Very profound and true, we’re all invisible sites until we get noticed - but that’s only for 15 seconds (the 15 minutes are gone); unless we have a way to draw people back - like an RSS Feed Subscriber, or Email Subscription - the visitors is gone - maybe FOREVER.
Seth Godin noted that "Every blog, every site is invisible… until it comes up on shuffle. The shuffle of reddit or digg or a cross-reference in someone else’s rss feed." We have so much competing for our attension and so much audience fragmentation (which is part of the Long Tail) that even if we get massive attension via a Digg Post that makes it to page 1 and stays for a couple of hours - that is traffic that is here today and gone the next day. Unless you get the visitor to subscribe, 99% of the time, they are one time visitors.
"And that’s what has happened to all of us. The local newspaper never had to worry about an attention lottery–everyone in town read the paper. Today, because it’s become molecuralized, our attention flits around, shuffled by one automated (or handbuilt) editor or another.
Which brings us back to subscription. The only win I see in the long run is for the winner of today’s attention lottery to earn a subscription (an RSS feed or an email sign up or a podcast subscription) that gives them a chance to be noticed tomorrow as well. Depending on the magic of shuffle for your success is too painful and too unpredictable.
That’s why I tend to look at my RSS subscriber base going up as a sign that my blog is doing better. After all, summer traffic is slow, and I can’t count of Digg for influxs of traffic, the 4,000 visitors in two hours that happend to me me a couple of months ago is a one and while thing.
"The page that Ron and I did was #1 on Digg and Delicious yesterday, at least for a little bit. And the traffic was huge. It really is like winning the attention lottery.
In the future - much more stress is going to be put on growing RSS traffic as a measure of site promotion succeeding; it’s easy to monitor if you have Feedburner.
By the way, my own subscribers to Webmetricsguru.com is much more than this - last I counted it was approaching 200 subscribers and grows by 20-30 subscribers a week. To me, that says i’m doing something right.
