You’ve covered the essentials: you’ve got a website, and you have a staff member (several, if you’re lucky) assigned to work on it. Now you’re ready to work on increasing your site traffic. But have you thought about why?

This isn’t a trick question; there’s no inherent reason to build your traffic (unless you like to show off high Comscore numbers at parties). So before you embark on a traffic-building plan, it’s a good idea to decide why you want those higher numbers. That way, you can build a plan that meets your goals.

Some good reasons to build traffic are:

• Ad revenue (advertisers like big numbers)
• Building your brand (make a larger number of people aware of who you are and what you stand for)
• Creating “community” (also, generally, around your brand)
• Pushing print subscriptions (an old-fashioned site strategy, but still a common one) 

It’s likely that you agree with all of these reasons. But if you’ve got limited resources (and please, find me a Canadian magazine that doesn’t), it’s worth deciding what’s most important and focusing on that.

Why are you building your site’s traffic? Is it for the wrong reasons?