If you are new to bogging, you know the pains you take to get others to respond to the content you create with so much love. The lack of audience is sometimes discouraging and makes you wonder why in Holy Ghost’s name did you start a blog?

Although, the audience builds up in due course if you persist long enough, sometimes targeting your content at a particular group of your audience does pay off.

I have noticed that the visitors coming from social media sites are very unhelpful and unresponsive. They are a mean lot. They consume the content and leave without so much as leaving an encouraging comment, subscribing to your feed, or er.. clicking on your ads. While it’s good to welcome any kind of visitors in a hope that your content gets more exposure and more people benefit from it, your first priority must be to identify your real audience and write particularly for them.

You know who they are. Your subscribers, your readers, and your commenters are your community, and they deserve the best you can offer to them.

When you slowly build a community, you naturally realise the needs and demands of your community. But, do you make a special effort to keep your community happy for what it gives to you?

I’ve seen blogs (won’t mention which) that, after having hit the Digg front page, completely ignore their readers and put all their energy into creating more Digg bait to get to that magic spot one more time, while their readers wonder what the hell happened.

It’s devastating for a blog to forget its readers in its selfish expedition to gain top spots on social media sites. When a blog loses its community, it goes crashing back to where it started.

Just to put everything into perspective, I get a high dose of StumbleUpon traffic every day, but it hardly helps my blog move a single step forward. Stumblers never subscribe, or even leave a comment on any of the posts. One of my posts got a thousand stumbles in a day, but this landmark didn’t affect my subscription statistics and total comment count one bit.

On the other hand, yesterday I got five visitors from Authority Blogger forum, and two of them left a comment on my posts.

And guess what? My subscription count was up by five!

If even the ten percent of stumblers had responded at all, they would have left 100 comments, and umm.. how about all of them subscribed?

Sounds unreasonable, no?

If you are on the verge of making a vow that you’ll never again write anything to attract social media traffic, STOP! That wasn’t my intention. You can write Digg bait, Stumble bait or whatever bait as often as you want, but don’t overdo it. Don’t fall in love with the huge surges of traffic. They are temporary, and will be gone before you blink. Focus, instead, on your readers and continue to deliver the quality you are known for.

Your community is the backbone of your blog, and helps you achieve your goals. While social media traffic is just a glimpse of the bright future that stretches ahead of you.