Wendy writes a great post today in her introduction to Social Media Strategy and Socially Driven Content.
In the post she talks to bloggers about why they should learn about social media, what results they can get and how to start out in it.
What caught my attention was right down the bottom of her post where she did a little comparison to how Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape and delicious readers interacted on her site over a 7 day period in terms of visitor numbers, page views per visitor and time spent on her site.
She then did a little analysis of ProBlogger readers over the same period (54 visitors). The visitors came simply by writing quality comments on my posts here (and she does write insightful comments).
The results speak for themselves.
While social bookmarking sites can potentially send a lot more traffic:
- ProBlogger readers stay longer per visit (you stay 18 times longer than Digg users)
- ProBlogger readers visit more pages over that visit (2.5 times as many pages than Digg users).
Wendy writes:
“I’ve grown to really appreciate the Digg crowd (even though they are mean as all hell sometimes), but if I had to pick, I’d take those 54 ProBlogger visitors over a big Digg any day.”
I guess that goes to show what quality readers you all are!
Seriously though (and you are quality readers – but there’s a lesson here) it’s also a good illustration of the power of different types of traffic.
While Digg can send you a heap of visitors in a short period of time they rarely stay long, rarely go deeper within your blog and rarely comment. On the other hand traffic from another blog on a similar topic (even if it’s just a from a comment) can drive a different quality of traffic.
Not only will they stay longer, comment more and view more pages I suspect they’ll also subscribe to your newsletter and RSS feed in higher numbers but they’ll respond more to your income streams (ads and affiliate products).
More reading on different types of traffic:
