Incoming links to an average post
Since I am, and probably always will be, a stats freak. I check them at least 50 times a day (seriously). Although I do consider this blog a pleasure, I still want it to be successful. In the blog world, success is measured by your audience size (readers and subscribers). So, I generally do a good job at perusing the web looking for opportunities to participate in communities, and hopefully lure a few readers to my blog at the same time. Seeing that conversion take place in my stats is no surprise.
However, sometimes I’m amazed at the weird things that bring people to this blog, and I even get frustrated sometimes since many of those incoming links are just to average stories. Had that reader stumbled upon one of my better stories, I might could have converted them into a regular audience member.
For instance, the most recent puzzler was the fact that I left a trackback on Uncommon Descent when I linked to the story about Phillip Johnson’s essay. I must have been one of the first to do this (since my trackback shows up at the top of the comment list) and to my amazement UD readers flooded this site with traffic! Don’t get me wrong, I am happy they are here, but that post was hardly worthy of making a good first impression of a potential audience!
Another instance was my post on Richard Dawkins being on CNN. Nothing special about the post. But the fact that it mentioned “Anna Nicole Smith” (after her death), the days following that post I had floods of traffic, mainly from blogsearch tools like Technorati and Google. Again, none of those audience members stuck around since 1) the story had nothing to do with A-N-S and 2) it wasn’t a great post to begin with. Later I had traffic on that post from more relevant query strings like “dawkins cnn”, but even those readers had no reason to stay.
I tried to stem the tide of the exits by offering my fresh traffic a link to an explanation of this site and some of the “best-ofs”, but naturally they saw that my post wasn’t what they were looking for and quickly moved on.
This scenario can be incredibly frustrating! On the one hand, the traffic excites you, but on the other hand you know it’ll be gone tomorrow.
I guess I need to work on making my site stickier 
Has this ever happened to you? Was it as frustrating to you as it was to me? How did you retain the traffic? I’m curious, so leave a comment or send me an email. I’d love to hear some suggestions!
By the way, I do want to welcome all the visitors from Uncommon Descent. I hope you stick around!
[tags]incoming links, sticky, sticky blog, hook, audience, stats, visitors[/tags]
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It is hard to know who is returning and even who is reading at all! I have found that friends have read posts and I don’t find out until much later!
I do tend to try and get to sites that I know might be interested in what I just posted. Example…I write a post related to a topic…I check out other blogs with similar topics. I guess too, I don’t really write a lot of posts that would be read by a select group. But then again…I’m just learning!