A few weeks have passed and I’ve actually gotten some traffic.
With Google Analytics, there is a statistic called the “Bounce Rate.” This depicts how quickly visitors come to your site and instantly bounce away — i.e. do they get to your site and instantly click the back arrow, close the page, or navigate somewhere else without reading or interacting with your site.
A bounce rate of 100% tells you that either everyone visiting your site is a bot/web crawler, or that your content or layout is so terrible that it repels viewers away instantly when they get there. My goal is consistent traffic with a bounce rate of less than 60%. I’m not sure if that’s particularly desirable, but I think it ensures that the readers who do decide to stay, are well-targeted and interested in my content.
I’ve only had about 10 unique viewers, which is pretty abysmal. The bounce rate is about 85%. I’ve had a few page clicks into a handful of different articles, but the dwell-time on each page is pretty low.
I attribute this to a few things: first and foremost that I don’t have a whole ton of content yet. There is little history or chronology to my blog yet. The content I do have (I feel, anyway) is useful, readable and relevant. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it doesn’t need to be.
I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel with my blog. I’m just trying to people with similar interests something to read and possibly benefit from.
It’s tempting, as a blogger, to write content around your products/advertisements, but I think a blogger with integrity should cater advertisements to their content instead. This ensures content is authentic, and I think authentic content is more useful to readers and less like click-bait.
As far as click-bait goes… you can’t argue that it’s not effective. If I find pictures of big-breasted women and link to my site from Pinterest, I’m sure I’ll get a ton of readers. I’ll probably even get some targeted, relevant ones. But it will be at the cost of my integrity. Now maybe my integrity does have a price, but I haven’t found it just yet.
For now my goal is to just stay the course and continue to write content as I come up with it. I’m showing up on several search results, and am hoping that continues to grow.