Experiment: Get 5000+ visitors a week with social media
My blog usually only gets a couple of hundred visitors a week. Mainly from coworkers and friends and family. I’m not much of a self-promoter and for some reason (probably because of lots of websites on the same IP) the site doesn’t rank very well on SEO. As you can see from the chart the vast majority of my traffic comes from my close social network sites and inbound links from instant messaging software. Search engines make up a very small percentage. I also don’t, usually, update my blog that often. Maybe one post a week on a good one so you can hardly be expected to come back every day to check it out.
Number of visitors to greenerdesktop.com since Google analytics was added late 2008
My experiment then is to try and raise this blog’s traffic from about 200 uniques a week to at least a target of 5,000 unique visitors in a calendar week. Using just social media sites. So join me in my quest and help me build my traffic to well beyond 5000 unique visitors by retweeting, facebooking, digging and buzzing all the articles I put up this week.
Just to give you a bit of history – This blog has been hit by the “Slashdot Effect” before. I posted an extremely controversial article to Yahoo Buzz as an experiment when Buzz first launched and managed to generate almost 5000 unique visitors in just one day. Of course the traffic eased off quite quickly with no real long term positive effect. Which leads me to the second part of my experiment. If I am successful in generating 5,000 or more unique visitors in a week what will the long term effects be? Will I suddenly have a dedicated readership base rather than just my friends or should I just stick with trying to improve my SEO?
How I’ll do it
Firstly. I’ll commit to at least one article every day during the 7 days this challenge is running. More than one is even better.
Secondy each article will be posted to Buzz, Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Propeller, Twitter, Slashdot, Facebook and all the other social media services will all be posted to when a new article is written. I’ll send article suggestions to news aggregators like Mashable, Ajaxian, Sitepoint etc. I’ll promote the crap out of every single article written.
Last of all I’ll make sure the articles are controversial as possible. Nothing generates social media links like creating a “shitstorm“. Keep checking back as I update you on the progress, the results and lastly in the coming weeks and months I’ll report on any lingering traffic. Whether it’s from search engines or social media. As I expect social media to cause a short sharp spike that falls off very quickly.
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