How Much Traffic Is Good Traffic?
You’ve installed Google Analytics or you are using Sitemeter to look at your traffic stats. But how do you know that you are getting good traffic?
There are a number of indicators. Traffic source is one indicator, but you should also judge your traffic numbers by how old your own blog is and what your competitive benchmark is. Another thing to look at is the keywords people use to find your blog organically.
I’ve had blogs that attracted 3,000 readers after six months and some that have attracted 3,000 visitors in the first month with minimal marketing efforts. That as a lot to do with niche. If your blog is in a popular niche then you could get a flood of huge traffic quickly. A small niche blog might actually be doing well with modest traffic. That’s why it helps to know your niche.
But what about those stats? Your primary traffic sources should be organic and referrals. Take a look at your referral stats to see who is referring you. Is it social networking sites like StumbleUpon? You might get a lot of traffic from those types of general topic communities but your traffic may not be targeted. On the other hand, if your referral traffic is coming from another site or blog within your niche then you can bet that it is targeted traffic.
Organic traffic is usually targeted to your niche. Those are people who found you through an organic search engine search. Check your keywords to see which phrases people are finding you for. If there are any oddball phrases not related to your niche, you might want to find out which blog post generated those and stay away from blogging on that topic. But you may use that strategy also to draw in traffic on a general search term not related to your niche by blogging outside of your niche. If you have an art or entertainment blog, a political blog, or another type of blog that might appeal to a general audience or a broad cross section of people then that might be a valuable way to blog if you don’t overdo it.
One other thing you should be doing with your analytics package is looking at benchmarks. A benchmark is a rolled up stats that measures what other blogs in your niche are doing compositely. For instance, if there are 100 blogs in your niche then the benchmark stats will take the average or mean of those and compare them to yours so that you can see how you fare against the competition generally.
