Fuwa & Mulan by Yuxuan.fishy.Wang, on Flickr

OK, sorry, this is as close as I could find without actual theft. But September has had a distressing effect on my traffic numbers, and it is just serendipitous that the Fizzle guys just came out with a wonderful podcast on the subject (traffic, not so much cats dressed up as Disney princesses, although that suggestion is part of their conversation). Musing about this today.

We live in an attention economy. The cost of having a website or any kind of online platform has plummeted, so there’s an awful lot of noise out there. People like Michael Hyatt make a living telling people literally how to stand out in a noisy world. Everybody is trying to get traffic, the lifeblood of making a living on the Interwebs.

What is traffic? It means people see the link to your site and click on it. They come, they look, if you have something they want or like, they stick around and click on a few more pages. Maybe they’ll buy something (if you have something to sell). Maybe they’ll click on an affiliate link and you’ll make a little money. That’s called a conversion, and it’s what you are looking for.

In the majority of cases, unfortunately, they will see right away that your site is not what they were looking for and bounce away. You got people clicking on your site, but nothing came of it. It’s junk traffic.

I’ve had junk traffic – the best day my blog ever had in terms of traffic was the day my hope of not needing a bra if I did enough kettlebells hit some news site. I sat there and watched the bar go up and up, it was addicting and exciting and everything else. They like me, they really like me!

But guess what? They were mostly bouncers. I imagine they were looking for women without bras, and when all they found was me, they went away again. If you came here because you were looking for cats dressed up as Disney princesses, you are probably on your way out again, too. Bye.

So what’s the deal with traffic? Do we want lots of traffic, or not? Is it OK to use dubious sales tactics like the subject line above, in the hope that something sticks? Or should we just focus on making an epic product (which is my plan for this site, in case you were wondering!), and not bother with all that SEO stuff? Or is the truth somewhere in between?

I will not lie to you, dear reader. I desire traffic. I desire attention. But mostly, I desire a community of people who care about each other (not necessarily about me, although that’s nice, too). I desire a conversation of thoughtful people, about many different things – about life, love, lacto-fermentation, raising children, swinging kettlebells, network marketing, WordPress, real food, whatever it is we want to share with each other.

So come on. Comment. Share. Join the mailing list and tell me what you want me to write about. Send me guest posts (although I won’t promise to post them, I do promise we’ll talk). Let’s get this conversation going.