Glowleaf

As I have mentioned before, RSS is the best metric to show the real success of your blog. Sure, you may have thousands of visitors every day, you may rank for every keyword in your niche, but if you don’t have RSS subscribers, you are failing.

Having subscribers is the equivalent of a newspaper, you have X amount of people, whom you will reach no matter what. Sales may fluctuate, you may have good days and bad days, but the number of subscribers is relatively stable.

And, honestly, it is much more important to say “I have 3000 RSS readers”, than to say “I have 15000 visitors every day”. The random visitors usually come because they find you in the engines, or from other links etc. No, of course, you cannot call them insignificant, but they are not a precise metric. RSS pretty much is.

I read somewhere that an RSS reader is the equivalent of 25$/month. I say this is crap, but he surely has a value, even if its not monetary.

So, why am I babbling about RSS instead of discussing the RSS data of this blog? Because there aren’t any

Checking out my Feedburner stats, I find ~25 subscribers. Pathetic, I know, but still considerable since this is a new and small blog. I believe it depends on the niche, but less than 5% of your visitors will either comment, participate or subscribe. The other 95% are lurkers.

Sunday, September 14 – Saturday, September 20

• 23 subscribers (on average) 
• 10 reach (on average) 

Bots

NAME	HITS
IceRocket	52
Technorati Search Bot	21
Another Google Bot	4
Moreover	2
Sphere	2
FeedBurner Feed Insurance	1
Radian 6 Crawler	1
FeedBurner	0
RSSMicro Search	0

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: feedburner, permission marketing, rss

…and I’m proud of it.

I have no idea why, but two thirds of my traffic are direct (rss readers fall into that category), and the remaining third is from referring sites. In the past 3 months, I got 11 (yes eleven) measly visitors from organic search. Still, traffic levels are satisfying.

I am not a professional blogger, and never claimed to be one.

But I must be doing something right. You read everywhere, “content is king”, and I agree. But content does not seem to bring in organic search for me. It brings traffic from links. Maybe there is a threshold, and I am yet to cross it. I haven’t really tried, to be honest. I don’t bother with keywords, or linking to my posts. Hell, even my categories have the wrong keywords in them.

I am an SEO, and my blog is nowhere to be found in the SERPs. I have an online business, affiliate sites, directory sites, ebay stores, splogs with 100 times the traffic and higher PR than glowleaf.net

I run ppc campaigns, abuse every system I can find, either torrents, social bookmarking, auctions, scripts, exploits.

I can’t name all my domains by heart.

I know SEO, I do it for a living. But I decided not to promote this blog. It was my little experiment, whether or not good content brings in traffic. I can say now with confidence that it does.

But it’s not enough, especially for marketing. You really need to have a solid linking and promotion strategy for your sites.

I will discuss in future posts how to do just that, mastering methods for standardizing your website promotion. Stay tuned. Hit my big bad RSS button.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: blogging, content, rss