Do You Have Ranking Obsessive Disorder?

I was recently perusing Serpd for great blog posts. Boy did I hit the jackpot! As I was reading a post about ways to know your content sucks,  by Hector Cueves, I made a startling discovery. I suck. Yep, I said it. I discovered a blogging disorder that may be causing you terrible symptoms as well. “Ranking Obsessive Disorder” or R.O.D. Sounds a little cheeky huh? Well, it’s serious my friends, very serious.

With Google Analytics, Alexa, Compete and all the other tools available to us to see where we stand in comparison to the other sites out there, we have an unlimited resource to enable our disorder. You may be asking yourself right now, “what the hell is this all about and why should I care?” As Hector points out, sometimes we may be more concerned with our rankings than we are with our readers. I, myself have struggled with this in the past.

How many times have we head over to our analytics account and checked every possible statistic we could? There is benchmarking, loyalty, visitor trending, bounce rate..a plethora of numbers to check our progress. There are times we may be spending an obsessive amount of time deciphering these numbers and not really paying attention to the most important factor…our readers. This is the most important factor for our success. If we are not keeping our visitors happy, or solving their problems, addressing their concerns than all of the hard work in our writing is in vain.

I am not saying that you should disregard analyzing your site. After all, this is how we see if our hard work and dedication is giving us a good return on our investment. But what needs to be the focal point is the community. The community thrives on interaction and building relationships. This is the best free way to gain loyal visitors. I can check my stats all day long and if my traffic has increased, but my relationships have not, I have essentially failed. I believe we all know how to build effective relationships out here in blog land, but here are just a few tips to remind you!

   Interact with your readers.  If you receive a comment, respond back. This is the first step    in bringing the personal touch to your blog.

.Answer the questions.  You need to write to solve your readers problems. Or better yet, if a question is asked in a comment, ignore that and lose a reader for sure.

Seek help. Recently, I wrote about learning from other bloggers.  This is so important. We can’t do it alone. We don’t know everything..as much as we like to think we do! We can learn so much from our fellow bloggers. Utilize other people’s knowledge.

 Pay it forward. So often this step is missed. We all try to build our links and visibility. If you read a great post, tell the author you loved it. Refer back to it in your own posts. Give someone who is struggling a pep talk or an idea to move them forward. If we all reciprocate the love, we can have a huge community of successful entrepreneurs.

If you have any more tips or ideas about how to overcome this ranking obsessive disorder, please feel free to leave a comment below! And let me take this opportunity to thank you for reading.