Here is what I am thinking. I’m thinking that I have a general idea what kind of people visit my site. I have a target audience, I have a pretty specialized niche, and I am thinking I still don’t know who the heck visits my site. I have analytics, I have reader feedback, I can see your comments, but still, I don’t know what you really want. Nor will I really ever. So what am I going to do?

You May Think You Know Your Visitors

So right about here, you may be thinking that you know your visitors. I will now turn this around and say, if you really knew your visitors you would know that you really don’t know them at all.

Probably the best way to explain this is by example using the popular website YouTube. Tons of people love YouTube, and you can bet money that Google has all the demographics on their users. Now let’s say the most popular group is young teens looking for funny videos. Using the common blogger technique of writing only for your niche, and making just one post  day, imagine if YouTube followed this path. Could you imagine it being even a little bit popular if it only allowed one teenager a day to post his or hers funny video? The site would be dead. Even if it allowed all videos submitted for that demographic, YouTube will still not be what it is today. Google knows that other people, people they don’t suspect, might like the site as well. Or in other words, they know they don’t know their visitors.

So What is a Blogger that Wants Traffic To Do?

If you are a blogger like myself, I would imagine that you would like more visitors. You would probably like more subscribers as well. Are you going to submit 100,000 new posts a day so you can be huge like YouTube? No. You would probably like to stay on your favorite  blog topic as well, so writing about anything and everything is out as well.

Maybe it’s time to consider some realities. The first thing to know is that traffic is a numbers game. You need to know that some regulars will simply stop visiting your site all of the time, and if you want your site to grow you need to out pace that. The second reality is that if you are only posting once a day or less you could be boring you visitors to death, even if it’s on topic. Why? Because you don’t know your visitors. Apparently, neither did I until recently.

The reason you could be boring them, even while staying on topic, is because we are all different.  I have to give another example here. You  own a fruit stand. The visitors of your fruit stand love fruit and that is why they come to your store. If you only offer apples and oranges everyday, the banana guy is going to give up going to your store. You new your visitors were fruit lovers, you just didn’t know or think that some people might like different kinds of fruits. Maybe it’s time to up the inventory a little.

More Blogging

Understanding that WE (or at least me) don’t know our visitors, the only real way to keep a larger portion of them happy is by offering more variety, more content, and something they can bite into at least once a day. That is why you are going to start seeing more posts here on this site. I’m shooting for three every weekday, focusing my energy on the major draw to this site, its content.

What inspired all of this for me? The thought that if a reader likes my site, but found that the last few posts did not interest them a week could go by before they see one they like. The end result, they stop coming because my site because it doesn’t really interest them that much. If I produce at least three types of posts a day my chances of keeping them interested just went up substantially.

If you are not jazzed on posting more, then the only alternative is putting more time into each post making sure that the little content you do produce is so good that it draws visitors from other sites. What’s your game plan? Produce more, or produce better?

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