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What matters to you the most? Traffic, comments, shares, or something else?

November 8, 2012 9 Comments

My previous post was titled The Philosophical Origins of Triberr.

  • I KNEW that was a terrible headline for people to see in their Twitter stream, or in their Facebook timeline.
  • I KNEW that most people will NOT look at that and think “oh my…I just have to bone up on my philosophy and Triberr connection.”

I even opened that post by saying “You want to make sure no one reads your blog post? Put the word “philosophy” in the title.”

To put it simply, that post was of interest to very, very small number of people. So, what happened?

What happened when I essentially decided to publish something that implicitly rejects almost EVERYONE who comes across it?

MAGIC! That’s what.

The Benefits of Going Rogue

Check out this screen shot and then let’s take a look at it together to see what we can gleam from the data,

There are 4 posts in that screen shot, and two of them are pretty standard stuff.

I would say those two posts show a pretty standard number of shares (190 and 192 respectively). And the click-through rates are pretty standard as well (701 and 873 visits respectively).

A Case Against Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, G+, and Triberr is a bit of an outlier, at a first glance.

  • 217 shares (slightly higher than normal),
  • and 1005 clicks (much higher than normal).

Here’s the thing, tho. You put words like “Twitter” and “Facebook” in your headline, and they are bound to spread across those respective networks. I knew that headline would do well.

But what is truly interesting to me is The Philosophical Origins of Triberr.

In 24 Hours

The screenshot above was taken approximately 24 hours after the post has been published.

I am sure it will be shared some more, so the 64 shares will probably land somewhere in the usual range of 150-200 shares.

The clicks on that post are ridiculously low. 64 shares, and 84 visits? Thats basically one visit per share. And that is very, very low. BUT!

Here is the kicker. Out of 84 visits, there are 22 comments. Some of those comments are mine, but still.

In my experience, it takes approximately 100 people to visit your blog in order for one of them to leave a comment. And that’s under ideal conditions. So, 22 comments out of 84 visits is HUGE.

Conclusion 

You want that much coveted engagement from your readers? Reject 99.9% of everyone else.

Bloggers often try to write too generally and in a way that it’s very inclusive. You’ll know you’re writing like this if your hope is that your post will appeal to everyone. Try something else instead.

Try rejecting -implicitly or explicitly- almost everyone. Better still, write your post with only one person in mind.

Your traffic will be shit. Your stats will take a hit. But who cares? You don’t measure success in traffic, do you? I know I don’t.

One of my measures of a successful post is engagement (and that mostly means comments).

So, by the standards that matter to me, The Philosophical Origins of Triberr post has done much, much better than A Case Against Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, G+, and Triberr. Even tho by click-through rates and traffic it has done much, much worse.

What matters to you the most? Traffic, comments, shares, or something else?

 

Creative Blogging, CREATIVITY
  • http://www.clichegames.com Anthony

    Good to be reminded to think about what’s important.

  • http://impactreputation.com/ Mindy Koch

    I find it interesting that you can predict which posts will blow up and which ones will be less shared. Very, very interesting!!

    • http://twitter.com/dinodogan Dino Dogan

      ya…totally easy. Some posts are just viral (or at least bacterial) like that :-)

      • http://twitter.com/Yogizilla Yomar Lopez

        Here’s what I find the easy formula to be: write about what no one else is writing about and write about it passionately and authentically. On the flip side, if you’re more of the technical or SEO-inclined content marketer, there’s always keywords that start trending up with little or no competition. If you create content around those before anyone else does, it can be CRAZY!

        I remember re-blogging a post about a zombie-themed video game for the Android about a year ago. I posted it to one of my lesser-known blogs. Rather than just rehashing the same content, I shared my own take on the game. Threw in first impressions, the few third-party reviews and quotes I found, and some related content.

        In less than an hour, the post had 7K views and, by the end of the day, it hit 20K. I got super-duper stoked! Tons of shares went buzzing around. Got some new followers, subscribers, and followers out of it.. Not too many comments, especially not as many as one would expect from that sort of surge in traffic.

        The cool part is that the developers ended up reaching out to me. They wanted some help with marketing but then they had some budget issues or something.. Typically fly-by-night startup stuff. Sucked but it was cool that an unexpected authentic post I wrote just because I wanted to caught on like that.

        I’ll tell you this much: it’s much easier to be creative when you just follow prompts instead of plans. 8)

  • http://www.brightcube.ca/ Dave Gallant

    I agree with the notion of rejecting 99%. When I started blogging in 2008, that was my mindset. Then, for awhile, I lost touch. I’d like to think I’m back to where I was in 2008 now. I hate putting out generic, bs, traffic driving stuff. Not that I don’t like traffic, but I rather have it mean something. So now, I need to be inspired to write, and often times is happens when I want to rant :P

    Thanks for this post Dino. It validation for me.

    • http://twitter.com/dinodogan Dino Dogan

      Thnx Dave,

      One of my fav things to shit on is traffic. There is so much focus on traffic, and yet, traffic is only good because it brings attention. If we could have attention without traffic, it would actually cost us less (bandwidth, and other server resources).

      And then not even all attention is the right kind of attention. Or from the right person(s).

      It’s important not to get lost in all that nonsense and focus on what matters. The impact you make on the world around you. BAM! Thats right. I just said that shit :-)

  • http://www.solitarymama.com/ Christina Majaski

    I think I’m going to try “The Philosophy of Having Sex on Facebook”. How do you think that would go?

    • http://twitter.com/dinodogan Dino Dogan

      Like gangbusters. Especially since the author is a girl. I’d read that shit :-)

      • http://twitter.com/Yogizilla Yomar Lopez

        Would this be a touch-enabled Facebook app? That’d be revolutionary! Hmmm, would that be considered eroge? That word looks funny when you read it in English. o_O