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A question that arose among members and possible members of my new Planet Atheism is this: won’t people start reading my writings through the Planet, and never visit my blog again? In other words, won’t it reduce traffic?

Traffic is important to many kinds of blogs (and sites in general). Maybe you are supported by ads, either as a main source of income, or just as a little extra cash every month. Maybe your blog is more about the comments than the posts themselves. Maybe it has other interactive features, which won’t be seen by anyone reading it through the “Planet”.

So, the question makes sense.

My own experience of being a part of a Planet — in this case, Planeta Asterisco, which aggregates this very blog — has always been positive. It hasn’t made me “famous” , but I notice that I get readers from the aggregator, that other members themselves sometimes comment on my posts, and so on.

But you can consider the following factors:

1. losing any traffic should be incredibly rare, if it happens at all. Any regular readers you already have will probably keep reading your blog the way they’re used to.
2. belonging to a Planet will increase your readership; depending on the Planet’s success, it may increase it a lot. An increased readership, even if many of them don’t actually visit your blog frequently, has many advantages; among others, they are likely to link to any posts of yours they find interesting. And comment on them (which, incidentally, means they visit your blog after all). You also begin to slowly build a “name” for yourself.
3. you can gain a lot in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). The aggregator includes permanent links to your blog, and to each individual post. Since many of the Planet’s members will also link to the Planet itself, it will probably soon be very well positioned in terms of SEO, making links from it valuable. As a result, you get more visitors from search engines.
4. you get other members of the Planet as regular readers (since most tend to read the Planet themselves). They all have blogs about (mostly) the same subject as yours, which increases the likeliness of they expanding on your posts in their own blogs, linking to yours. Again, more readers (coming from their blogs), and SEO gains (because of the links).
5. if you’re afraid of being part of an aggregator, then you should be afraid of having an RSS feed at all, shouldn’t you?

Related posts:

1. Blogging tips #20: Using social bookmarking to increase traffic
2. Blogging: more “experiments” with traffic
3. Tip: give your blog’s readers a way to contact you
4. “What to do when your Google traffic disappears”
5. Chtika eMiniMalls: how to increase CTR

Tags: Blogging, planet, planet-atheism, planeta-asterisco, seo

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 12:31 and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.