Romance Your Readership, Not Your Traffic

Romance Your Readership, Not Your Traffic:

Valentine’s day… a day dedicated to that person/those people in your life that are the most dear to you. If you’re anything like me though, most of your day (or at least until you get home this evening) will be spent thinking about a different group of people…the ones that visit your website. However if you’re thinking about traffic or visitors then your thoughts are misplaced: you need to be thinking about your readership.

What’s the difference between traffic and readership?

TRAFFIC is the amount of people that are attracted to your website for one reason or another. They might stumble across a link to your blog, have a quick read but generally don’t tend to stick around and won’t necessarily return. Traffic is measured very simply by the number of people that visit your site.

READERSHIP is the amount of people that are attracted to your website and decide ‘hey this is a pretty cool place to hang out’. They might comment on your content and are more likely to return to your website in the future. Readership metrics include: length of time visitors spend on your site, number of page views, number of subscriptions, number of shares, comments etc

Why is readership more valuable than traffic?

The bottom line is that readership is more likely to generate leads than traffic. An audience that is listening to what you have to say and coming back to your website time and time again perceives your brand as an industry authority and one which can genuinely help them. Your readership will share your content, building your audience for you: they become pro-active brand ambassadors in contrast to the very passive nature of traffic.

So how do you romance your readership?

In short, you need to provide people with:

• a reason to stick around
• a reason to come back

For this, you need:

• to publish a fresh supply of high quality, shareable content (such as news feeds)
• to facilitate conversation

When someone visits your website, you need to give them a reason to interact with your content: it needs to educate, add value and entertain, inspiring them to share it or leave a comment. Once they’re engaged, you should encourage the conversation instead of just letting it die with a two second ‘thanks for the comment’ reply. At the end of their visit, you want them to leave with a valuable takeaway which helps them to solve a particular problem and inspires them to come back again. Don’t leave it there though, give the conversation a chance to flourish on other channels by connecting on social media or commenting on their blog.

Sound like hard work?

Well, it absolutely is. You not only need to create the content in the first place (that’s a job in itself!) but you need to put the hours in afterwards to make sure that your content is working hard for you and actually converting your traffic into readership. At the end of the day, whether it’s your Valentine or your online audience, if you don’t put the work in, don’t expect them to either.

Would be great to hear your views below…