MackCollier.com

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How I Used Twitter to Increase My Blog’s Traffic by 60% in Two Weeks

Hey y’all, I wanted to update you on my progress on using Twitter as a tool to grow my blog’s traffic.  As I posted last week, I was able to increase my blog’s traffic by 41% in one week by using this method:

1 – Every morning starting at 8am, I would RT a link to a blog post/article every 10 mins, from 8am-10am.

2 – At 8am I would link to the blog post I wrote the previous day.  At 9am I would link to the blog post I wrote THAT day.  I would link to that day’s blog post again at noon and 3pm.

3 – During the day I would link to other interesting blog posts and articles I found or saw other people sharing.

That’s it.  But the main thing is that I started sharing links from 8am-10am, when most people are settling into their desks and getting the work day started.  Next week I might change the timing to coincide with lunch, maybe do it from 11am-1pm.

Anyway, here’s the traffic results I saw.  As I posted last week, traffic increased 41% over the previous week.  Last week, traffic increased another 14% over the previous week’s level:

blog traffic, twitter, increasing traffic, retweets, google analytics

As you can see, big jump in the 2nd week, and a smaller, but still respectable increase last week.  I was honestly hoping to see last week’s traffic increase by 10% over the previous week, so seeing a 14% gain was a pleasant surprise.

Now, by itself, saying traffic increased by 14% last week really isn’t enough to warrant a new blog post.  But something very interesting happened Monday night and I wanted to share that with you.  As I was watching the Daytona 500, at around 9pm or so, there was a bizarre series of events.  First, there was a wreck, and that brought out a caution, and a few trucks came onto the track to clean up the debris.  But as one of the cars (not involved in the wreck) was driving around the track, suddenly something ‘broke’ in its steering, and the car slid out of control, and directly into one of the trucks that was on the track cleaning up the mess!  And this particular truck just so happened to be carrying 200 gallons of jet fuel, so when the car slid into it, it immediately resulted in a huge burst of flames, and it was a miracle it didn’t explode.

But this meant that NASCAR now had an even bigger mess to clean up, and it took about an hour to get the track cleaned up and ready to finish the race.  Two interesting things happened during that hour.  The first is that during the delay, driver Brad Keselowski, who was smart enough to have his phone with him inside his car, took his car out and began live-tweeting the cleanup and what was happening.  Fox, which was carrying the Daytona 500, made several references on air to Brad tweeting, and Brad picked up over 50,000 Twitter followers during the delay.  Great example of Brad capitalizing on the delay.

But when the fire for the truck with the jet fuel was finally put out, it had created a huge sticky mess that needed to be cleaned up.  So how did NASCAR get rid of all that gunk?  By bringing box after box of Tide detergent onto the track!  Tide got an incredibly fortuitous ‘product placement’ during one of the biggest sporting events of the year, and they were a very popular topic among Twitter users at this time.

The problem was, Tide wasn’t active on Twitter at this time, and as I blogged about, their last tweet was several hours prior to the wreck.  It appeared that Tide had stopped tweeting around 5pm, and wasn’t monitoring Twitter that night, and didn’t notice all the free publicity they were getting until the following morning when they finally checked Twitter.

A definite missed opportunity for the brand, and I quickly wrote  a blog post Monday night (while the race was still going) about how Keselowski took advantage of the delay to group his Twitter following, but Tide totally dropped the ball by (apparently) not even monitoring Twitter during the race.  Now I was hoping that this post would be one of the first ones on the events, so I did make sure to optimize it for certain keywords like Twitter, Tide, Daytona 500 and Brad Keselowski, because I was hoping it would pick up some search traffic.  And it definitely did, here’s what my traffic looked like here on Monday (Note the spike at the end of the day when the post went live):

tide, daytona 500, brad keselowski

That spike was almost completely due to search traffic, as everyone was watching Fox mention how many followers Keselowski had picked up, and they were Googling to see what had happened.  Luckily, my post was one of the first ones on the story, in fact I scooped Mashable by 2 hours 😉

And the next morning when ESPN’s Sports Business Reporter Kristi Dosh was doing research for a post she was doing on the race’s events, my post was the #2 result she found for Tide and Daytona 500.  So that led to her contacting and interviewing me for her piece, which ran on ESPN’s site later on Tuesday.  So being proactive and blogging the race’s turn of events not only led to a nice bump in traffic for me on Monday night and Tuesday morning, it also led to me getting interviewed by ESPN.  Not too shabby!

The goal for this week is to again increase traffic by 10% over last week’s levels.  To do that, I’ll need to average almost 600 visitors a day, which would be almost double the traffic I saw here two weeks ago.  But it does prove that by blogging more, and leveraging a site where you are active like Twitter to help promote your blog, that you can quickly grow your blog’s traffic.

If any of you have started using this method for sharing and promoting content on Twitter to drive traffic back to your blog, what have your results been?

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How I Leveraged Twitter to Boost My Blog’s Traffic by 41% Last Week

I’ve blogged before about how you can use Twitter as a tool to drive more attention and exposure to your blog.  I wanted to walk you through how I used Twitter to increase my blog’s traffic last week by 41% over the previous week.

First, I posted 5 times last week, Sunday-Thursday.  On Monday-Thurs, I had a very specific pattern for using Twitter to push traffic back here.

Starting at 8am each morning, I tweeted a link to the previous day’s post here.  Then I went through Google Reader and every 10 mins from 8:10-8:50 I linked to an interesting post or article.  Then at 9:00 am I linked to my new post for that day.  Then starting at 9:10 am I tweeted out a link to another post or article from someone else every 10 mins.  Usually, I stopped at 10 am.

So from 8am-10am, I tweeted a new post or article, every 10 mins.  2 of them were my posts, the rest were posts or articles other people had written.  Then I would again tweet out a link to that day’s post at noon, and again at 3pm.  Also during the day I would RT any interesting links I saw other people sharing.

Here’s what my traffic looked like 2 weeks ago, then last week:

Two weeks ago, I averaged 340 visitors a day here, last week I averaged 479.

Now this strategy works especially well for companies or individuals that are using a blog as a thought leadership tool or to build awareness.  By sharing relevant content on Twitter that’s consistent with the content I create here, there’s several benefits for me:

1 – Sharing valuable content on the same topics as I blog about helps raise my visibility around those topics.

2 – As I am sharing links, more people start paying attention to the links I am sharing, which means more traffic when I share links back here.

3 – As I share links from other bloggers, it increases the chance that they will reciprocate by RTing a link to one of my posts.

 

Now on Friday, I didn’t write a new blog post.  Instead, I RTed a link to the 3 most viewed posts here last week, sending out a tweet to a new post at 9am, noon, and 3pm.  This way, I didn’t have to write a new blog post on either Thurs or Friday, so it freed me up to spend that time working on other projects.

So again, here’s the system I used on Monday-Thursday:

1 – Each day, publish a new post at 8am.

2 – Starting at 8am each day, tweet out a link to a new blog post or article every 10 mins till 10am.  13 links total.

3 – Tweet out the link to the previous day’s post at 8am, the current day’s post at 9am.

4 – Tweet out another link to the current day’s post at noon and again at 3pm.

5 – Throughout the day, RT valuable links that I see others sharing.

 

So if you are looking for a simple way to use Twitter to drive more traffic to your blog and build visibility for yourself, try this simple format.  This is also a good way to take an activity you are already engaging in (reading your feeds in Google Reader) and use that content to build your blog’s traffic as well as your Twitter following.

 

PS: A few minutes ago I got an email offering to ‘sell’ me 10,000 Twitter followers for $5.  As with much in life, real results require real work.

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The Beginner’s Guide to Blog Analytics

Analytics is an area that a lot of bloggers don’t pay as much attention to as they should.  And while I’m definitely not an expert when it comes to super-advanced analytics-tracking, I did want to give y’all a general overview of getting analytics tracking set up on your blog and some of the main metrics you should be looking at.

First, you’ll need to add a statistics tracker to your blog.  You can get a premium service if you want, but there’s plenty of free options that should be just fine for the average blogger.  On this blog, I use SiteMeter and Google Analytics to track my blog’s statistics.  Both of these services require you adding a snippet of HTML code to your blog’s template in order to ‘register’ the information about your blog’s visitors.  Now at one time, this could be a pain in the ass, especially if you weren’t comfortable editing your blog’s template coding.  Luckily, it’s gotten a lot easier now to do this.

For SiteMeter, you’ll need to first sign up for a free account, and then SiteMeter will give you the code you need to add to your blog’s template.  If you are comfortable doing the coding yourself, all you’ll need to do is take the HTML code SiteMeter gives you, and put it right before your template’s closing </BODY> tag.  If you have no earthly idea what I just said, don’t worry, you can click this link for a tutorial.  Or to make it even easier, you can do what I did, I took the code and created a new text-based widget on my sidebar, and added it there.  Simple as can be.

The second way I track my blog’s analytics is with Google Analytics.  As with SiteMeter, this requires adding a snippet of code to your blog’s template.  You’ll again need to sign up for an account with Google Analytics, and then take the code they provide and add it to your blog’s template.  I used a plugin to do this for this blog, Yoast’s  Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin.  That link will show you some of the additional functionality you can get from using the plugin.  But again, if you are comfortable tweaking your blog’s template, you can probably add the GA code manually without much problem.

There are other services you can use, but these are the two I use here.  Now in general, I use SiteMeter to track real-time visitor information, and I use Google Analytics to look at trends over time.  Even with the new version of Google Analytics and it’s Real-Time dashboard, I still get more detailed information from SiteMeter, especially on individual visitors.

Now I wanted to give y’all an overview of first some of the ‘basic’ metrics you should be looking at, and then I wanted to walk you through some of the metrics that I spend more time looking at.

Traffic.  Everyone loves to look at their traffic.  But besides being an ego-gush, there’s some very valid reasons to pay close attention to your traffic.  First, you want to see how it’s trending over time.  For example, if your traffic was down 33% in January of this year versus January of 2011, it helps to try to figure out why that decrease happened.

Also, looking at your traffic can give you great clues about when you should be publishing new posts.  For example, here’s what the traffic looks like here over the last 30 days according to SiteMeter:

Note the red Xs.  Those are coming on Saturdays.  Also notice, those traffic levels are the low points for each week.  So that alone tells me that if I want my new posts to get maximum exposure, I probably shouldn’t publish them on Saturday!  But as with anything else on your blog, you still should TEST this!  In my case, I have published posts on Saturday, and the traffic level for those posts was below what similar posts have gotten that were published here during the week.  But still, you need to test to verify your assumptions.

And like many of you, I use Twitter as a tool to help promote my blog posts.  I also know from watching my traffic closely that during the week, the hourly traffic is very low here each day till around 8am, when it starts to increase through the middle of the day till around 3pm, when it starts to fall again.  So when I publish a new blog post, I try to run it at 8am.  For example, I am writing this post on Saturday and Sunday, but will publish it at 8am on Monday morning.  Then, I will schedule a few tweets to promote it during the day, starting at 9am.  I schedule the first tweet for an hour later because typically I will have a couple of comments come in from blog subscribers that see the post as soon as it goes live at 8am.

Then, I will tweet a link out to it at 9am, then again at noon, and finally at 3pm or so.  Now I know from tracking the traffic in the past that I will get a bump in traffic from Twitter for each time I share a link to this new post.  I also know from watching my traffic patterns in the past that the tweet at noon will likely send more traffic here than the tweets at 9am or 3pm.  I assume this is because more people are taking lunch and checking Twitter from their desk at work.

BTW, here’s a detailed post on how I used this strategy to increase my traffic here by 300% and email subscribers by 900% in ONE week.

So in general, you should know what your traffic levels are on a monthly, weekly, daily and hourly basis.  That way if there’s a change good or bad, you should be able to spot it immediately, and then you can investigate to figure out what triggered the change.

Search Traffic.  Now along with traffic, I also pay very close attention to Search Traffic.  The reason why is simple: If someone uses search to find my blog, they probably do not know who I am, and they probably are trying to solve a business problem.  I’ll talk about this a bit more below, but by looking at keywords, I can see what people are looking for when they arrive here.  For example, I know that a lot of people arrive here by looking for information on the pricing for social media marketing services.  That’s because since 2010, I’ve been doing an annual recap of How Much Companies Should Expect to Pay for Social Media.  Last year when I realized how much search traffic was being sent to those posts, I went back and added in a link to my Social Media Marketing Rate Sheet.  Since doing that, I’ve gotten several work inquiries that have specifically mentioned a service and price listed on my Rate Sheet, which was buried on here before I added them to those posts.  Just last week, a major organization emailed me wanting to inquire about one of my services and referenced seeing it listed on my Rate Sheet.

Now should you care about Search Traffic?  Well I think the answer is ‘Yes’, but also note that I care more because this blog is a tool I use to grow my business.  But even if your blog is a personal one, search can help you get found by people that share your interests, which means you can make some new friends, if you aren’t interested in attracting new clients.  If you want to increase your search traffic, there’s two ways that I have found that have worked for me: Post more often, and optimize your posts for search engines.  Here’s a beginner’s guide on how to optimize your posts for search engines.

Referral Traffic.  This tells me what sources are sending traffic to my blog.  For example, it could be Twitter or Facebook, or a link that someone has put on their blog.  It can also help you identify sudden increases in traffic.  For example, if you see that within the last 5 minutes you’ve got as much traffic as you usually get in 5 hours, you can click the referral sources of that traffic, and that will usually tell you where that surge of traffic is coming from.  Often, it will be a new link that someone has posted on their blog, or maybe a popular Twitter user just tweeted out a link to one of your posts.

This also really helps you determine where you should be spending your time promoting your blog, on other sites.  For example, if you see that Facebook is sending your blog 1% of its traffic, but Plus is sending it 8%, then that’s probably a good indicator that your posts are more popular when they are shared on Plus.  A good way to test this is to share your new post on different sites at the same time, and tracking the referral traffic.  For example, if you write a new post tomorrow, share a link to it on Plus, Facebook, and Twitter at 11am on each site, and then track how much traffic each link sends back to your blog.  This is a ‘quick n dirty’ way to test how engaged your network is on each of these sites.

Pageviews for top posts.  This is a great way to tell which posts are most popular on your blog.  Here’s a list of the Top 10 most popular pages on this blog via Pageviews, over the last month:

Note that the top four pages on this blog all deal with the price of social media services.  That tells me that people are hungry for that type of information.

Search Keywords people use to find your blog.  This is really important because it not only gives you better insight into what posts are most popular, but also the search keywords are more about what topics people are interested in.  Also, remember that a lot of people ask search engines questions.  Look at this list of the most popular search keywords here over the last month:

Note that the #6 search term is ‘How to Write Your First Blog Post’.  I actually wrote a blog post with that exact post title.  I’ve talked about this before, but when you write your post titles, think about how people would find your post if they Googled it.  We often Google a question we are looking for the answer to.

Now note that the #1 search term for the last month is ‘social media crisis management’.  Also, looking at the picture above the one above, we see that the post I wrote on social media crisis management is the 7th most popular here in the last month.  That suggests to me that ‘social media crisis management’ is a topic that I may want to consider blogging about again soon.

Now paying close attention to your stats can also give you clues about the type and even FORM of content your visitors enjoy.

For example, here’s a screenshot of the 10 most viewed posts here in the last month from my Direct Traffic, which are usually visitors that came here directly from putting in the URL:

Note the two red circles:  The avg time spend on those two posts is 2:13, whereas the other posts are as low as 5 seconds?  Why is the avg time spend on those particular two posts so much higher?  I think part of the reason why is because both of those posts either have a video or audio file in them.  But I can’t be sure because the post inbetween them on Social Media Crisis Management also has a video embedded, and yet people are spending over a minute LESS time on it.

But this is a good example of why it pays to pay close attention to your blog’s statistics, so that you can better understand how visitors are finding, and interacting with your content.  Investing some time now to better understand blog analytics will not only save you time down the road, it will also make you a better blogger!  If you have any additional questions about your blog’s analytics, please leave a comment and I’ll try to help you!