I’ve been studying internet traffic for awhile, and blog traffic that comes in from search engines is interesting to me. Blogs are all geared towards creating community-style users, but most people land on blog pages just don’t stick around. This was sort of surprising to me at one time, but I’ve gotten used to the fact.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether you answer their question or not. If you answer a surfer’s question totally, there isn’t much more for them to do. If you don’t, they’re heading out anyways. So how do you convert people into readers, or commenters, or anything? Volume, my boy….volume. It takes a literal ton of traffic to get people to participate, and the type of traffic you need is organic and targeted.

Now, if a website is attempting to be an information resource, it’s going to take quite a bit of content to get people to actually bookmark it. And the visitors has to be in active research mode. Most web surfers are much more passive than that, and they’re looking for bite sized bits of information and fresh subject matter. Not everyone will read an 10,000 word document, no matter how good it may be. It’s all a tradeoff between time and interest.

So if you’re out there and wondering why it’s taking a long while to build up a community resource, don’t despair. It’s just a matter of traffic volume, and time.