Metafluence

Traffic experiment: week one

One week ago today, I announced that I would be conducting a traffic experiment with the promise of posting my results at the end of this month. Well, I’ve compiled enough information in this past week that I feel the data should be split up into multiple posts, so why not release them week by week.

Ok, this experiment began percolating for me in May when I wrote the post, “Coming to grips with what brings in high traffic“. One of the key concepts I outlined in that post was, “The reality is that if you want to drive traffic you have to write about things that have a high amount of interest.” I wanted to see if it made a difference when I covered high interest topics. However, traffic is more than just search engines, so I wanted to see what kinds of tactics impacted quantity of traffic, sources of traffic, and participatory traffic (people that leave comments, bookmark posts, leave trackbacks, etc). I didn’t create a strongly scientific methodology for this test, in fact I mix variables, which is a big no no in the strict world of science. However, I think we can draw some interesting parallels between cause and effect, which I’m hoping can be further analyzed by comparing it with the experiences you all have.

More posts

One thing that makes an overall impact is that I am posting multiple times a day everyday. My usual post rate is one post every 7-14 days. I must acknowledge that will skew results to be better than if I would have maintained my normal post rate.

Popular topics

I tried a variety of popular topics to see what kind of draw I could gain from doing so. What I did was monitor topics across Pop Urls and the popular tab on Technorati. The topics I ended up covering were: iPhone, Noelia sex tape, Victoria Beckham, Pownce invites, and Harry Potter. I sprinkled some of my normal posts in between to keep my theme strong with the search engines (didn’t want to dilute things too much with my experiment).

I saw great traffic results from my targeted posts. In fact, my daily traffic doubled after day two and tripled the following day. It has held steady at two and half times my normal daily traffic flow since. I looked over the traffic sources and there is a clear connection between my popular posts and my increased traffic. I saw a large jump in referrals from sources other than traditional search engines. Two surprising sources were BlogCatalog and ORBlogs. I have never seen either of these sources provide me more than single digits of traffic and they both hit triple digits from people searching on those sites. I saw moderate in comparison, yet still impressive gains from Technorati and BlogLines, also from people searching those sites.

Week 1 Conclusions

In general I saw a larger increase in the number and volume of referring sources. Technorati seems to be struggling from spam these days and didn’t feel like it delivered the kind of quality traffic that is used to. While I saw a large increase in traffic from across the board on these topics, I didn’t see an increase in traffic loyalty. I did see the opposite, including one comment from a reader that said they were unsubscribing from my blog because of the topics I was covering. Covering popular topics requires a blog setup for that kind of traffic. If your blog has a less than mainstream look and feel, and your audience isn’t mainstream, then covering popular subjects can have mixed results. The increased traffic without loyalty would be attractive to blogs with ads because that’s the perfect kind of traffic to be flighty and click on ads. If you can find popular topics that are also relevant and offer a new take, then they can be a great traffic supplement to even the highest quality blog.

If you want to stay up on all of my traffic experiment posts, I’ve tagged them traffic experiment.

What are your thoughts about these early results? Anythings surprise you? Have different experiences of your own?