Last week at Web Analytics World I
invited 4 well known personalities in the SEM industry to guest blog for me.
They included: Avinash Kaushik from Intuit, Jennifer Laycock from
SearchEngineGuide, Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro and SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin. Each
guest blogger provided a blog posting based on a topic of their choice and this
worked out perfectly because it produced a very diverse set of topics. Blog
topics included: the popularity of web analytics, Starbucks’ viral marketing
disaster, SEM’s future (or lack thereof), and mixing Search + Push Marketing.
The guest blogger idea came to me after reading Rand Fishkin’s
21 Tactics to increase
blog Traffic; invite guest bloggers was number 9. The list is very useful to
any blogger or organization because it contains a great mix of marketing
techniques and SEO Best practices to really help promote a blog. I currently use
several marketing strategies including Technorati, Digg, FeedBurner, writing for
WebProNews (and their network). I also apply good SEO/Usability tactics by
having unique meta/title tags, interlinking between pages and making each post
accessible to Del.icio.us, Digg, My Yahoo, Furl, etc… All of these strategies
have worked relatively well and I believe they are key to successful blog
promotion.
Before employing a blog strategy such as employing guest writers, it is
important to first establish yourself and your blog. Establishing yourself can
be accomplished by commenting on related industry blogs, writing interesting
content on your own blog, and writing for other well known Industry sites. I
write frequently for Enquiro Search Solutions and many of the articles get
circulated to WebProNews, SearchNewz, SearchEngineGuide and the Web Analytics
Association.
As a result of my guest blogger strategy, last week was my blog’s most
successful week ever in terms of generating page views and unique visitors;
building the % of Repeat visitors; and increasing the visitors’ pages per visit
and feed subscribers. In addition, my blog also received more comments,
Technorati links (in a week), Diggs, and mentions/plugs by other bloggers.
I am a big Web Analytics fanatic and love to check stats regularly and
today I’d like to share some of the data from last week.
Traffic and Trends
The charts below show trended traffic data (visits and page views) from last
week. The chart on the left is from Google Analytics and the chart on the right
is from StatCounter. I use both products because I like the intuitive reports
from Google but enjoy having real-time stats with StatCounter. On Monday I
posted about having Guest Blogger Week and introduced the 4 guest bloggers. You
can see that Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday all had relatively similar traffic
patterns but compared to a “regular” day for my blog, both visits and page views
were up 150%. The final day, Rand Fishkin’s post saw another dramatic increase:
600%+ for both visitors and page views. Overall, comparing last week’s traffic
to an average week I noticed a 200%+ increase in both metrics. A little bit
later I will talk about the sources that drove the majority of this traffic.
Besides attracting a larger audience, I believe my audience was much more
engaged with my site’s content this week. I assume this based on my site’s
repeat visitors (graph below), which were 21% higher than normal and pages per
visit which was 14% higher.
My regular subscribers, according to FeedBurner, were also following these
patterns of visits and page views and this is also representative of the idea of
more visitor engagement. I believe that over time, I will continue to see an
upward trend in all these numbers because more internet users have been made
aware of my blog’s content and will visit the site to check for updates. This is
one of the most important things to understand when trying to promote a blog:
having content that is worth reading. Marketing will bring in the visitors but
it’s the content that will keep them coming back, otherwise, without substance
you will begin to notice a decrease in returning visitors.
The biggest drivers of traffic to my site were the Guest Bloggers’ own websites.
Each one put out a plug to Guest Blogger Week and their own posting at Web
Analytics World. Therefore for about 24 hours my blog was featured on the home
pages of
SearchEngineGuide,
SEOMoz and
Out of My Gord. Popular industry bloggers such as
Clint Ivy and
Gary
Angel also helped in promotion efforts by linking to Guest Blogger Week
topics. These referrals spawned educated users to offer their opinions in my
blog by offering insightful comments to guest articles. I published some of the
topics to Digg and the new site
Search’n’Sniff. While I didn’t receive a huge number of votes, I did receive
many click-throughs back to my site. As Rand mention in his 21 tactics, only 1
out of 20 topics is worthy of Digg and has the potential to generate a lot of
buzz. I use Technorati frequently and although I didn’t notice any big referral
numbers, my blog’s ranking did jump from 88,000 to about 56,000.
I would recommend inviting Guest bloggers to anyone but I would like to
reiterate that it’s important to establish your site with good content and some
level of authority before doing so. Guest bloggers really helped to introduce my
site to new visitors, and as such, I managed to leverage the authority and
community associated with my guest writers, as well as the market buzz, to
hopefully build my own authority and community.
I am excited to see the long term effects of this past week’s efforts.
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SEO
