This is day three of our experiment to see what social media sites drive traffic. Here are the links to the previous day’s articles (day 1, day 2).
Traffic Update
We are using Google Analytics to measure the traffic from each social site. So far this week the traffic data looks like this:
• Stumbleupon.com – 132 visits
• Reddit.com – 37 visits
• Digg.com – 8 visits
• Technorati.com – 3 visits
• Indianpad.com – 3 visits
• Netscape.com -2 visits
• Myweb2.search.yahoo.com – 2 visits
The following sites have sent 0 traffic to the web site:
• Del.icio.us
• Google.com/Bookmarks
• Socialogs.com
• Furl.net
• Diigo.com
• Wirefan.com
• Bibsonomy.org
• Looklater.com
• Blinklist.com
As with most social media the majority of the traffic occurred within the first 24 hours. I did find it interesting that one of the Netscape clicks came from the Washington Post as the Post carries Netscape articles on their site. This is interesting as it means that a Netscape article can get you broader exposure online, than just from Netscape.com.
From an SEO perspective I am also interested in what impact the social media sites have on search engine rankings. Since this was a new post, the page of the post was obviously not in the search engines index.
Using Yahoo Site Explorer I am able to follow the back links to the page. Initially (within 24 hours of the post) I saw shows 8 links to the page including ones from Netscape, Digg and Reddit. Today that has fluctuated a little as the Reddit and Netscape links do not show up. Whether they have disappeared permanently or not, is something that I will have to follow.
What I have found interesting is that the blog post ranks #6 on Google for the article title “The Story of Tea”. This is a reasonably competitive keyphrase with over 18 million competing pages. Since this is a new post, on a relatively unknown blog I have to attribute the ranking to the links from the social media sites.
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Frank Antonellis 06.07.07 at 7:09 pm
Stumbleupon seems to be quite the force in your test. From your observations David, if trying to build the popularity of a new blog, would you suggest doing this every time that you release a new blog post? Also, about how long did it take to do all of this? Nice work btw.
David Wilson 06.08.07 at 8:22 am
Frank, I would not stumble every blog post. I would do it maybe once a week for the best post that you have. Stumbling something is quick and easy because of the toolbar. For the other social sites we used http://socialposter.com/. The whole process took less than 30 minutes to submit to 20 sites that we targeted.