Happy Tuesday everyone! Welcome back to the real world. Other than the wind (I keep telling myself the wind makes me super strong on my bike, though it doesn’t really help when you’re riding in it), we had a perfect weekend in Chicago. Hope you did, too!
I was catching up on my Google Reader on Friday night and I came across Scott Hepburn’s “Wanna Help a Fellow Blogger?” post. In it, he talks about ways we can each help drive blog traffic without using Twitter. GASP! Not using Twitter?! Is the world ending?
But…I agree. When we look at our referral sources on traffic, Twitter is number one. And it annoys the snot out of me. Why? Because that means our traffic is totally reliant on me and my network to get the blog posts retweeted every day. And why wouldn’t it be? I tweet the posts. I tweet our guest blogger’s posts. And I tweet blogs of people I respect and admire. So why would you go anywhere else to get the information? I make it too easy.
Twitter, however, is killing our bounce rates and it’s killing our subscriptions. On the flip side, though, our traffic is much larger than we planned and we’re enjoying great conversation among our community. I’m smarter and more open-minded because of the conversation you have here in the comments.
I still maintain Twitter is going to die (I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet) so we’re thinking of the future when I pose the question during every staff meeting, “What are we doing to drive traffic that isn’t reliant on Twitter?”
We are using other tools – StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook, for instance. But they don’t drive nearly as much traffic as Twitter. We don’t have the magic answer…yet. So help a fellow blogger out. What do you do to drive traffic, decrease your bounce rates, and increase your subscriptions?