Quality vs. quantity
Last week I made a decision regarding my personal blog, Movie Marketing Madness. While Blogger had been good to me since the blog's inception in early 2005, I started to feel the time was right for a change. Through a variety of projects I had been playing around with WordPress and was really digging the functionality it provided. I had also been sitting on the moviemarketingmadness.com domain for a while, but had pretty much just been redirecting it to the blogspot-hosted URL.
So I finally installed WordPress, imported all the old posts over to the new URL and set about the next phase in the life of a blog that's been very good to me, both personally and professionally. But, because I didn't want to lose over year's worth of incoming links, I left the blogspot blog alone. Even so, I saw my traffic drop like a rock. But you know what? I actually consider that a good thing.
See, for the last couple months I'd been getting a lot of visitors running Google Images searches for a couple of movie posters in particular. For some reason I wasn't really thrilled with that. It was like I didn't consider them “real†hits since they weren't there for my content but for an image I had happened to upload. As soon as I switched over to WordPress I saw those referrals disappear. Now my daily traffic is about a third to a quarter what it had been, but I like the quality of those hits much more than I did the quantity I was getting before.
Bloggers, it seems to me, seem to have one of two mindsets. Either they strive for their sites to have the biggest possible exposure and achieve the widest reach they can or they want to be taken very seriously by a core group. I'm very much the latter. I want my blog to read by the type of people who are interested in that particular niche of the world. That might sound kind of elitist, like I require some “cool†test in order to join my club, but it's not. In fact it's the exact opposite. I want MMM to be successful and to reach a large number of people. But I want them to come there to read me as opposed to just coming there to because Google says I have a picture they're interested in.
So the move to WordPress has been a good one, both for the hosted functionality it gives me as well as for the reboot it gave to my traffic numbers. I can more clearly see who's visiting and how they got there. That information will help me build a better site for both me and my readers, which is what blogging is all about.
