A Different Approach

In doing the redesign - which is still underway (after a few missteps with the blogs, I decided to give them all a month or so in order to gauge performance and so forth before moving forward) - I have been very involved in the technical aspects of the site and blogs and I've come to some definite conclusions, which I thought some of you might be interested in.

We used to draw a lot of comments - I could count on at least 2-3 comments everyday about six months ago or thereabouts - before the Google PR Spanking, and now not so much. We also used to average about 100 visitors a day, which is pretty darned respectable. There is no denying the Google Spanking hurt us, but it isn't just because it made us harder to find in the Google engine. A big part of it has to do with the fact that a lot of the commenters run their own blogs and their blogs were spanked as well, so - like myself - they've had to invest even more time and energy into their own work to accommodate the spanking and simply don't have time anymore.

Now, there are all sorts of "tips and tricks" to getting more visitors, getting more visitors to comment, optimizing for search engines (SEO), and more, and I have read a lot of it and applied some. And that's what this post is all about.

I learned very early-on that while many of these "tricks and tips" did result in more visitors, they were basically "hollow clicks." Obviously, people came to the site, but they didn't stay and they didn't even bother to look around, so what's the point? Sure, it sounds nice to say, "My site gets 100 hits a day," but what you're not saying is, "But only about ¹/₃ of them actually look at it." And what you're not saying is, in this case, far more important.

I have always approached every project of mine with the precept of "timelessness" firmly in mind. I am not interested in doing anything "timely," because "timely" is just a synonym for "fad." I could spend n hours working on something timely and make $x for doing it, but y years down the road, the entire project will be so dated that it will be embarrassing and harmful to my reputation. A few more years and it becomes "classic" or "retro," but it's still dated. While I like some dated things, I do not want to knowingly produce any; I seek to produce content that will be at least as relevant 10 years from now as it is today, even if it is only relevant then because of what it tells the reader about now. That's one of the reasons I covered the Paris Hilton jail thing here: it is important to the current celebrity-obsessed culture and even though most people under 20 (hopefully) won't know who Paris Hilton is a decade from now, they will definitely find the coverage interesting because of what it says about today. It says something about today's values and morès and it sheds light on everything else on this Americana blog!

That being said, pulling every SEO trick in order to dominate the search results and pull in a load of "empty visits" is just wasted effort. At this time, The Rundown averages about 50-60 hits/day, the majority of which spend at least 1:30 minutes on the blog. That may seem pretty paltry to you, but it's not; that's better than what we were getting when we had 100 hits/day and only 30 of you were spending more than 0:01 seconds reading! Add to that a steady base of 30-40 subscribers and you see that the numbers are not only roughly the same as before the Google PR slap, but we are reaching people who actually read The Rundown!

Actually, while hurting was the primary reason I was gone a week or so back, I also wanted to see how it would affect the numbers. I am going to have to have surgery on my wrist (outpatient, I'm pretty sure) and will definitely be out for a few days then, and so I knew that if things weren't stable enough, I was going to have to beg for guest-bloggers and guest-bloggers suck because they hardly ever come through. I'm happy to report that not only did the numbers maintain, the subscription base maintained, and when I returned, hits doubled! (They're back to normal now.)

I could give my Sally Field, "You really like me!" speech, but the truth is that we are finally achieving the status I was always looking to cull: that of a respectable resource for commentary and op-ed "news" on comic books, the comic book industry, gaming, and other nerdly pursuits. And we didn't do that by pandering - to anyone! We didn't accomplish this by pandering to readers, Google or search engines in general, advertisers/sponsors, or anyone else; we accomplished this by providing you with quality content.

And every, single day, I see at least 48767845786 "How to Get More Hits" and "How to Boost Your Subscribers" posts and they all say the same things and I no longer bother to read any of them because if they even remember to mention that content is king, it's never in the top three.

So I wanted to write this post just to let y'all know that while I could go that route, it's my choice not to do so and you're getting a better blog and website because of that. That is not to say that I completely ignore all the technical aspects - in fact, you are going to see that a lot of attention has been paid to these aspects once everything is done - but I wanted to thank you for reading and sticking around, even though you may have found us through some tangential post that really has nothing to do with comic books or pop-culture or Americana (there are a few), and let you know that we're not in the business of "attracting customers" and that's why it may have taken you some time to find us in the first place.

We really don't mind being one of the Little Guys; I don't want to get so big that I can't handle it, anyway - it's taken me nearly three years just to get used to this pace and get to the point where I can handle it! You know, when I can.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008