The Difference Between Traffic and Readers – and How to Know Which You Want

If you’ve been in the blogging world for any length of time (or even if you’re yet to start your blog), you’ll have heard some key terms being thrown around.

Two of the most popular aretraffic and readers.

Although you might think they mean pretty much the same thing (visitors to your blog), there’s a distinction between these.

Traffic includes people who visit your site for a couple of seconds then surf away. (If you’ve ever had a rush of traffic from StumbleUpon or another social site, you may well have seen this in action.)

Readers aren’t just visitors – they’re people who come back to your blog again and again. They might subscribe, leave comments, share your posts, and even buy from you … at which point they become customers.

Image from Flickr by The Next Web

Traffic is Fleeting (Though May Be Impressive)

Of course traffic is important, but simply having a lot of monthly visitors isn’t usually enough for a successful blog. Even if you’re not interested in monetizing your blog at all, you probably still want a lasting audience rather than fleeting traffic.

There’s one case when traffic beats readers, though, and that’s you’re monetizing solely through ads.

If the point of your blog is to bring in advertising revenue, then you don’t really want loyal readers – you want lots of passing traffic, people who’ll click onto one of your posts, then click on an ad and leave.

This may also be the case if you’re an affiliate marketer – you could be looking for one-time visitors (e.g. to your review of a product). However, affiliate marketing can work fine with a small but loyal audience who trust your recommendations.

Don’t take this to mean that you can forget about traffic altogether. New visitors are important – some will stick around and become readers.

Readers Will Grow to Like and Trust You

If someone reads several of your posts, leaves a comment, and subscribes to your newsletter, it’s pretty clear that they’re interested in what you have to say. They’re a reader – not just a passing blip of traffic.

Readers will generally subscribe to your blog or newsletter, though some may choose to follow you instead through social media. They won’t necessarily read every word of every post, but they will stick around for weeks, months, or even years – so long as you keep delivering the high-quality content that they’ve come to expect from you.

A small, loyal group of readers may be all you need. For instance, you run a consulting business and only need two clients a month, then if you’re attracting the right audience (people with the means and inclination to pay you!) then you could do very well with a readership numbering in the hundreds.

Most bloggers will want more readers than this, of course – perhaps a few thousand. It can take years to get a blog to that point, though there’s a lot you can do to speed up the process. One great method is to guest posting on large blogs in your niche to bring in well-targeted traffic that’s likely to convert into readers.

Which is Better, Traffic or Readers?

Personally, I favour building a blog (and business) that revolves around loyal readers rather than lots of traffic.

There are a couple of key reasons for this:

• If you rely mainly on search engine traffic, your business could take a huge knock if you get penalised by Google (whether fairly or not). This happened to Darren Rowse early in his blogging career.
• It can take a lot of time to see even $100 from advertising revenue (you may have to put in months of work building your blog first – I know I did!) and many bloggers simply don’t have the time or resources for that.

Of course advertising is a perfectly valid form of monetization – we run ads on DailyBlogTips, and I have a few on my blog Aliventures. For me, though, it’s more rewarding (both financially and emotionally) to focus on readers and other ways of making money blogging.

If you’re looking to get more traffic and more readers, watch this space! We’ll be launching a new course in a couple of days with six weeks of text and video lessons to help you grow your blog faster than ever before.

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