Reflections on Sources of Traffic

In the last week I had a post which has been on a real journey.

It’s a post on how to photograph fireworks that I’ve mentioned already when I spoke last week about Using Digg to Improve your Content but a post that since this time has continued to evolve. I hope you’ll forgive me for sharing a few more reflections upon my experience with it.

The post was posted a week ago in anticipation of 4 July celebrations and as I mentioned in my previous post on the topic it got picked up by Lifehacker, Digg and then Boing Boing.

What followed after these link ups have been a number of other waves of traffic as a number of other sites linked up including Wonkette, Wired and more recently one of Yahoo’s Tech Blogs by Christopher Null.

So after a week of links from some pretty amazing sites I’ve found myself today amazed by the big differences in the types of traffic that they have sent. Here’s a few observations:

Digg – sent a lot of traffic very very quickly. The first hour the post made it to the front page it sent 8000 visitors. The hours that followed saw this number decreases each hour afterwards. Over the day it must have sent around 30,000 visitors. AdSense earnings that day were definately up but despite traffic being 10 times higher than normal earnings were only a bit over double the normal level. The other benefit of being Dugg that day was that I had 200 people sign up for my newsletter. Lastly there have been a few secondary links on blogs from digg readers.

Lifehacker – in comparison to Digg, Lifehacker sent a lot less traffic. I don’t have the exact numbers but the amount of traffic they sent was probably under 1000 visitors in the 24 hours after their link. The difference was that this traffic came at quite an even rank and lasted a couple of days. The other difference was that the Lifehacker link seem to trigger both the Digging but also a lot of other sites linking up (I know of about 30 other blogs that linked up and credited Lifehacker as being the source of the idea).

Boing Boing – sent quite a lot of traffic over a three day period (as it slipped down the page it sent less as you’d expect). The earnings didn’t seem to increase much at all from this traffic and I didn’t get many signups in my newsletter the day it happened. The traffic seemed to visit and then leave pretty quickly. There were a handful of secondary links though from this link up.

Wonkette – the link was reasonably obscure so there wasn’t much traffic at all (I was a bit surprised about how little actually).

Christopher Null’s Yahoo Blog – this one was the real surprise of the week. The traffic over the last 36 hours from this link has been very large (it’s around the same as what Digg sent – ie 30,000+). The difference to Digg though is that this traffic is doing two things. Firstly they are signing up for the newsletter (today I had 1000 new subscribers!) and secondly they are clicking ads (they’re clicking ads 4 to 5 times as often as Digg traffic did). As far as I can see there are few (if any) secondary links coming from this traffic.

Of course it’s not as easy as just saying that a particular site’s traffic does certain things – it does depend on what type of link it is or what the blogger writes – but it does illustrate some of the differences between sources of traffic and how they can be useful for achieving different goals.

Another quick observation is that different sources of traffic SEEM to be having an impact upon the click values I’m getting on AdSense. I can’t really prove this as I don’t do this type of tracking – but there have been significant differences in click values from day to day on that blog this past week. This could be to do with the source of traffic but it could also be to do with the day of the week.

Lastly – this who experience has also amazed me as to the power that a single post can have to drive traffic and how a series of links feeding one another can keep it going for a length of time. While my DPS blog has had quite a bit of interest in it’s ten week life, this one post has taken it to a new level.

Fun times.