Forget Traffic: It's Subscribers You Want

I've never been obsessed with page views, search engine optimization, page ranking and other stats like the tech people talk about. I'm a firm believer in organic search results based on a few key best practices: If you write frequently about problems and solutions that your people are interested in, they should be able to find you.

Yesterday Denise and I interviewed Phil Hollows, founder of FeedBlitz.com, the leading blog to email provider about new services they're offering in the realm of newsletter and content distribution. FeedBlitz is rolling out some great new free features for marketing your business.

They now offer content distribution services, regardless if the content comes from a blog. And they distribute your content to a wide variety of means including email, Skype, IM and Twitter. Feedblitz provides data capture and list segmentation.

Then Brian Clark repeats what we've been saying all along: it's not traffic you need to be concerned about, it's subscribers. People who subscribe are telling you they're interested and want you to send them more information.

In a post titled How to Stop Worrying About Google Brian says, "I’ve said it from the very beginning here at Copyblogger—the most important thing to focus on is not page views or search traffic. Focus instead on subscribers.

"Getting someone to voluntarily pay attention to you over time is the greatest gift you can get as an online publisher. Do everything you can to get more subscribers, and quit trying to please Google."

Are you offering FeedBlitz subscription services on your blog? You should. Then look into how you can also use their services to send out a newsletter, a mini-ecourse, and promotional messages.

One last thing: if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to this blog to get updates! Use the form in the upper left hand corner to enter your email address.

NOTE: you can get access to the audio program with Phil Hollows with membership in our Blogging and Beyond Mentor Program. Click here for details.

Comments

[Gaje Master]

This does make sense. I was trying to build up the traffic and my rankings when I should have been focused on the subscribers, their the ones who will continue to read your work and probably the ones who will help to get your name out there. Thanks for the info.

[Charlotte]

You mean I can stop obsessing about my page views? Thank you! It's a whole new world!

Thanks for this info, I'm not very familiar with Feedblitz but I'll check into it now.

[Mandy]

You're right, after all who are we writing our blogs for in the first place - the readers. And the more of them we can impress enough to come back then the better we will do.

I've never understood all this page rank and page views etc very well, it's all computers deciding how good my blog is from a formula they use. I would rather have real people vote for my blog by reading and becoming a subscriber.

I don't know much about Feedblitz though just that it has something to do with Feedburner? I will have to look into it, how does it compare with Aweber?