Ever ask yourself, what constitutes a good blog or what makes a blog healthy?
Amongst the hardcore geeks and tech weenies of the blogosphere you will hear all sorts of things like page views, uniques, rss subscribers or even the number of comments. Do any of them really matter?
This may sound cynical but I’m being deadly serious. Many people pine over things that don’t matter and overemphasize things that are actually quite irrelevant. Everything I mentioned above can easily be manipulated or inflated in numerous ways. Let me dig into this a bit, yes?
RSS
I described the RSS issue in this blogs last bloggery.
Page Views: Most blogs do not receive that many page views, however if new visitors come and they read your older material, it’s a good sign that they enjoyed your content.
Unique Visitors
Everyone is so caught up with uniques, frankly uniques don’t mean that much in my opinion. The reason being is if you are getting a lot of targeted traffic, it’s actually useless. You can get your pages stumbled but if the average time spent on the site is under 5 seconds, it makes no difference whether they came or not.
Considering most blogs do not even sell something or at most maybe have some adsense on the side, what is the point in having more people come to your site if they wont’ read it? Many people get caught up on this. I run a few websites and let me tell you, it is better to have 10 targeted uniques a day then 1000 totally unrelated. If that were not the case, all those “buy 100,000 uniques for $10″ offers would be amazing, regrettably they are not.
Comments
If you get REAL comments it’s a sign of a healthy blog but most aren’t. I’ve found the majority of websites in numerous niches get comments from OTHER PEOPLE in the niche trying to bolster traffic to their blog. That or it’s just a tight circle of dorky characters constantly commenting on the same blogs. Are these really comments? Sure to the naked eye they are but the motivations aren’t the same as a comment from someone who is just a reader and throwing in their $0.02 on the topic.
If you were obsessed with comments in some sort of odd way to make you feel better about your blogosphere existence, you could just go around writing the nicest things on everyone else in the niche and probably expect to get many comments back. This takes time however and what is really achieved?
Also remember that MOST people in this world are spectators. Why do you think sports are so popular and why do you think there are typically 10 people on the field at once with 50,000 in the stands and 50,000,000 at home in front of their TV? Ever thought about that? Probably not.
What is the sign of a healthy blog?
I my personal opinion I believe the number one indicator of the health of a blog is the number of returning visitors you get each day. If you get 1,000 uniques a day from some social media site and have less than 10 returning visitors, is your blog a success? What if you get 100 uniques a day with 30-50 returning visitors? If I were to buy a blog and know that they’d love my writing (ya I’m dreaming I know) I’d take the 2nd blog over the first in a heartbeat.
The point of this bloggery is just to think about how you are promoting your blog, what you are worrying bout and take some time to reflect on what really matters. Don’t get caught up in the hype of appearances. There are many blogs that look great but really aren’t that healthy.
Good day to you and keep blogging for the fun of it.
If you’re a blogger, I highly recommend you visit our blog forum and join the conversation. If you’d like to write for this blog, contact me on twitter or on the forum.
