The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

Hugh McCleod is talking about the true size of your audience vs just what you can count up via website metrics and list length. Turns out, your audience may be enormously bigger than you think:

Another way to think about this is akin to a favorite rock band. You may not listen to their recordings every day, but pull out their music every so often, when your life needs a dose of their particular brand of inspiration. They might not be a daily fix, but they’re nonetheless a regular and important part of your life.

So following this logic, I’m guessing there are a lot of people who read me in the same manner that I read [fellow blogger] Weinberger. I may not be part of their daily fix, but they are part of my audience nonetheless.

In other words, just because someone doesn’t subscribe to your newsletter, stop by your blog every day (or even every week) or open most of your emails doesn’t mean that they’re not out there, waiting for you to say something that touches them and makes them want to reconnect.

Conversely, in a few quick notes at the end of the post, one of Hugh’s Twitter friends points out why traffic isn’t always the best measure of your audience.

..if ‘traffic’ is what you want, then more cartoons may mean more traffic. If you want connections and relationships, that’s harder.

And that’s the kicker right there. You can have a million people an hour hitting your site, but if none of them connect with you, your product, your personality or your message, they might as well not be there. OTOH, a small, but dedicated audience (even if they only check in on you once a month) is pure gold and worth 10 times the traffic numbers in actual value.

So, how big is your audience, really? You may never know. But one thing you need to realize is that focusing on traffic over building relationships = fail.

Tags: Conversation Economy //