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Blog Tours - 3 Blog Tricks That Don’t Work

May 22nd, 2007 | blogging, marketing, thehighcalling.org

Christopher Batt picture from wikicommonsOK, I’ve got good news and bad news. Let’s start with the bad news first shall we? Here’s what didn’t work.

1) The site reviews didn’t seem to affect traffic.

The more bloggers wrote, the less likely they would send traffic.

This was a surprise to me, but it makes sense.

If a blogger posts a substantial review of another site, readers tend to stay on the blog to discuss the review. They stay in the community where they have grown comfortable.

I thought of including two sample posts from the blog tour and having readers predict which one they think would send more traffic, but that would single people out a bit more than I’m comfortable doing at this point. I may ask some of the participants later if that kind of vulnerability is someplace you are willing to go.

There’s a lot of pride in a blogger’s traffic. Coming clean that a post didn’t work is incredibly helpful to a community. Still, it is painful to share our moments of failure, even when those failures occur during an experiment specifically designed to test what works and what doesn’t.

Long posts may keep people on your blog. But they don’t work to move traffic.

They don’t directly harness the collective power of blogs in the short term.

2) Comment activity did not seem to affect traffic flow.

This was a huge surprise to me. I covet my comments, and often allow the meat of a discussion to take place there.

Remember though, I’m measuring traffic received from blog referrals. So comments are a good sign of an active community on my blog, but they don’t seem to indicate a blog’s traffic potential. This means evaluating a blog’s comment activity is not a good way to gauge how much traffic that blog might receive.

On the blog tour, it was almost a negative predictor. That is, the more comments a blog had, the less likely it was to send any traffic!

Here’s what I think happened. Blogs with normally active comment sections have an implied call to action: “Comment on my blog.”

When that kind of blog joined the tour, they had a new call to action, “Go check out this website.” Except the readers ignored it. They went with the normal activity that was expected of them.

They commented. They didn’t visit TheHighCalling.org.

Interesting, right?

This doesn’t mean comments aren’t valuable. They are incredibly valuable as feedback, but they may not be as valuable as we think they are. Or they may measure something different than we think they measure.

No doubt, the comments section is where the real community building occurs on a blog. So perhaps, we could see if there is a correlation between returning unique users and comments. I’d have to think more about that.

3) Dual purpose posts didn’t send traffic.

In fact, in a few cases, high profile blogs sent almost no traffic at all because of the way they linked to us. One of our biggest bloggers—who’s traffic numbers are verifiably high—sent us almost no traffic at all. This blogger posted about us in a way quite different from any of his normal posts.

Normally, he writes elaborate essays. But his blog tour post was a survey of good sites on the internet that included us. Too many links, too many options in a form too different from what his users had come to expect from his blog. The result was that his readers seemed to have skipped the post. They certainly didn’t click through to TheHighCalling.org.

Another blogger posted her normal inspirational essay, then appended a pitch for TheHighCalling.org. Readers were familiar with the inspirational essay structure, so they commented on that. And practically ignored the second half of her post. As far as I can tell, very few people read the second half closely. They certainly didn’t click through to TheHighCalling.org.

This is significant because each of these blogs sent only 2.5% of the blog traffic. But the number of unique visitors to these blogs is very high.

It is possible that these two blogs are anomalies. I haven’t tested how much traffic they would send to an article they authored on TheHighCalling.org. But I will definitely explore that in the future.

If you recognize yourself as one of these bloggers, no worries! Your blog is great! And knowing what didn’t work is just as important as knowing what did work.

To Sum Up…

1) The site reviews didn’t seem to affect traffic.

2) Comment activity did not seem to affect traffic flow.

3) Dual purpose posts didn’t send traffic.

One thing to keep in mind about all three of these items. To say they “didn’t work” means they didn’t send traffic to TheHighCalling.org. What these posts may have done, in fact, was receive a spike in traffic for their own blogs rather than provide a spike in traffic for TheHighCalling.org.

If you are the blogger, that’s not a bad thing. It may mean that the stickiness of your post overpowered the persuasiveness of your call to action.

Of course, in some instances it could mean that a blog doesn’t have much traffic. It just has a lot of comments. That’s an interesting idea that’s also a little bit scary.

Tomorrow… the good news. What worked?

Image by Christopher Batt of Juuso Pykälistö (FIN) in his Peugeot 206 WRC during the 2003 Swedish Rally courtesy of Wikicommons.


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