Blogged thoughts, is our web blog. Expect views, opinion, rants and tirades about everything and anything 

Short post today folks, by the way is it ‘webtraffic’ or ‘web traffic’? Seems like a lot of web specific words/phrases get joined together. Anyhow today is the 1st of November and for the 5th month in a row my traffic went up from the figure from the previous month. The line chart for daily visitors when in year view on Google Analytics shows a small but seemingly steady movement towards a Northeast direction, the particular figure for October passed what could be called a ‘milestone’ (for the relaunched site anyhow, it didn’t pass some of the crazy milestones of 2002 and 2003) thus I must be doing something right. The question is though how do I maintain this and keep these increases going indefinitely? What would you do?

Is it a no brainer to just continue to concentrate on writing quality content for the site and then a ‘write it and they will come’ type of situation will occur? Is it the case that I should increase my networking in related external blogs, forums and newsgroups? Or should I attempt to juice up my SERPS with another active links campaign, reciprocal or otherwise? Perhaps I should set aside a budget for pay per inclusion directories?

More than likely my strategy will be a combination of a couple of different approaches, including some (or all) of the above. The one thing I am sure of though is that in terms of website promotion one cannot rely on the status quo to get them by, I mean if I was to simply leave the site the way it was and not add new content or not get more links, sooner or later traffic would start to dip and fizzle away, nobody can say that this would not be the case. Of course utimately I will be making the end decisions about this sites marketing efforts but of course your opinions are always welcome, so please do share them.

Strange kind of issue today I know folks, but it’s something I want to gauge my visitors views on in light of the fact that in the past few months I have through my own networking and indeed through this site come in touch with people and companies which strictly speaking can be considered as my competition. Many of these people and companies have expressed desires to meet up with me informally over a beer or a coffee and have a chat.

Now generally speaking, I love chatting about the businessy (not actually a word I know - but should be) side of the web such as SEO, Internet marketing, ecommerce in general, takeovers, stocks etc. and not the technicial side of it, this is despite the fact that I have a first class honours degree in Computer Science and work as a PHP/.NET developer (or ‘code monkey’ as my boss calls it) during the day but one has to wonder about the merits of meeting up and getting to know the competition.

What good can come of it I wonder? Does it enable us to learn more about the competition in order for us to make ourselves better than them or even to enable us to put them out of business? Or does it put in place a type of ‘friendly competition’ which can be useful when either side gets bogged down with too much work and is looking for someone to send that excess work to perhaps even in return for an ever so slight commission?

Is it possible for two competitors to meet without ulterior motives on either side? These days even the smallest bit of business information could potentially be worth thousands and thousands of hard earned currency, so are meetings like these basically an exercise in information extraction in which the most tactful side will ‘win’? Or is there enough business out there for both sides and is an exchange of tips, thoughts and approaches beneficial to both parties for use against the rest of the markets’ competitors? These are the questions I pose, your thoughts and opinions are as always much appreciated.