Simmer down! Taken from the Saturday Night Live skit. Simmah down! That’s exactly what bloggers should do who are focused too much (obsessed with) growing traffic and readership to their blog. A recent New York Times article: For Some Blogging Never Stops (free subscription required) exposed that some bloggers are taking blogging way too seriously and it is becoming a problem. This article spawned a conversation at Blogcritics about blogging and traffic. That’s what critics usually will cite: blogs aren’t significant because of the little traffic most of them receive. BS!

If the effort is put into what is regularly being written about — the content — and trading links with and commenting and trackbacking to other similar blogs, the traffic will grow exponentially. Things that Make You Go Hmm has continued to grow traffic every single month traffic-wise since its inception 48 weeks ago. It hasn’t even been linked off our site where we currently receive the most daily traffic and that would take us like ten seconds to do. Rather, we’ve let this blog grow its own audience naturally and I would recommend other bloggers do the same. Lono is asking the question: Is blogging futile? (click blogcritics image to visit his blog entry) I have no official statistics to back this up, but I’d be willing to wager that 85% or higher of the blogs out there do not even generate *100* unique hits a day.

Then there’s probably up to 14% or so that do somewhere between 101 and 10,000 unique hits a day on average.  That leaves significantly less than 1% of blogs that are doing in excess of 10,000 uniques a day like Blogcritics is doing.

If one can consistently draw 500 - 1000 or more uniques a day on his/her blog, then that is a pretty successful blog, as far as blogs go, anyway.

However if compared to the (traffic) readership of an average article at CNET, MSNBC, Slashdot, etc and blogs seriously pale in comparison traffic-wise. Thus, I do not understand the logic behind journalists being afraid of the bloggers.

What I do understand them being concerned about is being scooped by bloggers, which seems to be happening on an increasingly more frequent basis. However, the vast majority of general public still gets their news through online news services, print, radio and TV so bloggers are actually <i>helping</i> journalists.

Blogs are a niche, and niches can be very, very profitable as John aptly pointed out and I’ve always thought it was silly when folks worried too much about traffic.

I know websites getting over a hundred thousand uniques a day and barely making any money and I know folks with groups of websites that individually don’t do 1000 uniques a day that are clearing five figures a month.

10,000 hits a day of blog bandwith is going to cost $100-200 USD, and that assumes no videos or audio files which can drive up the bandwith in a hurry. So it is important to remember that as a site becomes more popular there must be some sort of financial foundation in place to at least cover these costs.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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