Posts Tagged ‘web traffic’
It’s not about you
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
A friend of mine recently sent me a great article by Joel Spolsky on why he was shutting down his blog. It appears Joel had great success in creating a blog about programming but he felt it was time to focus his time on taking his business to the next level. As he prepares to shut down the blog, he reflected back on what made the blog such a great tool in growing his business.
What Joel did, without even trying to, was create a community of programmers that were highly interested in his product. He did this by not focusing on himself or his company but rather the industry as a whole. This allowed him to draw-in over a million unique visitors a month that may have otherwise not had an interest in his company. While he admitted it was hard to not give into the impulse of self-promotion, he saw it as the key to his success.
As Joel shuts down his blog, he does so having used it to grow his company from a single person, bootstrap company, to over 30 employees and millions in revenue. Not bad for a man with a vision and a blog. What interested me in the story though was HOW he did it. Time and time again he pointed out that the only reason why the blog worked was because he didn’t focus on himself or his company, only on his industry.
This is an important lesson to take away. Even as a seasoned blogger I sometimes succumb to the temptation to self-promote, although the times are few and far between, they show how easy it is to do. All too often I run across blogs that have aired on the side of self-promotion and they immediately seal their fate that I will not return. Even if the writer is amazing, witty and captures my attention, it is not worth sifting through the sales pitch.
This is even a problem that I will run into with my clients. They will love the traffic and response they are getting and decide they want to through in a quick pitch for one of their products or services. I try to warn them against the move but it is ultimately their blog and their company. And although the results of this quick pitch might not be immediately felt, it is evident that repeated self-promotion leads to stagnated growth. Even an expert in growing a blog’s reach, like me, can do little if the content is not what people are looking for.
I guess my mom was right; it’s not all about me.
Tags: advertising, blog, business, communication, social media, social networking, strategy, web traffic
Posted in Observations, social media | No Comments »
Want to drive traffic to your website?
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Alright, I’m not one for self promotion but a client of mine sent me this graph and even I was impressed. As you can see, we started their social media campaign at the beginning of August and then the report was run on October 7th.
I don’t consider website traffic to be the only key to a successful social media campaign but if you are looking to drive traffic to your site, keep this in mind:
What I found really interesting was that the first 7 days of October already received more hits than every month before the campaign started. Pretty cool!
Tags: advertising, social media, web traffic, website
Posted in social media | 1 Comment »