Over the course of the last month, I have been investing a little more effort than normal into both writing hopefully interesting posts for my personal blog at Cheese and Beans, and marketing it - with the idea that I could look back after a month or so, and reflect. It’s an odd thing to do because I don’t have a huge narcissistic streak in me, but the availability of free tools to give easy data makes the task of reflection a lot easier than it might have been (read: I am lazy, and this is an easy post to write).
Publishing the nitty gritty will probably be interesting to those who are just starting to write online; to show the kind of audience you might garner if you exploit obvious avenues. It does come at a cost though, and I will get to that towards the end.
What did I do?
Write every day - not just post photos, and no single sentence comments on the state of the/my universe.
Post the URL of the post to StumbleUpon
Post the URL of the post to Reddit
Post a titled link to Tumblr
Post a titled link occasionally to Facebook
Make sure the blog was listed appropriately at BlogCatalog
Invest some time in reading other blogs at BlogCatalog, and take part in the community
Install the MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog widgets in the sidebar of my blog
Try to catch up on my blogroll
Allow replies to comments in my blog - and use them to respond to comments from visitors
What happened as a result?
6,241 visits
5,091 unique visitors
9,130 page views
73% Firefox, 11% IE, 8% Chrome, 6% Safari
13% of traffic was direct to the site (not via a link)
“Cheese and Beans” was the most searched for term
I guess if I can take anything from the above, it’s that the name of the blog has become the most searched for term. Rather than being sought for it’s content, it is now being sought as a destination. I’m quietly happy about that, but suspect that as my effort wanes (which it will), that trend will reverse itself. In reality, StumbleUpon has massively skewed the figures - but perhaps it’s a means to an end. I exploited a very popular traffic seeding tool, knowing that the bounce rate (people seeing the site and not reading any further) would be very high indeed. Some of those random visitors stuck though.
I will carry on pushing the posts out and publicising them throughout November, but following that only write during November - to see what effect it has all had on the baseline traffic. It feels strange in some ways - playing the marketing game. You’re intentionally manipulating real people - I’m not comfortable about that at all.
If you have any questions, ask away.