Do people REALLY read your blog
Over the past year my websites have had the good fortune to be mentioned on a lot of very high traffic blogs. The likes of Engadget, Gizmodo, CrunchGear, TechCrunch are some of the larger ones but since BlogStorm launched it has attracted links from loads of search related blogs around the 1,000 to 10,000 RSS reader mark.
The thing that always amazes me is the low level of traffic that blogs can send you. For instance Engadget has 600,000 RSS readers and normally sends about 1,000 visitors, TechCrunch has 250,000 readers and sends about 2,000 visitors, even when they write an entire post about your site.
Some of the search blogs that have linked to BlogStorm have thousands of readers and only sent a handful of visitors.
I know you are probably thinking that most people read these blogs using RSS readers but that would still cause a spike in traffic from people clicking through from their reader.
Obviously I love receiving any amount traffic and links but it just goes to show that just because a blog has 600,000 readers it doesn’t mean they actually read it, the only way to judge the real readership is by looking at the number of comments each post is getting.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 8 comments below, or add your own!
I have often thought about the this topic myself. Being a relatively new blogger, trying to generate a bit of traffic and (more importantly) readership is quite the challenge these days.
I am finding that a more blog specific analytical tool like getclicky.com is useful in giving me a true indication of my blog’s progress.
getclicky has a feature called \’spy\’ which allows me to view my visitors and their actions in real time, thus providing real transparency in the actual experience my visitors are having
Number of comments can’t be used to judge a blog’s readership in my opinion. Some blogs may have a lot of readers but they are not the commenting type.
I don’t think comments is really an accurate measure of readership either. The more controversially someone writes or the more low level the content is the more comments it typically gets.
Thanks for the feedback.
I suppose one of the problems with using comments is that each blog has such a variety of commenting systems. Some make it easy for readers to comment and some make the comments stand out more than others. With the advent of dofollow there is more incentive for readers to comment on some blogs than others as well.
I still believe that in general the number of visitors you can expect to receive after being linked from a blog is related in some way to the number of comments the blog receives. Clearly there are exceptions.
I think that the number of visitors a blog sends is inversely proportional to the number of posts a day it has. For example, a blog like Mashable, although it has 170K subscribers has so many posts that the link gets lost among the noise. In my experience, it’s better to get a backlink from a lower traffic blog that only has 1-2 posts a day- then you’re not competing for attention with the 20+ other sites TechCrunch wrote about that day.
I would agree that you can’t really judge the comments. We recently launched http://grapethinking.com, which is based around the wine industry, reviews, and marketing. Our traffic (though still not that great) has increased drastically over the past few months, and while we have seen a somewhat proportionate change in comments, it is still not reflective of our readership, as most people just view our content and leave.
i have just launched my own website http://www.gadget-mania.co.uk and have been commenting on gadget bloggs but im never sure if they are dofollow or nofollow,is there any way i can find out? i have tried google with no success
Hi Patrick, That is the painful honest truth. comments are the surefire way to know if what you’re writing about is of any interest to your readers, that’s why I really try to write about topics that I have a genuine interest in and work on making it as intriguing as possible to keep my readers engaged.