I was intending on putting in a longer, more researched entry today. It has actually been written, but an event happened a few days ago that I thought would make a better blog for today (I can always re-post the other one in a day or two). As my last blog was also on Social Media this ties in really nicely.
Now, to the story. Around 3-4 weeks ago now I wrote a Squidoo lens on ‘How to add your LinkedIN contacts to Twitter’ and forgot about it. Last week I decided to check in how it was going – around 20 uniques visitors per day. It was not until I searched Google for various terms, including ‘how to add LinkedIN contacts to Twitter’ and ‘how do I add my LinkedIN contacts to Twitter’ that I noticed the lens was ranked #1. By now I was blogging and had written an update version so thought ‘why not post it on my blog to help promote it?’.
That is exactly what I did, and I put a link at the top of the old lens informing people of the changes and linking them to it. I Twittered this update to my followers (around then 1,800ish) and went to sleep.
When I wake up this very blog has generated around 180 uniques overnight! Looking at the traffic stats in Google Analytics I can see that Twitter referred over half the traffic, the Squidoo lens sent its fair share but more importantly I had a single hit from Delicious – somebody bookmarked me. The next morning I wake up and the Delicious hits have made up near 25% of the traffic and are still growing. I’ve also noticed a few smaller Digg like & bookmarking sites, which I had never heard of, referring me traffic. The traffic was clearly qualified too – with my Bounce rate going from 71% down to 42% and the LinkedIN / Twitter guide being the most viewed page here!
That is just a little story I wanted to share. It was just an innocent attempt on my part to drive a little more traffic here and begin to consolidate my articles. I did not really promote the change at all; especially promote it on social sites. For a simple blog article I think the traffic generated was phenomenal and it just goes to show what all of these websites can really do for your traffic – even if you did not mean for it to happen!
