Connor Wilson » Blog Archive » Having Hunreds of Thousands of Tech-Illerterate Visitors

Having Hunreds of Thousands of Tech-Illerterate Visitors

Posted on April 4th in Ideas — No comments so far. Got something to say?

I forget how I cam across it, but just recently I stumbled on PinkIsTheNewBlog. It’s a celebrity gossip style blog, but I assure there is a point to this. Upon seeing it, I wasn’t totally interested in the content, but this blog is one of the top 5 or so most popular website among women 18-34. It’s a pretty tough market, basically filled by MySpace on top, with Google and YouTube getting in there too. So This site (pitnb- also ranked 174 on Technorati) must be pretty popular? Well, after some scrolling, you can find their stats and FeedBurner counter.

Upon looking at the stats (here and here), one could conclude: Wow. That’s a lot of hits for a… crappy design and clutter city. That’s a lot of hits for anyone. But the design doesn’t matter. Why? Because those 134,000 visitors a day only convert to 1200 RSS readers. Conclusions? The readers aren’t ‘computer people’ so to speak. Traffic doesn’t always correlate with feed readers and subscribers, but when you get 500 hits a day (est. for 1200 readers- someone help me out here) it should be a lot different than 130,000.

How could this improve?

I bet with one day, and one blog post the count could spike to at least 50,000, and stay there. But, how? Inform your users. If you’re running a non-tech site, where users won’t know what RSS is, to improve your hits/readers, try the following:

Post: “What RSS is and how to use it”. The first step to getting your users to subscribe. If 130,000 seemingly devout readers saw a post on this ‘new’ technology you could use to get updates from blogs/websites everywhere, and how to use things like Google Reader and BlogLines, then a lot of them are going to do it!
Get the counter and icons above the fold. Make those 1200 people seem like the coolest people in the world by honouring them (so to speak) at the top of your page. Other people will catch on very quickly.
Just encourage it. With celebrity gossip bloggers, non-tech related (and by tech, it’s very broad, including business, etc…) sites, etc… chance are your readers don’t read much else besides their email. Email updates anyone?

With a site like PITNB, it just has so much potential. Slap a new design on there, maybe formulate some sort of identity and get the subscriber count up to in turn boost traffic over time, and there you go: more traffic, readers, money, etc… The writing obviously isn’t the problem, because that seems to be what’s bringing the users in and back.

Update: Here’s a comparison for you: TechCrunch gets less traffic on average (95k/d) than PITNB, yet has 350k subscribers. Potential increase of 349k?