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Do you know what the number 1 killer of startups is? Traffic.
Do you know why? It’s our constant fixation on generating and building traffic that ultimately kills a startup or prevents a blogger from writing full-time.
Here are some common mistakes entrepreneurs and bloggers make regarding traffic:
Think about it. How many internet startups get started without a clear business model? How many internet shows die because they never reached a huge amount of viewers? How many bloggers are afraid to make money w/ their blog because they feel they don’t have enough traffic?
Do you want to be a full-time blogger? Do you want to have a successful internet startup? STOP FOCUSING ON TRAFFIC!!!
Great, we’ve gotten that of the way now. So if you’re not focusing on traffic, then what should you be focusing on?
The internet startup should focus religiously on cultivating and maintaining current user relationships.
This does two very important things:
Do you know what I absolutely hate? I hate when AT&T, the cell phone provider I use, has fantastic promotions for first time customers, but completely neglects long time customers. The same exact thing applies to LA Fitness - my gym membership. LA Fitness has tons of promotions to get people to sign up, but has nothing for me, a 6 year member.
Do NOT become these companies. If you focus 100% of your energy on building a community for your website, then your members will do the marketing for you. Just take Twitter as the best example. Have you ever seen them market their product? NO WAY! All of their traffic has been from Tweeples blogging and evangelizing the site like crazy.
Contest and Prizes
Create a weekly contest where your members have to participate to win a cool prize like a free iPod or free Flip Cam. Get the company to sponsor the product so you don’t have to pay for it. When a member wins, make sure to get a picture of them, and put them on your website’s Hall of Fame so that they feel further attached to your website.
Unexpected Milestone
People absolutely LOVE surprises. Reward the devoted, hardcore people on your site by giving them an unexpected prize when they reach a certain milestone. If you’re an ecommerce website, give a surprise reward to someone who orders their 10th product from your website. If you’re a community based website, give an unexpected reward to someone who has reached 1,000 friends.
The point here is that if you give your diehard fans an unexpected reward, then they will tell your casual members about the potential rewards they could be receiving and thus have more active participation on your site.
I have done my share of SEO and strategic Stumbling. I’ll be perfectly honest with you, I have spikes in my traffic due to both, but rarely does my traffic significantly increase after the spike. Inflated traffic like Digg, Stumble, and from Google just do NOT stick.
I don’t want to give you the same boring advice like “write quality content” or “comment on other peoples’ blogs.” I’m sick of it.
If you want to take your mind off traffic and build a stronger community with your blog, do the following:
What I wrote above for Startups applies to Bloggers in terms of rewarding them. Use the Top Commentors Plugin to reward your readers who comment the most; occasionally give out prizes to your readers based on a contest you develop.
Feature your readers with an Interview
If one of your biggest fans has a great blog of their own, then invite them as a guest onto your blog and do a video interview with them. To make sure that the interview doesn’t bore your readers, make sure that the interview has a clear goal and objective. For example, if your blog is about fashion, feature a reader with a very cute fashion sense and talk about where you guys get the best deals and what to wear this coming season. If your readers can learn something valuable from the interview, then you should definitely do it.
Make introductions
You can safely assume that your blog readers share similar qualities. This means your blog readers would love to meet each other because people love to meet others of similar interest.
When appropriate, introduce one of your readers to another via Twitter. It’s quite simple actually; something like this would suffice:
@Yu-kai_Chou thx for the comment! Great ideas. Would love to introduce you to @Joseph_Yi. I think you guys would hit it off
Your readers will instantly become grateful to you and will not hesitate to introduce their network to your blog or Twitter.
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Traffic is never the answer. Focus on your current user base or readership and you will become much more successful.
This sounds a lot like Seth Godin's Tribes. All good advice though. As Brad Fallon put it, "we used to just think it was about traffic and conversion, but now we know there's a third leg--community."
Amen dude!
You hear about a lot of startups "buying" traffic or focusing all of their energy on SEO. But that model doesn't help you build a community. Putting all your emphasis on traffic will most likely turn everything you're trying to create into trash.
How does a blog make money without advertising or sponsorship? I've heard people call their blogs, their "business," but what's the revenue model other than advertising?
I see a blog as complementing an existing business, like a cake maker blogging about cakes and their readers getting hungry and buying them on the way home. Otherwise, I don't understand how a blog would work as a stand alone business.
Hey Dead,
Read this post to find out how to make money with your blog without using Google Adsense: http://www.junloayza.com/marketing/an-honest-take-on-making-money-online/
Hope it helps!
Hey Jun, this is a great post. Its so true that the most important people are your current customers or community or whatever you call them. Buying traffic is easy, but it gets you no where. Build a following, give them ways to love you and they will promote the hell out of you.
At some point you do need to be concerned with traffic, because you need to scale. But it has to be real, engaged traffic, not a random Digg or Stumble spike.
Just look at the Brazen Careerist community. No Google Advertisements in sight. It's all about community here. And this has quickly become a place where you want your blog posts featured. Very insightful post.
@Dead Hedge,
People like Steve Pavlina (www.stevepavlina.com) make money selling their book. As far as I can tell that's his only revenue stream off of the blog, granted it's available in bookstores as well.
A lot of it depends on what you blog about. The closer you hit people to shopping mode (like product reviews) the more likely they are to click off of your site via advertising or affiliate links. There are 6 figure bloggers like Lindsay at writingforyourwealth.com who use this model and maintain numerous product review sites. However, your "personal branding" blog isn't going to do squat because AdSense isn't going to pick up any relevant ads and the people there could care less anyway because they just came to view the content.
Blogging in and of itself isn't going to make you Silicon-Valley startup rich though.
Instead of focusing on what I had done professionally in the past, I focused on what I wanted to do in the future. More...
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