I’ve had a blog (not referring to this one) that’s been floating around for years. I’ve backlinked it previously to some degree, and it’s had a steady flow of traffic probably floating around 80 visitors a day for several years. Up until recently I had neglected it, mostly because I didn’t have time for it.
But recently I’ve taken to updating it again. Instead of necessarily posting very large articles, I mostly took snippets from interesting articles I had read, shove them in a blockquote, throw a “via” link on the end, and maybe a few sentences of commentary.
61 Days. 61 Posts.
Nothing big, but I basically went from posting virtually nothing on the blog and letting it coast off of it’s own steam, to suddenly a flurry of virtually daily blog posts since October 2nd. Today is December 4th, and since October 2nd I’ve posted approximately 61 short blog posts. Incidentally, it’s been 61 days (unless I miss counted). The fact that the numbers come out at exactly 1 blog post per day is simply a strange, cool coincidence that occurred entirely by accident.
In the several months prior to this 61 days I posted roughly once per month, and in the middle of the 61 day period I bumped a single, spun article out to a mass article distribution service for backlinks.
Results: A 35.86% Traffic Jump
The results are in. Basically, I compared the last week’s worth of traffic — starting at December 4th backward — (a total of 846 visits) to the traffic that was flowing in during the week prior to the beginning of the blog binge (a total of 608 visits). That’s a 35.86% increase.
It’s important to note that this traffic is traffic *exclusively* from search engines. On Google Analytics that report can be accessed via Traffic Sources > Search Engines. The reason I used this report, obviously, as opposed to the general traffic is it removes other variables like the absence or presence of a few facebook share visits. The only thing I’m interested in is what the *search engine* effects were from this result. Not unrelated viral traffic.
One of the other really cool elements of this experiment is ultimately I was really only taking a previous behavior I had — obsessively social bookmarking — and instead channeling that same energy into simply publishing it on my blog instead of delicious. So we’re not talking a lot of extra energy here: I’d definitely put this in the behavioral hack department.
