I haven’t done a post here in a while analyzing my stats, so I wanted to share with you something interesting I’ve found over the past two weeks. Going back a month, and not counting this post, I’ve published 10 posts here since July the 20th. The posts have been a bit infrequent, until last week and this week.
Last week I published 4 posts here, and this post will mark the 3rd post so far here this week. Here is how my daily traffic has been for the last month:
Note that the days with the red X above them are the days when a new post was published. Also notice that traffic was down a bit from July 21st through the 8th of this month. Then it about doubled last week when I published 4 posts, and it’s spiked this week.
Now at first glance, you might assume that since I posted more last week, that it helped boost this week’s traffic as I was actively posting this week as well. I think there’s some truth to that.
But I’ve done something different this week. Each day I have shared links on Twitter to other interesting blog posts or articles, starting at 8am each morning, with a new link each 10 mins. I scheduled these ahead of time with HootSuite. Also, I’ve mixed in the newest post from here, each day. For example, today I started sharing links at 8am on Twitter, and at 9am, I shared a link to this post. I didn’t do this at all last week.
Now my hunch, and it’s just that, is that sharing links this week is driving more traffic to my blog posts. The links I am sharing every morning are generating a LOT of retweets, and I think that’s getting a lot of people to pay attention to them. And in the process, they will also be checking out my posts. Also I think it’s interesting to note that LAST week’s 4 posts averaged about 130 retweets each, while the 2 posts written on Monday and Tuesday have averaged about 40. And even though this week’s posts are getting far fewer RTs, as you can see, traffic is much higher so far this week.
I’ll keep watching this to see if sharing really is driving traffic. BTW in case you are wondering, the sources I use for finding content to share are:
1 – Google Reader. I use new posts from blogs/sites I am subscribed to PLUS shared items from people I am following. Shared items are a GREAT source of killer blog posts and articles.
2 – AllTop. Another good source that gives you access to articles from many sites in just a few minutes. Great for scanning dozens of sites and seeing what everyone is writing about.
Normally these two sources give me enough links to cover 2 or 3 hours. If I need additional links, Delicious is another good alternative. Also, as I see my friends sharing interesting links during the day, I will RT these as well. This, plus the links I share in the morning, mean I can share 25-30 links a day. And then I can RT a link to my newest post 2-3 times that day. That means I will share other posts from other bloggers about 8-10 times as often as my own posts. Not as high as the 12:1 ratio that Chris Brogan suggested during #blogchat this week, but close!
Does this help any? And if you try to post daily, and also use Twitter to promote your posts, have you also noticed any type of traffic bump from sharing links from OTHER sites? I would love to know what y’all are seeing in your stats!
I do see the co-relation to sharing links and posting your own. I have not yet got to the point of providing hard data. I still need to install that plugin that provides you that graph. I have seen significant RT’s on items that I do post either my own links or others which is encouraging. Thanks for the google reader tip. That was something I have yet to dig into but started today.
Hey Jonathan, I’m not convinced that there’s a perfect correlation either. But I do know that when I am sharing links to OTHER sites, along with my own, that I seem to get more traffic to my blog versus when I share links to my blog only.
See you next month in Dallas?
I also see the correlation, not only on our own blog but with many clients across different industries. Intuitively, it makes complete sense that this would be true — sharing resources (your’s and others) that are valuable to the community, increase your social equity within the community you are sharing to, lending more credibility to all links you share, including your own 🙂 Great observation Mack!
Maria those are great points and those of us that are well-versed in social media ‘get’ the importance of sharing in this context. One of the things I am thinking about is making the case to people that are NEW to social media, that if you do share, not only will you get ‘social equity/capital/whuffiewhatever’, but it will also have REAL benefits in terms of more traffic and exposure.
I think it goes back to speaking the language that companies can relate and respond to. Then after they ‘get’ it, the conversation can be less about what THEY get from sharing, and more about how to share even more. Because by that time, they understand the value created for THEM when they create value for OTHERS.
Hopefully 😉
I’m a very new blogger so posts like this are like gold to me. I greatly appreciate your research and plan to do an “experiment” of my own to see how this method can help bring traffic to my brand new site.
Thanks so much Mack!
Johnny I want to see y’all do your own experimenting with this. My limited experience has shown that sharing other links boosts traffic back here. Play with it and see what you find.
And please let us know what you learn 😉
Interesting findings Mack. Thanks for the info.
Hmm…this might be a great case study of the benefits of content curation, or even of Chris Brogan’s 12:1 rule. Thanks for sharing.
Mack,
You talk about traffic bumps and I wrote about traffic circles! I believe that it is human nature to see your tweet, be curious, go to the link and then travel back to learn more about you from your site. Magic!
Judy
For every day you RT’d something, did you also RT a link to your own blog posts? And, unrelated, is there a correlation between those days in that chart and increased subscriptions to your blog feed?
Hey Ari, last week I just linked to my posts. Well I RTed a few links here and there, but not in a daily, organized fashion like I have done this week.
As for my subs, first email:
So far this month, I’ve added 28 email subscribers. 16 were last week (when I wasn’t sharing links each morning), and 3 so far this week.
As for overall feed subscribers, on Aug 10th I had 767 feed subs, yesterday I had 813. On Aug 1st I had 713.
Looks like not as much movement on the subscriber front.
I saw someone’s study a while back (Dan Zarella? Can’t recall who but it seems like his kind of analysis) that indicated that if you tweet several links in rapid succession, the click-through rate declines for each subsequent link.
Spacing them out the way you did may be a key variable in your results. If you shot off a whole bunch of links quickly and your own post link was in that flood, you might not see the same results.
@BarbChamberlain
Barb I used to space them out every 5 mins, and some people told me it was way too much, and a couple of people told me they even unfollowed me cause I was sharing too much too fast. So I spaced it out to every 10 mins and that seems to work for everyone.
Mack,
Thanks for sharing your experience w/spacing out links you share. If I’m jumping between Twitter/blog reading & clicking quickly through several links I tend to share them in real time, which is probably too many too fast; I’ll have to use a utility to spread them out a bit more (I read really, really fast).
It *was* Dan Zarrella-with-2-Rs who did the research I mentioned above on click-through rate if too many links come too fast. Here it is: http://bit.ly/cBfhwT
@BarbChamberlain
Hey Mack, that’s really interesting as that is very similar to my own strategy, which is heavily focused on content curation. I share posts I find useful through Hootsuite daily and publish between 1 and 3 posts a week. I find sharing useful content drives traffic to the blog and website and on those occasions when Im not sharing, it decreases dramatically.
Gemma
Thank you, Gemma! I think the sharing also helps keep you ‘top of mind’ with your network. Which increases the likelihood that they will share YOUR content and visit your blog!
Did this tactic (not strategy) increase the number of followers you are reaching out to when posting links? If so, the bigger the audience the more visibility and also the more reach right which equals more traffic?
So, you should have also mapped # of followers against the traffic data too to see if the # of followers had an impact on traffic.
The other fact is # of subscribers. How much of that traffic ended up subscribing to your own blog? Now that is clever….
Kudos for being so honest and brave with your stats. That’s one thing that helped me to decide to bookmark this blog (in addition to having enjoyed a few posts). Also, you mentioning how many retweets you got inspired me to check out your Twitter, so now I’m following you. Great job.
That’s a very nice strategy, ironically I have been noticing this exact same behavior just today with my own blog.
I am as well using Google Reader to find interesting posts to share among the huge amount of social media / entrepreneurship / marketing / technology blogs and websites I follow, I think sharing is the key to social media and the very essence of what this is all about.
Thanks for sharing. I’m new to Twitter. Hopefully I will be able to benefit from it.