Data visualization: What it is and how it adds value to marketing

The abundance of data can be a bane as much as it is a boon. While marketers now have plenty of data to back up their campaigns and strategies, that also means they have to go through the tedious process of sifting through a sea of data to find what they need to measure performance and what can help them make a case for the value of their work. This could easily lead to analysis paralysis in which they get so overwhelmed with data that they end up not making any decision at all.

That’s where data visualization enters the picture. By showcasing the most critical data in a visual format, it makes the information easier to process and understand. In this post, we give you an in-depth look at data visualization, why you need it and how you can apply it in your organization.

What is data visualization?

Data visualization is the process of translating large and complex datasets and summarizing them in a visual format. This not only makes the data easier to understand but also pleasant to look at, which helps you get people’s attention more effectively.

Sprout Social regularly publishes data visualization examples with accompanying infographics in our content. This allows us to highlight the most important details at a glance, while the body of the article elaborates on the findings.

You’ll also find other data visualization examples throughout reports in the Sprout platform itself such as this report on Facebook competitors. The comparative line graph helps you quickly visualize how your Facebook page compares to your competitor in terms of audience growth by day.

Just a few of the most common types of data visualizations include:

• Area charts
• Line charts
• Bar charts
• Pie charts
• Scatter plots
• Histograms
• Heat maps

These can act as standalone visualizations in analysis reports, illustrate text content or even play a part in a larger data storytelling effort. It’s important to understand the best use cases for different types of data visualization so your imagery actually clarifies and highlights the takeaways for your data rather than confusing viewers further–read on for tips and best practices.

Advantages of data visualization

There are a lot of ways data visualization can fuel and strengthen your marketing efforts other than making the information easier to process. Let’s take a closer look at the advantages of data visualization so you can understand how it adds value to your organization:

1. Provide greater insight

The most obvious advantage is that it helps connect the dots between different datasets to uncover patterns and trends, thus enhancing comprehension. It adds more context and assigns meaning to your data, helping you understand its relevance in the real world and how you should apply it. Instead of just overwhelming you with information, data visualization puts together the most valuable bits in a way that makes sense for you or for the audience of your content.

Data visualization provides insights that you can’t get through traditional descriptive statistics, helping you visualize the variations between seemingly similar datasets. Anscombe’s Quartet serves as a classic example of this. This illustrates four datasets that share similar descriptive statistics such as the same numerical average or standard deviation, but when plotted in visual graphs, clearly tell four different stories.

2. Improve your decision-making process

With improved insight and better comprehension, data visualization helps improve the decision-making process. As critical decision-makers won’t have to go through the tedious process of sifting through data to uncover the insights they need, they can avoid analysis paralysis and make informed decisions much faster.

That’s exactly why you need data visualization for marketing, as it helps you develop powerful strategies and campaigns before your competitors can catch up with you.

3. Engage the audience

There’s no doubt that well-designed visuals are attractive and engaging. Data visualization combined with data storytelling can help you draw in your target audience and engage them. It can add more substance to the information you want to share and help you get your message across more effectively.

So it’s no surprise that even for publications like The Washington Post, the most-read story it ever published online is a visualization-driven story involving the coronavirus simulator. And for The New York Times, the most-read piece it published online during 2013 was a dialect map.

4. Easily repurposed

One of the best advantages of data visualization is its versatility, allowing you to repurpose it in different formats for various aspects of your business–from social media to content marketing. Since it helps translate the information into a format that’s easy to process, it improves the understanding of crucial metrics at every level. This makes it perfect for use in internal reporting and client reporting as well as content development.

The Sprout example given at the beginning showcases how data visualization serves as content for your organization. The addition of visualized data makes your content easier to consume and share, especially on social media where visual content dominates.

For example, see how the Content Marketing Institute tweets out one of the charts from its annual report and then invites followers to read the full report.

84% of B2B content marketers have use paid distribution channels in the last 12 months.

To learn more about what marketers had to say about distribution channels, including which generated the best results, read our report. https://t.co/HUl0n2Zs6U pic.twitter.com/7QGKKsxCRA

— Content Marketing Institute (@CMIContent) April 20, 2020

You can further communicate your data into other formats including:

• Annual reports
• Articles and blog posts
• Case studies
• Brochures
• Presentations
• Videos
• Infographics
• Internal reports

Data visualization tips

Before you rope in your design team for data visualization, there are a few essentials to take care of. You need to make sure you’re working on a subject that would appeal to your target audience and properly source the data you want to visualize. So use the following tips to nail your data visualization efforts:

1. Get specific with your subject

For your data visualization efforts to make an impact, the first step is to tackle a subject that’s relevant and interesting to the people you’re targeting. But even the most relevant data can be difficult to process if you overwhelm the audience with too much information. And your data can go all over the place if you don’t have a clear idea of what story you want to tell.

So, define a clear purpose for your visualized data to narrow down on the main subject you want to address. This will also help you put together the information in a logical flow for powerful and effective data storytelling.

2. Collect credible data

Make sure the data you’re using is solid and credible. Since data is easy to manipulate and misrepresented to serve one’s purpose, it’s crucial that you only trust unbiased sources. You may also conduct your own study through reliable and valid research methods.

3. Use design best practices

Of course, the visual elements are just as important as the information itself. The whole point of presenting your data in a visual format is to engage the audience and make your data more readable and digestible. Design best practices are essential here, which is why it’s ideal to work with team members that specialize in design rather than taking your best guess at layout and color decisions that can significantly impact how well a viewer understands your data.

These best practices include:

• Carefully choosing the type of chart to best translate your data
• Guiding the eye by highlighting the most critical details
• Using the right color palette that’s brand-consistent and pleasant to the eyes
• Using fonts that are brand-consistent and easy to read

Of course, having a brand style guide makes it a lot easier as you don’t have to go through the whole process of brainstorming what visual guidelines to follow down to the font and color every time.

The following infographic from MediPENSE nails all of these best practices. It uses bar graphs to showcase the various ways in which caregivers dealt with their highly demanding jobs. It highlights the crucial numbers to get key messages across.

Plus, the color palette remains consistent with the brand’s blue and green colors, while the white background ensures minimal strain on the eyes. And they use two or three font styles that are easy to read.

Data visualization tools

If you don’t have a background in design, it will be difficult to pull off a successful data visualization solo. So it’s ideal to collaborate with a dedicated design team if you want your data to have the desired impact. If you are crunched for time or resources, though, there are tools that can help you automatically generate visualized data or come with data visualization templates that you can easily customize.

Here are a few tools to help with your data visualization efforts:

1. Tableau

One of the best tools to visualize your analytics data, Tableau lets you connect to cloud databases to collect your data and turn it into visually-appealing charts and graphs. You can use bubble charts, word clouds and tree diagrams to add more context to your data and allow for easy comprehension.

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social comes with a comprehensive reporting tool that automatically generates visual reports for your social media performance. You can easily track follower growth rate, measure post performance and compare yourself against the competition through these visual reports. It even lets you generate visuals for internal reports including task performance and team reports.

3. Venngage

Venngage can help you put together infographics to paint a bigger picture through data storytelling. It comes with many data visualization templates that you can customize with your own information, colors, charts and visuals.

Get ready for powerful data storytelling

With everything that you’ve seen and read so far, it’s clear that data visualization plays a major role in multiple aspects of your business. Not only do you need data visualization for marketing, but you also need it for better communication within the organization and faster decisions. Plus, it serves your content marketing efforts in so many ways with the versatility to adapt to various formats.

So if you’re still not using it to its full potential, it’s time to change that. Get our free social media toolkit to get a better picture of how data-fueled social strategies should look like.

This post Data visualization: What it is and how it adds value to marketing originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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Eight Ways Your Content Marketing Might Be Sabotaging Your SEO

Of course content marketing and SEO have a symbiotic relationship, but many content marketers are making seemingly small mistakes that can add up--and end up sabotaging their SEO. Here are 8 ways you unfortunately might be doing exactly that. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

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Eight Ways Your Content Marketing Might Be Sabotaging Your SEO

Of course content marketing and SEO have a symbiotic relationship, but many content marketers are making seemingly small mistakes that can add up--and end up sabotaging their SEO. Here are 8 ways you unfortunately might be doing exactly that. Go to the full version at MarketingProfs

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Marketers Need AI, and AI Needs Marketers

AI-powered automation has begun taking over some of the most grueling elements of contemporary marketing and content authoring at scale. Still, AI isn't a marketing silver bullet--but marketers can't afford to ignore its already evident potential. Go to the full version at MarketingProfs

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B2B Direct Mail for Marketing and Sales [Infographic]

Particularly in ABM, offline engagement tactics--such as B2B direct mail--can make an impression and differentiate you from your competition. When, post-pandemic, businesses reopen their offices, B2B organizations should give direct mail a serious look. Go to the full version at MarketingProfs

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Eight Ways Your Content Marketing Might Be Sabotaging Your SEO

Of course content marketing and SEO have a symbiotic relationship, but many content marketers are making seemingly small mistakes that can add up--and end up sabotaging their SEO. Here are 8 ways you unfortunately might be doing exactly that. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

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Optimize audience engagement on your posts with Sprout’s ViralPost® send time technology

Optimize audience engagement on your posts with Sprout’s ViralPost® send time technology

Optimize audience engagement on your posts with Sprout’s ViralPost® send time technology

Google Search Ranking Update Flutters April 28th & 29th

There may have been a Google search ranking algorithm update over the past couple of days; on April 28th and 29th. There is chatter within the SEO industry and some of the tools are showing pretty heavy signs of an update.

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The Key to Long-Term Traffic and Profit for Your Blog

The post The Key to Long-Term Traffic and Profit for Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

“How do you create content that goes viral?”

I remember getting this question from a new blogger. They wanted a post to go viral on their blog, thinking it would suddenly shoot their blog’s traffic and profit into the stratosphere.

And who knows? It may have done just that. Unfortunately, without having plenty of content in their archive there’s a good chance those numbers would have come crashing down pretty quickly.

So I told this particular blogger what they needed to hear rather than what they wanted to hear. And I thought it would be worth sharing what I said with you all this week.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with writing content that might be shared hundreds or even thousands of times. I often talk about how important it is to write sharable content. But ‘going viral’ won’t necessarily give you the sustained traffic you need to make it as a full-time blogger.

While some bloggers may have achieved overnight success on the back of a single post, in most cases it took months (if not years) for them to become full-time bloggers. I’ve met thousands of bloggers over the years, and the fastest any of them have reached the full-time level is four months. And that was certainly the exception to the rule.

Most people take a longer to reach full-time status. And they achieve it by taking one step at a time.

The thrill

In the early days of Digital Photography School, I was obsessed with having my posts go viral.

And in January 2007 it finally happened.

The blog was about seven months old at the time, and I was averaging around 4,000 visitors a day. I certainly wasn’t complaining about the traffic I had, which came from a combination of:

• readers from my previous photography blog
• lots of evergreen content
• ranking relatively well in search.

But I’d been sitting on that number for a while, and I was no longer satisfied. I wanted more traffic, and I began to look at what other sites were doing.

I was particularly drawn to social bookmarking sites such as dig.com, which were huge at the time. I started analyzing the content being shared a lot on these sites. And I discovered certain characteristics they all shared.

I started writing similar content to those posts being shared over and over. It was quite different to the content I’d written so far. My posts became quite ‘fluffy’ – not very deep, and not very helpful either to be honest. They were written more to create controversy than to help anyone. And they all had titles that were practically clickbait.

And then I’d pitch them to sites by saying, “Here’s a post that might interest you and your readers”.

One of the sites I pitched my posts to was Lifehacker. And when they took the bait and linked to one of those posts, my traffic doubled overnight.

But that was just the beginning. The next day it was picked by digg.com, and I ended up with more than 100,000 visitors in a single day. I can still remember sitting at my computer, watching my stats climb every time I refreshed the page.

It was an incredible rush. And with it came the feeling that I’d finally be able to blog full-time.

The aftermath

But those incredible numbers didn’t last long, and the next day I had 4,100 visitors.

I was so disappointed.

I understand why so many people want their content to go viral. Getting that rush of traffic was amazing, and I doubt I’ll ever forget how I felt that morning. But despite trying to get all those new readers to read another post, sign up for my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter, I never got that traffic again.

For the next month my traffic was back to around 4,000 visitors a day. It started getting me down – I really wanted another rush of traffic. I wrote more posts like the first one, trying to recreate the scenario. But none of them took off. I pitched almost every post I wrote to Lifehacker, but they didn’t link to any of them. I even tried to game Digg and get my post voted up there, without success.

I was obsessed with going viral again. I desperately wanted a repeat of my earlier ‘success’. But all it did was encourage me to write more fluffy content designed to trigger shares rather than serve my readers. And while I did manage to get a few more posts to go viral, the spike in traffic lasted just as long.

The reality

My obsession with going viral continued for months. And then one day I realized what my 4,000-visitors-a-day figure really meant.

I had 4,000 people coming to my site every day. Out of all the web sites on the internet, they were making a conscious decision to spend some of their time on mine. And while I wasn’t getting 100,000 visitors a day, those numbers meant I was getting around 120,000 visitors a month.

Which was definitely worth celebrating.

But I also realized they were now getting short-changed. Because each time they visited they were getting formulaic headlines and fluffy content written specifically to be shared rather than to solve their problems.

And that had to change.

I changed not only what I wrote, but how I wrote. My new goal was to serve the readers I already had, and to grow my traffic slowly over time rather than in one big hit.

Of course, to serve my readers I had to know what they wanted. So I asked them by sending out surveys with questions such as:

• “Who are you?”
• “What problems are you having?”
• “What questions do you need answered?”

From those surveys I learned a lot about my readers, the problems they faced and what they wanted to know about. And I wrote content specifically to answer their question and try to solve their problems rather than to get clicks. And because I wasn’t continually refreshing my stats to see whether I’d managed to go viral again, I had a lot more time to write it.

Not only was I writing more useful content, I was also writing more of it. I quickly went from four posts a week to five, seven and eventually ten.

The human touch

Another bonus was I also had more time to interact with my readers. I started responding to comments more often, and we started a forum to try and build a community there.

I also started taking advantage of the traffic I was getting by encouraging those visitors to become subscribers. I focused more on building my email list and creating email content that would engage those readers and bring them back to the site again and again.

I still tried to write the occasional piece of shareable content. But rather than try to hit the ball out of the park with every post, I’d try it once in a dozen or so posts.

And as it turned out, whenever I did write sharable content my writers happily shared it for me because I was serving them better.

Again, they were just spikes rather than a massive growth for my blog. But they certainly helped in terms of social proof.

A month after deciding to focus on my readers rather than my traffic, I was getting 4,500 visitors a day. Three months later that figure had grown to 6,000 visitors a day. And a year later my blog was getting 9,000 visitors a day.

It still gets the occasional spike in traffic. But those spikes are just a bonus. My goal is to grow my traffic from day to day and have people stick around for the long term.

And now, getting 100,000 visitors a day is normal for us. But only because I stopped chasing viral traffic and started creating content to help my readers.

The truth

I honestly hope you get to experience that moment when one of your posts goes viral and your traffic goes through the roof. But don’t let it distract you from your long-term goals. Remember why you started blogging in the first place. And never take the fact people are choosing to visit your blog again and again for granted.

Look after them. And in the years to come, they will look after you.

Image credit: George Pagan III

The post The Key to Long-Term Traffic and Profit for Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

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The Key to Long-Term Traffic and Profit for Your Blog

The post The Key to Long-Term Traffic and Profit for Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

“How do you create content that goes viral?”

I remember getting this question from a new blogger. They wanted a post to go viral on their blog, thinking it would suddenly shoot their blog’s traffic and profit into the stratosphere.

And who knows? It may have done just that. Unfortunately, without having plenty of content in their archive there’s a good chance those numbers would have come crashing down pretty quickly.

So I told this particular blogger what they needed to hear rather than what they wanted to hear. And I thought it would be worth sharing what I said with you all this week.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with writing content that might be shared hundreds or even thousands of times. I often talk about how important it is to write sharable content. But ‘going viral’ won’t necessarily give you the sustained traffic you need to make it as a full-time blogger.

While some bloggers may have achieved overnight success on the back of a single post, in most cases it took months (if not years) for them to become full-time bloggers. I’ve met thousands of bloggers over the years, and the fastest any of them have reached the full-time level is four months. And that was certainly the exception to the rule.

Most people take a longer to reach full-time status. And they achieve it by taking one step at a time.

The thrill

In the early days of Digital Photography School, I was obsessed with having my posts go viral.

And in January 2007 it finally happened.

The blog was about seven months old at the time, and I was averaging around 4,000 visitors a day. I certainly wasn’t complaining about the traffic I had, which came from a combination of:

• readers from my previous photography blog
• lots of evergreen content
• ranking relatively well in search.

But I’d been sitting on that number for a while, and I was no longer satisfied. I wanted more traffic, and I began to look at what other sites were doing.

I was particularly drawn to social bookmarking sites such as dig.com, which were huge at the time. I started analyzing the content being shared a lot on these sites. And I discovered certain characteristics they all shared.

I started writing similar content to those posts being shared over and over. It was quite different to the content I’d written so far. My posts became quite ‘fluffy’ – not very deep, and not very helpful either to be honest. They were written more to create controversy than to help anyone. And they all had titles that were practically clickbait.

And then I’d pitch them to sites by saying, “Here’s a post that might interest you and your readers”.

One of the sites I pitched my posts to was Lifehacker. And when they took the bait and linked to one of those posts, my traffic doubled overnight.

But that was just the beginning. The next day it was picked by digg.com, and I ended up with more than 100,000 visitors in a single day. I can still remember sitting at my computer, watching my stats climb every time I refreshed the page.

It was an incredible rush. And with it came the feeling that I’d finally be able to blog full-time.

The aftermath

But those incredible numbers didn’t last long, and the next day I had 4,100 visitors.

I was so disappointed.

I understand why so many people want their content to go viral. Getting that rush of traffic was amazing, and I doubt I’ll ever forget how I felt that morning. But despite trying to get all those new readers to read another post, sign up for my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter, I never got that traffic again.

For the next month my traffic was back to around 4,000 visitors a day. It started getting me down – I really wanted another rush of traffic. I wrote more posts like the first one, trying to recreate the scenario. But none of them took off. I pitched almost every post I wrote to Lifehacker, but they didn’t link to any of them. I even tried to game Digg and get my post voted up there, without success.

I was obsessed with going viral again. I desperately wanted a repeat of my earlier ‘success’. But all it did was encourage me to write more fluffy content designed to trigger shares rather than serve my readers. And while I did manage to get a few more posts to go viral, the spike in traffic lasted just as long.

The reality

My obsession with going viral continued for months. And then one day I realized what my 4,000-visitors-a-day figure really meant.

I had 4,000 people coming to my site every day. Out of all the web sites on the internet, they were making a conscious decision to spend some of their time on mine. And while I wasn’t getting 100,000 visitors a day, those numbers meant I was getting around 120,000 visitors a month.

Which was definitely worth celebrating.

But I also realized they were now getting short-changed. Because each time they visited they were getting formulaic headlines and fluffy content written specifically to be shared rather than to solve their problems.

And that had to change.

I changed not only what I wrote, but how I wrote. My new goal was to serve the readers I already had, and to grow my traffic slowly over time rather than in one big hit.

Of course, to serve my readers I had to know what they wanted. So I asked them by sending out surveys with questions such as:

• “Who are you?”
• “What problems are you having?”
• “What questions do you need answered?”

From those surveys I learned a lot about my readers, the problems they faced and what they wanted to know about. And I wrote content specifically to answer their question and try to solve their problems rather than to get clicks. And because I wasn’t continually refreshing my stats to see whether I’d managed to go viral again, I had a lot more time to write it.

Not only was I writing more useful content, I was also writing more of it. I quickly went from four posts a week to five, seven and eventually ten.

The human touch

Another bonus was I also had more time to interact with my readers. I started responding to comments more often, and we started a forum to try and build a community there.

I also started taking advantage of the traffic I was getting by encouraging those visitors to become subscribers. I focused more on building my email list and creating email content that would engage those readers and bring them back to the site again and again.

I still tried to write the occasional piece of shareable content. But rather than try to hit the ball out of the park with every post, I’d try it once in a dozen or so posts.

And as it turned out, whenever I did write sharable content my writers happily shared it for me because I was serving them better.

Again, they were just spikes rather than a massive growth for my blog. But they certainly helped in terms of social proof.

A month after deciding to focus on my readers rather than my traffic, I was getting 4,500 visitors a day. Three months later that figure had grown to 6,000 visitors a day. And a year later my blog was getting 9,000 visitors a day.

It still gets the occasional spike in traffic. But those spikes are just a bonus. My goal is to grow my traffic from day to day and have people stick around for the long term.

And now, getting 100,000 visitors a day is normal for us. But only because I stopped chasing viral traffic and started creating content to help my readers.

The truth

I honestly hope you get to experience that moment when one of your posts goes viral and your traffic goes through the roof. But don’t let it distract you from your long-term goals. Remember why you started blogging in the first place. And never take the fact people are choosing to visit your blog again and again for granted.

Look after them. And in the years to come, they will look after you.

Image credit: George Pagan III

The post The Key to Long-Term Traffic and Profit for Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

from ProBlogger https://ift.tt/2KNYIpK
via IFTTT

The Key to Long-Term Traffic and Profit for Your Blog

The post The Key to Long-Term Traffic and Profit for Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

“How do you create content that goes viral?”

I remember getting this question from a new blogger. They wanted a post to go viral on their blog, thinking it would suddenly shoot their blog’s traffic and profit into the stratosphere.

And who knows? It may have done just that. Unfortunately, without having plenty of content in their archive there’s a good chance those numbers would have come crashing down pretty quickly.

So I told this particular blogger what they needed to hear rather than what they wanted to hear. And I thought it would be worth sharing what I said with you all this week.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with writing content that might be shared hundreds or even thousands of times. I often talk about how important it is to write sharable content. But ‘going viral’ won’t necessarily give you the sustained traffic you need to make it as a full-time blogger.

While some bloggers may have achieved overnight success on the back of a single post, in most cases it took months (if not years) for them to become full-time bloggers. I’ve met thousands of bloggers over the years, and the fastest any of them have reached the full-time level is four months. And that was certainly the exception to the rule.

Most people take a longer to reach full-time status. And they achieve it by taking one step at a time.

The thrill

In the early days of Digital Photography School, I was obsessed with having my posts go viral.

And in January 2007 it finally happened.

The blog was about seven months old at the time, and I was averaging around 4,000 visitors a day. I certainly wasn’t complaining about the traffic I had, which came from a combination of:

• readers from my previous photography blog
• lots of evergreen content
• ranking relatively well in search.

But I’d been sitting on that number for a while, and I was no longer satisfied. I wanted more traffic, and I began to look at what other sites were doing.

I was particularly drawn to social bookmarking sites such as dig.com, which were huge at the time. I started analyzing the content being shared a lot on these sites. And I discovered certain characteristics they all shared.

I started writing similar content to those posts being shared over and over. It was quite different to the content I’d written so far. My posts became quite ‘fluffy’ – not very deep, and not very helpful either to be honest. They were written more to create controversy than to help anyone. And they all had titles that were practically clickbait.

And then I’d pitch them to sites by saying, “Here’s a post that might interest you and your readers”.

One of the sites I pitched my posts to was Lifehacker. And when they took the bait and linked to one of those posts, my traffic doubled overnight.

But that was just the beginning. The next day it was picked by digg.com, and I ended up with more than 100,000 visitors in a single day. I can still remember sitting at my computer, watching my stats climb every time I refreshed the page.

It was an incredible rush. And with it came the feeling that I’d finally be able to blog full-time.

The aftermath

But those incredible numbers didn’t last long, and the next day I had 4,100 visitors.

I was so disappointed.

I understand why so many people want their content to go viral. Getting that rush of traffic was amazing, and I doubt I’ll ever forget how I felt that morning. But despite trying to get all those new readers to read another post, sign up for my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter, I never got that traffic again.

For the next month my traffic was back to around 4,000 visitors a day. It started getting me down – I really wanted another rush of traffic. I wrote more posts like the first one, trying to recreate the scenario. But none of them took off. I pitched almost every post I wrote to Lifehacker, but they didn’t link to any of them. I even tried to game Digg and get my post voted up there, without success.

I was obsessed with going viral again. I desperately wanted a repeat of my earlier ‘success’. But all it did was encourage me to write more fluffy content designed to trigger shares rather than serve my readers. And while I did manage to get a few more posts to go viral, the spike in traffic lasted just as long.

The reality

My obsession with going viral continued for months. And then one day I realized what my 4,000-visitors-a-day figure really meant.

I had 4,000 people coming to my site every day. Out of all the web sites on the internet, they were making a conscious decision to spend some of their time on mine. And while I wasn’t getting 100,000 visitors a day, those numbers meant I was getting around 120,000 visitors a month.

Which was definitely worth celebrating.

But I also realized they were now getting short-changed. Because each time they visited they were getting formulaic headlines and fluffy content written specifically to be shared rather than to solve their problems.

And that had to change.

I changed not only what I wrote, but how I wrote. My new goal was to serve the readers I already had, and to grow my traffic slowly over time rather than in one big hit.

Of course, to serve my readers I had to know what they wanted. So I asked them by sending out surveys with questions such as:

• “Who are you?”
• “What problems are you having?”
• “What questions do you need answered?”

From those surveys I learned a lot about my readers, the problems they faced and what they wanted to know about. And I wrote content specifically to answer their question and try to solve their problems rather than to get clicks. And because I wasn’t continually refreshing my stats to see whether I’d managed to go viral again, I had a lot more time to write it.

Not only was I writing more useful content, I was also writing more of it. I quickly went from four posts a week to five, seven and eventually ten.

The human touch

Another bonus was I also had more time to interact with my readers. I started responding to comments more often, and we started a forum to try and build a community there.

I also started taking advantage of the traffic I was getting by encouraging those visitors to become subscribers. I focused more on building my email list and creating email content that would engage those readers and bring them back to the site again and again.

I still tried to write the occasional piece of shareable content. But rather than try to hit the ball out of the park with every post, I’d try it once in a dozen or so posts.

And as it turned out, whenever I did write sharable content my writers happily shared it for me because I was serving them better.

Again, they were just spikes rather than a massive growth for my blog. But they certainly helped in terms of social proof.

A month after deciding to focus on my readers rather than my traffic, I was getting 4,500 visitors a day. Three months later that figure had grown to 6,000 visitors a day. And a year later my blog was getting 9,000 visitors a day.

It still gets the occasional spike in traffic. But those spikes are just a bonus. My goal is to grow my traffic from day to day and have people stick around for the long term.

And now, getting 100,000 visitors a day is normal for us. But only because I stopped chasing viral traffic and started creating content to help my readers.

The truth

I honestly hope you get to experience that moment when one of your posts goes viral and your traffic goes through the roof. But don’t let it distract you from your long-term goals. Remember why you started blogging in the first place. And never take the fact people are choosing to visit your blog again and again for granted.

Look after them. And in the years to come, they will look after you.

Image credit: George Pagan III

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