. That’s why most people prefer cafés to caves. (But you knew that, right?)

The same goes for blogs. Visitors arrive at your blog, take a quick look – and decide whether to hang out or leave. The way bloggers think about visitors is by measuring traffic and conversion.

Traffic is the number of people visiting your blog. Conversion relates to whether your visitors take action, once they’re on your blog.

To grow your blog, you need two things: traffic and conversion.

Let’s take a look at both these elements in turn.

Traffic

Traffic means people visiting your blog. Keep in mind that there are three kinds of traffic: organic traffic, referred traffic and direct traffic. Each of these different groups of visitors comes with a particular set of expectations. And each kind of traffic needs a particular approach in order to tap into it.

• Direct Traffic

Direct traffic refers to people who come directly to your blog because they know and trust your blog. Here is an example:

This kind of traffic is called Direct Traffic. In some ways, it’s your best kind of traffic because it’s made up of your loyal readers who may want to leave a comment and are keen to support you and your blog.

However, they won’t necessarily want to buy anything from you, because they don’t arrive at your blog with a burning question or desire.

• Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is used to describe visitors to your site who come from direct links on other websites or through social media. Here is an example:

John sees a link to your blog on one of his favorite blogs. Maybe he also saw a link to a post of yours on social media. He decides to take a look.

This kind of traffic is called Referral Traffic. These visitors are likely to become subscribers because your blog has been endorsed by someone they respect. There are some simple things you can do to encourage referred traffic. For example, you need to have share buttons at the bottom of each post so that readers can easily share the post with others through social media.

• Organic Traffic

This refers to the traffic that arrives at your blog through people searching for topics in Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and so on. At first, this kind of traffic will be quite low, but it will become significant over time.

Let’s imagine a reader called Mandy. She wants to know something, so she searches on Google. One of the options Google serves up is a post from your blog. Mandy clicks on the link to see if you can give her an answer.

This kind of traffic is called Organic Traffic. These readers come to your blog post because your headline and snippet of content seem to promise them the answers they are looking for.

I’m sure you can imagine that visitors who come to your blog via Organic Traffic are potential buyers (if you have a product to offer). They have already arrived on your blog seeking something that will help them, and are motivated buyers.

Organic traffic happens automatically over time. However, there are also ways to optimize posts so that they rank high in Search Engines. This is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and is a way to divert some of the huge Internet traffic to particular posts on your site.

Conversion

Traffic is good. But just traffic alone is worthless. You could get an army of visitors traipsing through your blog, but if they don’t take action, they’ll leave and most likely never return. If that’s the case, you are left with nothing to show for the traffic. Here is what needs to happen:

You need to convert traffic.

While the visitors are on your blog, you want them to hang out, read one or more posts, and then subscribe. The reason you want them to subscribe is that you can then start creating a relationship with subscribers, and ultimately also sell them products that you create or endorse.

Why you need to prepare your blog for traffic

There are some things you want to have on your blog before you start to look for traffic. Because if some basic things are not in place on your blog when people arrive on it, you could miss out on getting that person to come back again. You may also miss the opportunity of getting that person to pass on your content and share it with others.

Here is a simple truth …

Readers only subscribe if they enjoy hanging out on your blog.

In order to make your blog inviting, you need to understand and implement the five foundations of blog growth, which we’ll take a look at later in this module.

Author: A-List Team