About two months ago, I sat down with a piece of paper, and drew three sqaures on the piece of paper. The piece of paper was entitled “traffic studies and human involvement”. My aim was to come up with three ideas, whether they were unique or recycled ideas, so that I could study website traffic, but more importantly, I wanted to try an get into the mind of the average human who surfs around the Internet ‘aimlessly’. The sites were coded, designed and online a few days later, and my studies started immediately. I now have a A3 piece of paper with various observations jotted down all over it. After sitting with the messy A3 page, I took an A4 page and proceeded to summarize my findings. I am not going to give a complete break down on everything I have observed yet, as I am still compiling a few items, but I want to share one topic specifically, which relates to website traffic, focusing mainly on blogs and human involvement..

I have noticed that blogs usually start with a slight boom, as an author releases a site to the public, the authors interest is large, and a great deal of time is spent spreading the word, emailing friends, submitting to search engines, and any other ’spam’ methods he/she requires (I don’t take kindly to people who spam, but you got to do what you got to do, I guess *shrug*). Anyway, this initial burst of traffic results in hundreds (hopefully) of unique hits to your website, and this fuels more interest in the blogger. The next step is to keep up the writing and content movement, but what often happens is that the spreading of the website dies somewhat, and the unique hits start to decrease, but the number of revisiting readers increases slightly. Over another period of time, let’s say around two to three weeks, traffic seems alright, but starts to decrease slightly, in both cases: unique visits and revisits. At this point, a blogger would usually try pushing again, but if this does not result in success, many people would give up, and the interest in the blog could easily fall away. This point is crucial for any blogger, people visit a website, and if they are interested in the material on the website, hopefully they will return again, but in most cases they will only return again if they see a link to your website, this would trigger the memory (MyBlogLog’s images play a great role in this recognition structure) and they would pop on over again. If this returning visitor now sees that many other people are interested in the site, the chances are that they would become a regular reader on the website, sign up for your newsletter or even subscribe to your RSS feed..

The point which I am trying to make is that when your hits start dropping, carry on writing your content, and carry on pushing the website, and spreading the word. People are like sheep, once they see that many other people are interested in the material on the website, it’s as though they manage to lose a subconscious insecurity and start allowing themselves to follow your advice. When people leave comments on your website, reply to them, try to start a discussion, reply to a post with a question - hopefully the initial comment poster will return, read the question and comment again, which is the beginning of a possible discussion, where other users might get the urge to share their opinion. Set up a system where users can send the article link they enojyed to another user. All of this said, it shows how the bigger websites, just keep getting bigger and bigger in terms of traffic, regular readers, and regular interactors.

‘You get out, what you put it’ - keep pushing your blog, keep rotating that content, and don’t give up if things seem to be dying, people will return when they recognise your link. Of course, you need to write good, interesting content.

Thanks to Google Analytics and Statcounter for your fantastic statistical software!