Blogging also takes a lot of time. You will spend hours writing blog posts, editing images, responding to comments and making sure your blog is running smoothly. Or at least I hope you are doing that.

I talk about monitoring your website all the time. If you don’t know where your visitors are coming from, what they are doing on your website and why they are leaving, your blog will not grow. I recently worked on a website that was 2 years old. It averages 8 visits a day over the last month.

Wow, a 2 year old website getting 8 visitors a day. That is almost impossible to do. You really have to try to NOT get traffic over that period of time. The reason why this is impossible to do is because Google picks up on all your website content and from that day on, your pages are in the search engines and people will find them and visit your website… Or will they?

Have you heard the term “Real-time” lately? It’s a buzz word that describes the current state of the Internet. We want everything to be real-time. Our news, our blogs, our TV, everything. Twitter handles most of our real-time information but Google is not far behind. The  problem with “real-time” for content creators is that it affects search results much faster then before.

If you monitor your website traffic, you will know that a tweet will get the most traffic within 10 minutes. After 24hrs the tweet is all but a memory. You can every retweet something an hour after the first tweet and nobody will notice. The same is happening with your content in the search engines

The sad truth is, most of the content and blog posts you spend hours creating get no traffic a few days after your post them.

Below is an example of a recent blog post from my blog

As you can see, it’s not getting any traffic anymore… Most posts are like this

Here is an example of a post that gets hits regularly

That’s more like it… You want to these types of posts in your archive. Imagine a hundred pages like this providing traffic to your website. Unfortunately, only about 10% of your posts will continue to grab visitors, so do the math… That would be 1,000 blogs posts or so. that’s a lot of work!

Of course there are some ways to increase your odds for success.

1. Create content that is timeless. I think there are 2 strategies when blogging. Blog a lot about current “real-time” events or blog about things that will be searched for over and over.  If you blog about current news, you will get more hits right away, but in the long run your posts will fade away. On the other hand, you can create educational posts or personal posts that will get searched for often and for a long time. I personally think there is too much work to create real time content. You have to blog all day to maintain high traffic numbers. This why blogs like this are made of groups of bloggers.
2. If you plan to have posts in the search engines, make sure they have the proper keyword density. Make sure people will be able to find them. Don’t forget the images in the posts. Google image search is a wonderful tool to generate traffic.
3. Try to bring older posts back to life. Use WordPress plugins to show related content or most popular posts from months ago. Retweet your archive. Like I said before, even if you tweeted it a month ago, nobody will remember.
4. Repost it. First check your stats and if it is truly dead. If you think the information is timeless, dust it off, re-word it and re-post it. Again, nobody will know.
5. Use older posts that are dead on article marketing websites. One thing to remember is that even if the post is dead, it’s probably in the search engines. Most article website don’t want duplicate content. First reword it, then submit it. You can provide a link back to the original post too… That will make a nice backlink since all the content will be related.

Bottom line get creative. If you have writers block, look to your old content to see if you can refresh it and grow your website traffic without having to work harder then you have to.

Action Plan

Start with a blog audit. Go to Google analytics and find the posts that are dead. See what keywords were used to find the posts and then use one of the ideas above to get that content back to life.

So you have a strategy for archived content? Please share with our readers

Your daily blog traffic will equal your number of blog posts

Do you check Google analytics every few hours? almost as much as you check email? Don’t worry, you’re not alone, many bloggers care about their website traffic because website traffic equals website revenue. There is nothing worse then spending hours writing a killer blog post only to have it evaporate in the black hole of the blogosphere.

I’ll be honest, I’m a pageview whore…

I check GA (Google Analytics) all the time. I wish they made a real-time Google analytics widgets for my desktop for all my websites. One thing I’ve noticed is that there are certain factors that effect your website traffic. I can’t give you a magic bullet to get crazy traffic, but I can tell you that blog posts equal linear traffic.

I’ve noticed that the typical blog posts gets a nominal amount traffic in the long tail of blog posts. Chris Anderson (wired magazine) coined the term long tail

It covered how the media and entertainment industries will succeed not by pushing only mass market hits that are popular among many but by also mining the “long tail” of interest among a few in less-popular books, songs, movies and more.
Source: Searches long tail

You probably don’t have a popular blog, meaning your blog gets 100K hits a months. Most of us don’t, so we live in a rat race to hit up long tail searches. Searches that have 5 or more words in the query.

The odds for generating large amounts of traffic are very, very slim if you rely on blog content.

I see so many new bloggers say they want to blog more, but does that really work? The answer is no. Why write more blog posts if your traffic will only increase by one visitor a day per blog post.

You have to figure out how to get more traffic to your blog without blogging.

Look at blogs that have 1 million page views a month. Do they have 1 million blog posts? Of course not. Look at blogs that get 5,000 visitors a month, do they have 5,000 blog posts… probably not.

You need to find ways to interact with the community, especially now that blogging backlinks are dead, and the social network is all the rage.

this screams, I have absolutely no idea what internet marketing or social media is all about. If you follow this plan you will not be blogging in June of 2010.

Here is the secret, instead of saying “I’m going to blog more” or “I’m going to blog everyday”, change your mindset and say “I’m going to get 10 new subscribers every week”. Do you see the difference?

One is goal oriented and one is task oriented

Goal oriented let’s you forget about the minuscule tasks it takes to reach a goal while task oriented puts all the focus on the little things that take up all your time. a few months later your hitting all your tasks but none of the results are manifesting. Why is that? It’s because as soon as you finish a task your done, there is no big picture, there is no reason, you just know that you have to do something.

What’s more important a blog? that has 10 times more content then all the other blogs in the same topic, or the blog that has the most readers, subscribers and fans. Content and fans do not go hand in hand. people don’t read blogs for a lot of content, they read it for information, ideas, views that they will not get anywhere else.

So, really, I think blogging is a great idea, just make sure you have your priorities set straight on why you are blogging at all.

If you really want my honest opinion about blogging, especially if you don’t have a blog and want to start one now, would be to really think about upcoming forms of media… most notably, video. I’ll be blogging about this soon, but the way we consume information is moving from text to video. I’m getting on the video bandwagon. I got a new pocket cam coming in about a week, and vlogging is my #1 reason why I got it.