Hits, Followers, and Comments

The success of most websites depends on several things: the number of visitors to the site; the amount of people who sign up for a newsletter or more information (acquiring potential customer details); and the number of sales and repeat sales.

Now a blog’s function is a little different than a retail website, even though items can be sold through a blog. Since the purpose of a blog is more networking than anything else, those three items can be translated to hits, followers, and comments. And they seem to fall in line with a similar level of importance.

Think of your site like a restaurant - there is a big difference between someone driving by a restaurant and someone coming inside - and an even bigger difference if that person actually orders food.

Hits

As I discovered from the detailed stats on my two websites, there is a big difference between hits, page views, and visitors, and most stat counters are inaccurate when it comes to actual visits to a site.

Here’s some definitions from Wikipedia:

Hit - A request for a file from the web server. The number of hits received by a website is frequently cited to assert its popularity, but this number is extremely misleading and dramatically over-estimates popularity. A single web-page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) of discrete files, each of which is counted as a hit as the page is downloaded, so the number of hits is really an arbitrary number more reflective of the complexity of individual pages on the website than the website's actual popularity..

Page view - A single page view may generate multiple hits as all the resources required to view the page are also requested from the web server.

Visit / Session - A visit is defined as a series of page requests from the same uniquely identified client with a time of no more than 30 minutes between each page request.

Hits, page views, and visits are good, because that means people are looking for us or what we have to offer. But they may or may not add up to much in the end.

Followers

On a website, these are the people who leave their contact information. These are the ones that come inside and pick up a menu.

These people are curious enough to leave a contact and may return. They are potential friends and networking opportunities. Unless they interact with us though, that’s as far as it goes.

Comments

These are the people who are buying! They are the ones who interact with us. They care enough to leave a comment and build a relationship. In life, we are ultimately selling ourselves, and those who comment buy who we are - they believe, they understand, they can relate. (And if we’ve sold ourselves as a person, then selling ideas and physical items is easy.)

So, which would you rather have?

5000 hits/views/visitors?

1000 followers?

100 comments?