Blog Post Promotion – Content, Social Sharing & Analytics

Analytics

Blog Post Promotion – Content, Social Sharing & Analytics

A few weeks ago, I published the most popular post on my blog. Ever. 125 women in blogging brought in numbers like this site has never seen before. I can’t tell you how excited I was that this post was so popular, and how thankful I was for every tweet, comment, share, and so forth.

A few days ago, Faisal Khan of Star Developer asked me if posting a link on Twitter actually resulted in significant traffic. So I thought what I would do is share some of the social promotion, sharing, and actual analytics to give you some insight as to what efforts make an impact on the number of visitors coming to the site.

Content

First of all, let me preface this by saying that not all promotional strategies lead to the same results. It all depends on your content, your niche, and how a post satisfies your audience. If it’s highly satisfying, then your first wave of visitors share it with their friends, and when they visit and like it, they share, and so on.

Trackbacks

In this post’s case, one thing I know made it a hit (besides the two weeks of research and probably 8 hours of actually compiling it all), was the trackbacks. I can say this because I did two things to initially jump start post promotion – I sent out a tweet when the post went live, and I sent out a newsletter to my mailing list subscribers.

How do I know it was the trackbacks that brought the post initial love? Since my scheduler in WordPress is broken, I woke up early in the AM to post it, sent the tweet, then went back to sleep. A few hours later when I awoke, there were already 100 tweets for the post, many of which I recognized as not my usual Twitter followers or mailing list subscribers.

So it had to be the trackbacks – since I included a few posts from each person on the list, all of those people who had pingbacks enabled were alerted to my post. I know when I see those, I usually go check it out, and typically give the post a tweet.

What lesson is to be learned with this? Link love is a good thing – give it freely, and it will reward you in irritating blog and blogging karma points!

Social Promotion

The following were initial items I did for social promotion of the post.

1. Tweeted it as soon as it went live, then one or two times throughout the day.

2. Shared the post with 750+ followers on StumbleUpon.

3. Posted it to my wall on the Kikolani Facebook fan page which has 1,100+ fans.

4. Posted it to my activity stream on my LinkedIn profile.

5. Submitted the post to Blog Engage.

Social Sharing Statistics vs. Pageviews

The following are the current social sharing statistcs for this post.

  • 709 Tweets
  • 785 Facebook Shares & Likes
  • 188 Views on StumbleUpon
  • 46 Delicious Bookmarks

So how do these social sharing counts relate to the actual amount of traffic?

According to Google Analytics, the above social sharing translated to the following number of pageviews from social network referrers.

  • 1,074 from Facebook
  • 791 from Twitter
  • 216 from HootSuite (Twitter)
  • 117 from StumbleUpon
  • 64 from Paper.li (Twitter)
  • 63 from TwitterFeed (Twitter)
  • 53 from the ht.ly shortener (HootSuite – Twitter)
  • 36 from LinkedIn

Also, on a side note, one of the tweets led to a reactionary post on another blog that brought in the highest amount of traffic after Facebook and Twitter. So that would be another 609 visitors brought indirectly from Twitter.

Social Sharing and Traffic

What are your thoughts on the value of social sharing and traffic? Please share your thoughts, especially if you have ever analyzed a post that has gone viral on social media.

Also what tools do you use for better blogging productivity?

 



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