Since I’ve been blogging more recently, I’ve seen a spike in traffic.

There’s nothing special I’ve been doing outside of what I normally do when blogging.  It’s just the consistency of pushing out relevant content that really matters.

If you’re a blogger, there’s a frustrating conversion rate between visitors and commenters .  The ratio can be a 100 to 1 (this can also be true on Facebook and Twitter).  This is so true that I can lay down a challenge to prove me wrong.

There are also other levels of interest here as to who is actually reading you’re site, participating, and who is bouncing off.  If you have a good monitoring program (Google Analytics), you can get a grip on this situation.  With GA, you will have an insight on your site’s visitor’s habits, such as New Visits percentage, Bounce Rate percentage, Pages Per Visit and Time on Site.

Other tools, such as Content and popular blog posts can help narrow down what is important to your readers.

How do you engage your audience?  Any tips?

There’s a common piece of advice to “fish where the fish are.”  While no doubt this is a great short term strategy, but eventually the resource will dry up.  Why?  Because, soon enough everyone will start fishing in the same spot!

There’s some recent data released by HitWise that shows Facebook touting 50% of web visits and Twitter only showing 1% which may cause people to run to Facebook in crowds.  (Look at my other post from today for technical reasons why this data is not reliable.)

1.	Facebook	50.15%
2.	YouTube	15.21%
3.	MySpace	15.08%
4.	Tagged	1.16%
5.	Twitter	1.14%

So, you look at the above chart and see the heavy usage of Facebook, and you run off to establish your presence.  What’s wrong with that, you may ask…you reason: most of the traffic is there, so I want to go where I will have more return.

Personally, I don’t believe in chasing traffic.  I believe in making traffic, come to me.  Chasing traffic will drive you nuts (traffic is the web currency equivalent of money).  Rather, identify your strengths, develop what makes you unique, create value and as a side effect traffic will follow.

Promoting and networking are fine, but without taking a self inventory and honing your assets you’ll never break away from the crowd.  You may reap the rewards of hard work, but you’ll won’t make YOUR mark or unique contribution.

If you must go or do what others are doing, then it’s okay to do so for a time.  However, identify the time to breakaway and make your own inroads, plans, conclusions, methods, philosophy…make your own rules.  You’ll never have to worry about it being too crowded, because no one can ever do what you do best – and that’s being you!

Being your true self, is the key to generating traffic.

What do you think?  Am I wrong…half wrong – half right?  How do you generate lasting traffic?

The recent data by HitWise that rated social networking sites, ranks Facebook as #1 with 50% traffic, and Twitter as #5 with a mere 1% is a perfect example of a data presented at a certain level of truth, leaving questions at all other levels.

1.	Facebook	50.15%
2.	YouTube	15.21%
3.	MySpace	15.08%
4.	Tagged	1.16%
5.	Twitter	1.14%

Here are the problems:

1. What counts as a visit on Facebook?  (Ex: If you click through 50 profiles, does that count as 50 visits?)
2. Twitter users for the most part use 3rd party applications to manage their accounts such as Seesmic Desktop and Hootsuite, not to mention mobile device access.  Surely, this type of access is not counted as a “visit.”
3. There are other uses for twitter such as search (again 3rd party apps can come into play), or just sit and watch your custom “lists” or groups and use them as a news feed – “visits” here do not account for this invaluable feature.
4. The specialized niches that each network serves (think LinkedIn), is severely undervalued by presenting this data as meaningful.
5. What type of traffic are going to these sites?  What are they doing there?  How is this important to me or my business?

Each point begs pertinent questions – what is the value of other networks?  Are visits the measure of usefulness?  How are the sites used?  Who is visiting these sites and what are they doing?  Nothing outlined by HitWise, comes close to providing answers.

The web is no different than any terrain – the more you know, the better you can use it to your advantage.  Thinking through what is presented here, we come to important conclusions – this is called being media literate – and can leverage the information in our favor.

Did you initially interpret the data as I did…that is, Facebook rules?

(In a little while, I’ll be posting another piece that uses the same data above. However, the discussion is about why you should not chase traffic, but make it come to you.)