Uh Oh! Your Site Looks Un-Trafficked
When you’re first starting a website, it can be tempting to seek new advertisers, build a community (forum) and add other features/additions that can generate revenue and make your site look appealing.
The problem is, if you don’t have enough traffic, your site will end up looking vacant, smallish and unimportant.
So I thought I’d make a list of a few things new Webmasters should avoid when starting a site.
Don’t Look For Advertisers… Yet
Most serious advertisers know what to look for when searching for sites to advertise on. They’ll check your Alexa Rank, PageRank, PageStrength and other tools to get an idea for how much traffic you’re getting.
So don’t throw up “Advertise Here” message unless you have the traffic and advertisers to support it.
If you do this prematurely, it lets everyone know you don’t get enough traffic because the “Advertise Here” message continues to display, yet you have no advertisers who choose to advertise with you.
Don’t Launch a Forum or Other Community-Based Applications
Many members on my forum, WebsiteBabble.com ask about starting their own forum. Yet, I always caution them to make sure they have enough traffic before doing so.
It doesn’t look too good when you launch a forum that gets 1 or 2 posts per week. People won’t want to participate in a forum that looks inactive.
I’ve found that the best way to establish a forum is to build a website or blog that generates a good amount of targeted traffic (500-1000 unique visitors per day). Then use that traffic to help promote your forum.
Incorporate links to your forum in popular web pages and blog posts. For example, if you have a heavily trafficked page on how to develop a site with CSS, you could invite your visitors to post questions about CSS in your forum.
Also, don’t be afraid to create a few fake accounts and post some starter questions and answers to get your forum going.
Once the activity picks up you won’t need to do this anymore, but that’s a great way to encourage participation in a new forum.
However, if your traffic levels are low, hold off on the forum for now.
Don’t Display Your RSS Feed Subscribers
With the popularity of FeedBurner, many bloggers opt to display how many people have subscribed to their feed.
This looks pretty impressive when you get into the 4-digit arena, but not quite so good when the number is under 20 - especially if your subscriber rate is not increasing much.
It doesn’t look too good when someone visited your blog on January 1st when you had 20 subscribers, and four months later they return and you have 22.
Sometimes it’s best to keep your numbers to yourself. :)
The Moral of The Story
Notice the above points all revolve around one thing… generating enough traffic. That should be the first goal for your site.
I know it’s tempting to add user interactivity, forums, chats, make money from advertisers, etc. but without traffic, your site becomes a collection of features that no one is using.
It’s much better to spend the early days learning how to generate targeted traffic to your site. Then once the visitors come, you can start thinking about adding such features.
View my traffic building tips page to read about some of the ways I’ve brought traffic to my site over the years. See if there are any methods you can implement yourself.
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Even though it is hard, I do agree with this. I am waiting (or trying to anyway) until I reach 500 uniques/day to my website before I put more monetization models on the site. Right now, I only have adsense (and 1 affiliate link on 1 page - which has done nothing) on my site. Trying to concentrate on building traffic and content first.
Hi Lisa,
I love reading your site… and now your blog. I always find it inspiring.
I totally agree with this article. Someone suggested I start a forum and I’m not really into the idea for a couple reasons. First, I only have about 10-11K hits a month. Second, forums don’t seem very profitable.
Am I missing something here? Do forums take a lot less time one might think to moderate? Is there much profit in it? What sort of added value does it create?
Nice to finally say ‘hi’ to you! I love your easy going, helpful approach!
All the best,
Christine
Good questions, Christine. First of all forums can be very profitable if you have enough traffic. Forums like ABestWeb make a lot of money with advertisers and sponsors. Smaller forums may not make as much. My forum was not created so much to profit (as you see I have no AdSense ads and few banner ads). I created it to help promote my main site and build more credibility by getting to know the people I help.
Even though I do not put a lot of affiliate links on my forum directly, it has definitely helped compliment my main site. So it depends on the goal of your forum.
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I hope a lot of newbies read this. It’s so tempting to want to throw up affiliate links, advertise links and all the money making stuff. But you’re right. What’s the point if you’re getting 20 visitors per day.