10 Common Website Traffic Myths

Due to the vast array of blogs out there talking about just how powerful traffic is for you, your blog and brand, you might be finding it difficult to find the tips or guides to using traffic to your benefit and not just for staring at. After all, if you don’t have any plans for monetizing your site or focusing on your brand during the peak traffic periods (not just spikes), you won’t be able to grow your site nor reach your long-term goals.

High blog traffic, or traffic anywhere except stalled on the highway, is something that everyone desires. With traffic, you are able to do nearly anything you want – it means that people are actively looking at your site, discovering what you have to offer. At this point, and only at this pint, they can decide whether they want to go further and “catch” onto the pitch that you tired to convey, the message that you tried to get across – that you wanted them to purchase or continue to read and subscribe to your blog or services.

While I cannot say that you will be able to use all of these tips, included are a few common misconceptions about traffic that you have to understand. I focus on ways people make mistakes, ways to fix them, and how to get a better understanding on your traffic.

Note: They are not all myths, but simply answers to common questions.

1. Traffic doesn’t grow by looking at stats.

This is probably one of the most commonly stated tips that people give in terms of traffic. When you are constantly looking at your stats and traffic, not just the trends, you are not only showing that you don’t want to see your blog grow, but you are also spending time unproductively. Although you can do this every once in a while to see how visitors come to your site and how long each stays, you shouldn’t do it every day. Instead, focus on what creates the most content, the goods, that people want to read, use, and enjoy.

2. Your readers don’t necessarily care how popular (traffic wise) your site is.

Taking a look at a collection of sites out there, you will generally find that most have a rather high popularity. However, this is not necessarily true for all sites, especially those that are able to cater to a more in-tune market that shares a better relationship with one another. In other words, community is larger than total popularity. With community, traffic builds, and with traffic, popularity builds, if you get the picture. This doesn’t happen for all sites. The prime example, Google, didn’t become successful due to a small user base, but because it naturally grew in popularity due to its usage and high traffic.

3. You don’t have to pay for traffic.

Most likely, you’ve heard of or seen people that were successful in purchasing traffic. Ultimately, if you have just started your blog, this method will fail due to the fact that you have no root, nothing to keep your readers from leaving. It might all add up to a few extra clicks if you have ads on your site, but nothing more. Essentially, purchasing traffic is a hit-or-miss thing until you are good at advertising correctly. And, for the most part, this works better once  you have the content base to support the claims that you may have made during your advertising campaign(s).

4. More work pays off.

As stated in the first tip, procrastinating content creation won’t help your blog grow. Instead, you need to be able to distinguish your site from others, being able to create more high-quality content on a more consistent basis. Let’s say that you spend an hour creating 10 100-word posts. They will only get you as far as the word and substance in those posts which, by most figures, won’t be too far. Rather, a single 1,000-word posts that you spend two hours or more on and include various forms of unique content representation that draws in your readers will help exponentially more than multiple, quick posts that you spend less time wirting.

5. Traffic naturally fluctuates.

An overview of your traffic and analytics might show that your traffic is decreasing, although, in another view, it has been increasing over the past week. Another person might tell you that your website is extremely popular while the next says that you have very few daily readers.

Drastically different answers like those illustrated above are seen everyday when people try to analyze traffic and form “comparable” figures of what the traffic really is. In reality, there  will likely never be a solution for finding the exact answers, no matter how many different services we were to look at. What you really need to know is that traffic changes everyday, although you should never see jumps of double digit percentages day after day.

6. Traffic exchanges don’t work as well as they say.

In a way, a traffic exchange is trying to offer you a service that only works in an ideal world, one where people are able to spend hours doing something that provides little to their benefit. For this reason, the traffic that has been promised is rarely delivered because people can’t spend time browsing sites or attending to their accounts.

In my opinion, they could work only if you spend a minimal amount of time with them and your blog has zero visitors – they would provide a starting point, in some ways.

7. Just because your bounce rate is high doesn’t mean that visitors don’t like your site.

A popular myth, bounce rate is simply an indication that your site’s layout or way you present content is better-than-average because the visitors don’t have to page through multiple pages or try to find what they are looking for. On the other hand, it means that you probably won’t be generating as many page views for advertisers paying you based on the number of impressions you deliver. The more content-rich your homepage and individual pages from search engines are, the more likely the visitor is to leave the page, but still retain some information about your site, which is generally the most important part.

8. Once you have established brand recognition, traffic becomes less important.

I might be going off on a limb with this idea, but when you develop your brand, people will retain what you offer far into the future, being able to go back to your site without having to search multiple queries just to find the site they were looking for. It’s what makes many of the top companies remain in business – the experience their customers had, even if it was only one time.

The traffic aspect won’t matter as much because these people will probably recommend your company, name, or services to others – a free marketing approach.

9. Traffic growth only results from a dramatic change.

Partially true, this means that unless you change a major portion of your marketing campaign, your layout, or what you are doing to draw in traffic, you won’t see any significant growth month-over-month. However, there are many examples of sites that haven’t changes since they were launched and are more popular today than ever. So, you just have to continue providing a reliable service and traffic should naturally increase, even without spending a dime on marketing or promoting your service (although time is a factor, like always).

10. More subscribers Does Not Mean More traffic.

While subscribers and traffic typically go hand in hand, sites that have in excess of 50,000 subscribers might only see a fraction of those people who visit their blog everyday, it not on a rare occurrence. Subscriptions have made it much easier to reduce the amount of traffic to your blog which, all in all, might be a good thing. It might mean less income from ad sales, but you are helping to balance traffic between multiple sources (unless you have a lot of images in your posts hosted on your server). This myth has been proven false dozens of times with various blogs.

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