Matthew Gates http://notetoservices.com 9m 2,318 #webtraffic
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
The Importance or Unimportance of Website Traffic
Passion of the Website
How much I cared about website traffic when I started Confessions of the Professions only to have website traffic evolve into the very core of the website existence. Websites exist because people visit them. People visit them because they exist. When websites continue to exist, they attract interest and people who want to read them. A website will always have the potential to fail when the owner loses interest in keeping the website going. It is not easy building and running a website that has a decent amount of traffic a day and every month. I never asked for the traffic, I just built it and people actually came. But I, and I am sure I am far from alone, am one of those web developers that would love to get popular, but prefers to be alone, and unknown.
I tend to build websites and people do come, often with a single tweet, or a good article shared on LinkedIn. Not a whole lot of people come from anywhere in particular, but some do come because they came across this article, or any article on this website, for the matter, in a search query from Google or other search engines. I really never cared if the website became popular not. Why should I care? I would be disappointed if it didn’t get viewed a lot, but just to get my thoughts out, and the thoughts of other, it helps me understand our humanity, my humanity.
If an article went viral, as quite a few have done several times, I jump for joy in hopes that the author of the article is recognized in some way. The mutual symbiotic relationship I have between my contributors and myself is nothing ever personal, but an understanding of people trying to get their message out to the world, whether it was to find your passion in life, get a good job, become a good father or a better mother to your children, it was about finding the next stage of your life, the stage we are always aiming to be at, the stage of getting older.
The message will and should be heard!
Interest of the Website
If anyone is reading your website, it is because they are interested in your writing and what you have to say. What could you possibly be thinking about that other people want to hear? What exactly are people searching for all day? Are they bidding on Ebay? Searching Google? Updating a status on Facebook? Tweeting? Sending an Instagram? Pinning on Pinterest? Tumbling on Tumblr? Selling on Craigslist? Buying everything? What exactly are people doing on the Internet and when do they find the time to read these articles?
If someone is interested, that is the person you want to get your message to. That is the person who will remember your name and look for you again. For those who skipped the whole article and lost out because, let’s face it, 7 billion people on this planet, of which everyone of them has an opinion and about 3.5 billion, which is a half of the world, has access to share their thoughts and ideas on the vast unlimited endless Internet, similar to the vast unlimited endless universe that hardly any of us can see anymore, due to light pollution; those statistics are extremely vast that a website has almost no chance of ever getting discovered if it does not market and advertise itself on the biggest platforms that have the most set of eyes.
Those who are interested in jobs, careers, and the workplace, what businesses are doing, might frequent this website, probably between the ages of 25 and 50, the working age, looking to extract information about life in the workplace. Our major theme of the website, however, distracted our stream may get, we always will return to:
What is my passion? How do I find happiness? How do I find it in life? How do I find it at work?
Analytics of the Website
You would think that people who are interested in the website would visit them for hours on end at a time, but no one has that kind of time to spend on any website ever. At most, the major social media platforms get a half hour to an hour of visitation time per day. Snapchat, Instagram, or Pinterest may get even more. The average time people actually spend on a website is about 2 minutes. If you can get someone to spend 2 minutes on your website, you would have to greatly consider that a success.
Think of it as putting a commercial on a television network. If 10 to 30 seconds of air time managed to accumulate some eyes and customers who were interested, than you were successful. If no one sees or interacts with your website, than you may have to re-evaluate your methods. Between all of the analytics available on the Internet, from the billion dollar Google corporation to much smaller companies, all seem to remain far from perfect, but all can come very close to giving you an idea of your traffic situation, and which country visits your website the most.
When you thoroughly review your analytics, which can take months and years to understand, you can understand website traffic. Obviously, you cannot thrive on one visitor or customer, but having one visitor or one customer is the start to any business or website.
Exploration of the Website
When you have a mission and a goal for your website and you maintain passion about it, it can never fail or not receive traffic. The chances of a random someone stumbling across your website because you shared a link are greater than your chances of receiving millions of visitors. Be happy with that one. If that one likes you, they will share it with other ones who may like you. And they will share it with others who like you, and so on and so forth.
The Internet we created is the world-wide-web, connecting us together in every way possible, from our thoughts, to our bank accounts, to everything we do and our way of life, is like space travel. We used to be a species interested in space travel, but once we learned the truth from the aliens that crash landed on this planet, we decided to invest our time and energy into technology. Unfortunately, technology had a bit of a side effect and our human brains, which seek knowledge and fun, had somehow distracted us from our focus.
In distracting us, our whole entire world became so addicted to the Internet that our entire society is run by and on the Internet. Our population is so addicted to the Internet that being without a phone is like being alone and being alone is scary. Once upon a time, there were no mobile phones, and thus, everyone had to rely on the trust of each other. This will someday be talked about, as if it were ancient history, “in the old days”, when we didn’t have Internet.
The generations of before the 90s will be the only generation who remembers being without the Internet. Anything after will always remember a world with the Internet, whether it survives or not for the next one hundred years. After all, the Internet is already over 25 years old. A similar story arises in the Torah: When Moses traveled 40 years across the desert, he was commanded by God to let the older generations die out, so that the slave mentality would die out with it. Those who had memories of slavery, could share their stories with their younger generations, and so on and so forth, but the mentality of once being a slave to another man and going into freedom was his mission.
In comparison to what is going on in today’s world: We are entering into a new mentality of the generation of Internet: the generation who does not know the world before the Internet. From here on out, unless there is a massive destructive event that effects the entire world, we are always going to rely on the Internet to do our work for us.
If we were to focus our energies on humanity and space exploration, we could certainly achieve it, and the more time that went by, the more we would have a chance at discovering life on other planets, just as we discover life on a website. What the odds would be of finding another planet able to sustain life on it are just as much of a random chance as typing in a URL in the address bar and landing somewhere. Yet, sharing your website with the massive data storage centers, also known as social media and search engines, your website will become indexed by a bot, similar to the bots we send into orbit, looking for life on the Internet.
Visibility of a Website
Once your website becomes visible to the world wide web, you are now known in some way, your identity is no longer a secret. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is like asking the question, “If another species found us, would we have preferred to keep our identity and location of our planet a secret?” The visibility of a website is a goal many of us have; getting views, conversions, popularity, sales, brand familiarity.
In the beginning, I received just two visitors to my website on a daily basis: My mother and my wife. The website was written with mostly articles of stories I heard from other people, posted as Anonymous, or as myself. The interest of building Confessions of the Professions to learn about the world, about jobs, about people, has taken me into the realm of understanding the workplace and why we need it. Just like the queen bee: imagine a planet where the queen bee is its leader, and all other forms of life were bee drones, workers, or warriors, completely under her control, and busy doing something, they would all be free to sting us and do as they pleased. Obviously keeping her bees in line is extremely beneficial to the human race. The website has grown to those who are interested in it and understand it for what it is.
If the website gets a few thousand visitors per day, it was a great day. I do not even see a thousand people in one day in my real life. Imagine standing in a room and meeting a thousand visitors in one day. That is a lot. How many people would you say you would need to meet in a single day to feel like you accomplished anything?
My answer may be different from yours, but to feel accomplished throughout the day, I only need the approval of one person: my wife. Okay, two people: myself as well. The remaining people are people that I hope to please while I strive to feel accomplished throughout the day. In sharing Confessions of the Professions with the world, it is a gift from me to the world. Many blogs are gifts to the world. They keep us from being alone and having the world remain silent. More importantly, they connect us to at least one other person. Whether we just read their articles and become a fan of them, or we actually comment on the article, or email the author.
Legacy of a Website
Websites, in large part, fail as much as a planet fails, or businesses fail. Only the few strong who learn to survive, either by experience or luck, are able to make it and become something of a representation of a thriving planet. Each website represents a single person or organization. If a person passes away, does the website die with them? For those who own the organization and started a company, they may leave the website legacy with the people, who continue its tradition. For those who pass away, with no one to carry on the torch, the websites dwindles away and becomes nothing.
Some websites that existed years ago, sprung up, thrived for a time, and somehow passed away. Did the owner of the website die? Or just lose interest in keeping up on the website? Websites take a lot of work to keep up with a website is not an easy job. However, for those who are driven by passion to drive the legacy of the website, they hopefully remain in the minds and memories of the world, even long after they have expired and no longer exist.
Personal websites may only last as long as we are alive and it is the message we leave on those websites for others that we may pass on. For it is the knowledge of our soul trying to connect and learn with other souls, that makes the human connection on the Internet. Websites come and go but to have a website or a blog that was seen, even if just by one other person, is a person that would have never known you had existed in the first place, and that is always the best website traffic.
Having accomplished just getting a website on to the Internet and acquiring one visitor, a few visitors, or hundreds of visitors to your website is an accomplishment and you should be proud of what you did, no matter how many visitors are attracted to your website. “Look at where I started and look at me now” is the mentality you should always have. Having a website or a blog and being able to run it is a big success, especially if people are interested in reading about what you write. As long as you never give up, you can never fail, and you will always find yourself successful when it comes to your website and website traffic.
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