Oh Traffic, Oh Traffic – Where For Art Thou?

One of our favorite bloggers, Scott Karp, has a great post up over at Blogherald titled If No One Reads What You Write, That’s Because it Sucks. It’s a great article, looking at the different metrics in play that affect online readership.

That being said, if we wanted to apply these concepts specifically to digital editions, we’d have to say that – in addition to Scott’s points – there are at least two other factors which can have a negative impact on digital edition readership:

1) Your audience – For those of us chained to our computers, it’s hard to imagine that some people aren’t, but guess what? There are niches out there that don’t spend their days (or much of their nights) online. Tradespeople for one – you won’t find a laptop with wi-fi around where people pour cement and when these folks go home, they’re more interested in food and sleep than logging on the Web. Yes – this is somewhat stereotypical and I’m sure we could find a "blogging mason" somewhere – but if you’re going to build an audience, stereotyping is part of the process. Point being, if your audience isn’t online, great content won’t help.

2) The medium – this is a corporate blog, so here’s the part where we tell you a little bit about how NXTbooks can help your readership. Most digital publishing companies don’t offer permalinks and most Flash-driven solutions aren’t indexed by search engines. To the publisher, this means your content can’t easily be shared by those who do find it, and can’t be found by search engines – neither of which help readership. NXTbook Media is different – our page-specific permalinks help your content get shared and our Hybrid Indexed Flash helps Google and Yahoo to find your content.