The great blog photo dilemma: stock or custom

A blog with good information, clear writing and solid promotion does you no good if it doesn’t reach the right audience.
The wrong audience for your site isn’t likely to produce horrific results, but it might create one of the worst possible outcomes for your business … nothing at all. Here are five things to look for that indicate your blog isn’t reaching your intended audience:

1. Inbound Traffic From Random Sources
Site statistics will tell you what pages your visitors were on immediately prior to coming to you. Random number strings, unrelated sites and known link farms indicate sources of less invested visitors.

2. High Bounce Rate
“Bounce rate” is the percentage of visitors who view only one page before leaving your website. Some of these will represent die-hard fans who drop in regularly checking for updates. Most, however, represent people who showed up and left from lack of interest.

3. Traffic Spikes
If you get a single day or weekend of high traffic followed by nothing, that traffic probably consisted of the wrong people. It came from a single post that went viral, or an effective publicity initiative — not from engaging the people your blog is aimed for.
It’s worthwhile to look at what caused the spike, though. It may point you toward ways to attract the right readers using similar methods.

4.Off-Kilter Comments
Read the comments on your blog. Are they engaged and interested? Do they expand the conversation? Or are they link bait or a single meaningless line? A lack of high-value comments is a sure sign that you’re failing to attract visitors who care about what you have to say.

5. Low Conversion Rate
If you get 10,000 visitors each day, but no subscriptions or sales, you’re reaching the wrong people. This seems fairly obvious, but many beginning bloggers will look only at their traffic, without considering conversion rate — or even including an opportunity to buy or subscribe on each page.