Posted: July 17th, 2008 in General »
My new passion project, an art blog, is going swimmingly and I’ve really enjoyed the change of pace. That pace being slow as a turtle as I tweak every detail from fiddling with the Wordpress theme so much that it’s unrecognizable from the one I initially downloaded (and still give a linkback to), installing loads of plug-ins and widgets, and generally being an obsessive compulsive freak. Now *that* shade of beige looks much better. Waitaminute…did I check it in IE yet? The dashed box around my sidebar looks totally messed up! Clearly I can’t be expected to create any, you know, CONTENT when I’ve got a sidebar that doesn’t look exactly the way I want it to across all browser platforms.
I’m giving myself a bit of leeway since this is a passion project and not one I’m doing for solely income generating purposes, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t loads of you out there, reading the latest marketing guru blogs and secret forums, then squirreling away all that information until you’ve perfected your blog or CMS design. The fact of the matter is - it doesn’t matter what your site looks like if you don’t have traffic. That bears repeating:
It doesn’t matter what your site looks like if you don’t have any traffic!
I’m guilty of putting off traffic generation too as it’s my absolute least favorite part of this business. I convince myself that it’s OK to procrastinate because my site isn’t ready yet and gosh, I wouldn’t want a whole bunch of people to visit my site when it doesn’t look perfect yet. But it’s far too tempting to sit on a great idea for a site while you install all sorts of bells and whistles on your site, then spend ages creating great content for the site and when you’re finally ready to unleash your masterpiece to the world? Somebody else beat you to the bunch and is dominating page 1 for all of your keywords. No good.
So, before you install that new Flickr script or search for yet another new theme, ask yourself, “What did I do to generate new traffic today?”
You can always tweak your site later and once you’ve got steady traffic coming in, you’ll have solid data to help inform any decisions you make with your site design. If you’ve got a decent stats program (even Google analytics will do), you should be able to see pretty quickly if changing the link on your post titles to a different color garners more or less clicks throughout your site. You just changed the background color? Take a look at your average visitor length for the next few days & see if there’s a change. If people are backspacing a lot faster, you may want to rethink your neon green on black color scheme.
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