People ask all the time about what kind of traffic myITforum.com gets, since I say from time-to-time that we’re constantly growing. Vendors ask a lot about how much traffic we see per month and I have to chuckle a bit and say “it’s probably better to give you a per day or per week”. Once I give them the stats, they understand why.
Here’s a quick breakdown of just the past 7 days:
Total Sessions: 261,254.00
Total Pageviews: 2,009,062.00
Total Hits: 3,454,587.00
Total Bytes Transferred: 38.47 GB
I post things like this periodically – I even include them in community presentations/sessions sometimes – but it’s not to brag. Not at all. The importance of stats like these is to make the community aware but also vendors. And, here’s why…
Community
From a community perspective, seeing these types of numbers gives a couple assurances. First, it shows community members that there is a significant community following, which means that they can get their questions answered and problems resolved quickly. Visiting a not-so-active web site can be frustrating, particularly when a huge issue comes up and there’s no one around to help.
Secondly, it shows that there’s a lot of sharing going on. If you pay attention closely to a few web sites you see that only a handful of people are actually participating – and that handful of people are, in reality, the people running or maintaining the web site. Not good. By providing a worldwide community of active participants you know that, when a huge issue comes up, *someone* *somewhere* has seen it or experienced it and you’ll be able to work through the issue together.
Third, these type of numbers show that content is continually updated, refreshed, or generated. Each day that you visit, you’ll learn something new. And, again, you’re not learning something new from the same old people all the time. You get to learn from different perspectives and views that ultimately complete the whole systems management picture.
Vendors
From a vendor perspective stats like these should make you salivate. Why? Well, for one, the community is dedicated. By interacting with the community in a number of ways (ads, press releases, in-community support, etc.) you become an unofficial “member” of the community – meaning that your company, products, etc. are in the minds of potential customers all day long. Its not like another web site where you have to pull teeth to get results from marketing, the myITforum.com community visits daily because they WANT to. Your products and services are seen and heard without amassing a huge marketing campaign that may result in 10% or less of a response and may end up just sucking your marketing budget dry. Vendors should spend time interacting with the community – become “friends” with the community.
Another reason is that the community is active. By interacting with an active community you know that your efforts will never be wasted. You know that your efforts will be heard by someone, any time of the day.
And finally, the community is large (and growing) and highly targeted. You can go advertise on a different web site, but your results will suffer. At myITforum.com you know that there will always an attentive audience. And, we make sure that the audience knows about you, your company, and your products. myITforum.com management constantly works for you to make sure that your message is clear and evident. On a lot of web sites, you post a banner or two and hope for the best. When the banner rotation is over you sift through your results and say something like “well, that didn’t work out, let’s try something else”. Through our creative and sometimes demanding services, your message is spread wide and far to an audience that actually wants to know about you. When you partner with myITforum.com, you’re not just giving us a banner. Like any ad agency, we help build your reputation on a level that you’ll not see anywhere else.
If you’re a vendor who is interested in hearing more about interacting with a large community and getting real results for your efforts, drop me a note: rodtrent@myITforum.com