While it only seems like a few seconds have passed, it has been a over month since I started using Twitter to promote this website and blog. I posted two articles on the subject last month, the first was my novice guide to promoting with Twitter and the second was more of a response to those who questioned how I used Twitter to drive traffic to my website. Now is the time to post the final piece, in which I go over in detail what I have discovered using my methods.
First off, for the past month I had been relying almost exclusively on Twitter for new traffic. I haven’t been promoting on my other websites, forums, or other blogs. I have still been commenting other blogs, but not nearly at the frequency as I was previous to this experiment. The purpose of this was to try to eliminate too many other outside sources of traffic. Since this blog isn’t set up to generate tons of revenue, I had no problems eliminating other sources of traffic to verify some of what I was testing.
Secondly, it should be factored in that I only work on this website 3 days a week. Since my intentions are for this blog to be a personal outlet and not a business, I don’t follow the monetized ‘mold’ of posting every single day. Now that the lame disclaimer has been stated, on to the factual goodness.
For those who didn’t read the first two posts, I will briefly go over my tactics. Twitter is a social networking tool. Oftenit is referred as ‘micro blogging’. Users are able to send messages, or tweets, to people on their profile, but they are limited to 140 characters. I spent one week adding Twitter ‘friends’ by raiding the larger bloggers profiles and adding them to my own. After the initial push, I have spent most of my time building relationships with those who have felt compelled to check out my website or send me a message on Twitter. I installed Twhirl (a Twitter desktop client) to help facilitate this, and I always post a link to my latest and greatest blog post.
According to my statistics, 5495 hits have been brought to the website from Twitter.com. In my promotional plan, It was noted that I put links to this website and the about page in my Twitter profile. I assume that most of these hits are from people who clicked on the link from within that profile. When I send out links to posts, I use TinyUrl which come back in my reporting as TinyUrl referrals and not Twitter. The average length of time they spend on the site is slightly over one minute. This indicates to me that the majority of these hits are of the investigative variety to see who I am, or what my website it about. I did have over 2000 hits come from StumbleUpon, and I feel some of these may have been directly related to the Twitter promotion as to very few of my posts had been stumbled before I started this promotional push.
There was a decent spike in daily traffic after the initial push, however. I did all of my mass adding of Twitter profiles between May 2nd and May 8th. Check out the graph below, it showcases the daily page requests:
There was a ten day lull in the middle when I did not make any posts (a family situation kept me from working on my website or posting) . I noticed that each time I post, a nice amount of traffic is coming back to the website. The site uses a plug-in which will broadcast my posts on Twitter. There are almost double the amount of people coming back to the website each post than I did before I started with the promotion. This indicates to me that I was able to attain at least a fair amount of new readers.
As far as RSS readership goes, this went up quite a bit. Before I started the promotional plan I was hovering near 30 RSS subscribers. Now it is over a hundred. The number hasn’t deviated much from the initial push, so that leads me to believe I have gained some loyal readers. I have also noticed a lot more comments, and a handful of repeat commentators.
There was some negative feedback at first, but most people are receptive to new blogs as long as they don’t over do it. I never spam from my Twitter account, and I aside from conversational tweets, I never send out random links to my blog.
In conclusion, I feel that if I continue to use Twitter effectively, I can expect to continue to drive traffic and increase my readers.
I am interested to hear from those who use Twitter. Have you noticed additional traffic to your website after you started using Twitter more actively?
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