This post contains affiliate links.
I wrote an article on BlogEngage called Gauging the Value of Article Submission Directories that I want all of my fans to read and help vote up (Stumble, BlogEngage, Share on Facebook…etc).
This article is about determining which article submission directories are working for your site and focusing on leveraging the ones that work and improving traffic from the ones that aren’t working so well for your blog.
This article is follow up to that article and will talk about your website traffic being valuable. Too many times people just want traffic to their sites but don’t know what they want from the traffic when it arrives.
You want to convert traffic into more than just read and run users, you want to convert them into loyal fans and followers who will bookmark or subscribe to your site and come back daily. Ideally you want to convert "referral" traffic to eventually transform into "Direct" traffic which means the user directly came to your site and didn’t come from a link on another site.
High direct traffic is very important in showing how many people deliberately come to your site. These are your most loyal fans typically as they aren’t accidentally finding your site via a search or following it from a tweet or other shared link. These are the ones you need to keep as loyal fans and reward by providing high quality and consistent content as well as inviting to openly engage and comment.
You will start to recognize your regulars by seeing comments posted by the same people and you know that if they leave 2 or 3 comments in one week, they probably are active readers and followers of your site. Make sure you take the time to comment back, reply and keep them feeling the "connection" to the blog author.
Meanwhile, valuable is subjective. Some websites/blogs who sell products or services see value in "selling an affiliate product or even their own product". The sell is more important than building a casual reader and subscriber.
Others want to have readers and followers, while others still want a combination of both if possible. Typically you can only pitch and sell so much, unless you are trusted your sales pitches will be lost on your loyal fans who will just say things like "this is a great product" or encourage your sales, but won’t actually make any purchases themselves. Your sales are more likely to come from search traffic, this is statistically true as somebody who finds your site this way was looking for something.
Look at the traffic to your site, see how many comments are being left, if any sales are being done and if you see your direct visits increasing over time. Know that traffic exchange programs and traffic burst sites like StumbleUpon will bring in traffic, but this traffic may not be as valuable in that it doesn’t often convert to loyal readers or purchasers of products.
Remember to read my article on BlogEngage about which Article Submission Services work best and how to find out which ones will work for you.
-Justin Germino
WPX Support
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