The other day, I was talking to a business associate who has a non-profit site promoting a moral code for children. She was asking me about SiteBuildIt! (SBI!) and something she said just won't leave me alone.
SBI! is all about websites that get actual traffic and her response to something I had written about SBI! was she had "a site that she just sends people to" herself. The implication was she didn't really need something like SBI! as a service because she was just using her site as a big electronic business card, or as a follow-up tool in her sales.
This is all fine and good, but it struck me as contradictory. So I asked her a question: "If you had, say, 5,000 or 10,000 or more people come to your site every week, would that help what you're trying to do?" "Of course!" she immediately responded.
It was a predictable reply, of course, but this brief exchange was enlightening to me. It exposed something I think a lot of people who have websites feel.
Many have become apathetic toward idea of getting traffic at all.
I know I had. My blogs were created foremost for me to have an avenue to write. A place to put my thoughts.
But without traffic, what good is that? A little relief for me I suppose, but that relief could be potentiated by knowing I'm getting a lot of people stopping by to read a bit, even if just for the usual 10 seconds you get when a visitor arrives to any website.
Ah but I digress.
It's a weakness of our human nature to sometimes justify or make less of something we know is wrong rather than just take a look at it head-on. It relieves some of the pressure of knowing we are basically an accomplice to our own undoing in some way.
The goal starts off nice and clear, when first concieved: build it (the website) and they will come. We sign up for a hosting service which promises a nice cheap location on the web for pennies a day. Wethen purchase some website design software or have a friend help us put it all together or use some other cheap/free method of building it. Months later, when the visitors don't "come" it is far easier to find a reason why we don't need the traffic than to admit we didn't do our homework in the first place, or that we focused on the wrong goal in the first place (building it instead of first researching what to build that would get traffic).
It reminds me of the bumper sticker I saw while camping over Labor Day weekend. It read: Vegetarian: an old Indian word for "bad hunter."
It may be less comfortable, but the right thing to do is own up to the fact that we would love it if our website(s) had real, organically-attracted traffic in viable numbers, but just don't believe it can happen anymore.
Admitting that opens the door a crack and lets in the idea that maybe...just maybe something could be done about that problem.
In other words, the first step is to take some responsibility for it and decide that, as a website owner (future or present), it would be wise to understand this area of how traffic is made in the first place.
Now this is where SBI! truly shines. They are all about helping non-technical people learn the seemingly technical science of generating traffic on the web. You don't have to know HTML (or any other acronym) to understand this area. You just need to have a source of information that actually presents itself in a way that you can take it step by step. That is exactly what SBI! is and does.
I suspect I'll be singing SBI!'s praises for some time to come. Their service is really that good. But for now I just want to get across to folks out there who have sites or have had them and have given up on getting traffic, that they can have websites that generate their own traffic without having to hire some high-priced super consultant.
What's more, you don't even have to be a vegetarian! ;-)