Blog Tours – What Is a Successful Blog Tour?

We defined success in a simple way: I wanted to prove that blogs can organize themselves to send measurable and significant traffic numbers. 

But going in, I didn’t know if the High Calling Blog Tour would generate any traffic at all. Remember, our goal was traffic, not sales. And I measured the most conservative estimate of traffic possible: unique users.

So did it work? Did a simple blog tour increase traffic noticeably?

You bet.

During the week of the tour, 33% of traffic to TheHighCalling.org came directly from the blogs.

That number doesn’t seem as dramatic as it is because we had several other traffic building activities going on at the same time. Our FaithInTheWorkplace.com newsletter went out from Christianity Today on Tuesday afternoon, for example. Like any good newsletter, it generates a healthy spike in traffic.

During the week of the blog tour, the traffic from blogs alone represented a 100% increase over a normal week in April 2007. That means the blog tour essentially doubled our traffic numbers. Let me say that again. A loose network of two dozen bloggers spent a few days posting reviews of our site, and the traffic doubled.

If you compare our blog traffic to the average week of traffic in April 2006, the increase is even more dramatic. Our blog traffic alone was a 350% increase above the amount of traffic that came to us in a normal week. Bloggers sent us 350% more traffic in one week than our entire site generated in one week this time last year.

Of course, for my organization, blogs aren’t about sending traffic to our site. I mean, that’s a nice perk and all, but that’s not the big goal. The big, holy, audacious goal (what we call our BHAG) is to see if we can harness the power of blogs for the Kingdom of God. We are, after all, a Christian organization.

I just chose to examine traffic. My logic being similar to the logic of a church that measures effectiveness in part by the number of people who are involved in ministries. The traffic.

I know that can be a very shallow way to measure a church’s effectiveness. Especially if it is the only measurement tool. So it’s not the only thing I looked at.

**Geek Alert… Feel free to skip the next two paragraphs.**

Also, I need to give a disclaimer that this is a simple test to see if more tests are justified. If we couldn’t find any correlation with this small group, then we wouldn’t proceed any further in trying to organize blogs in exactly this way. So my data set was small. Once I threw out the anomalies with the help of a statistician who is ABD (“All But Dissertation”), I had a reliable data set of 20 blogs and 29 posts. My statistician friend (Ok, it’s my father-in-law) said 30 was the smallest reliable data set, but that my data set from the blog tour was good enough to predict whether there was something worth testing more.

What did I look at? Gender, profession, # of days the blogger posted, # of links the blogger posted, # of comments per post, # of comments per day, # of average comments per blogger, google PageRank of each blog, Technorati rank of each blog, Technorati Authority of each blog, per cent of traffic each blog sent out of total blog traffic, total traffic from all blogs, total traffic from each blog, average pages viewed by unique users referred by each blog, plus two top secret predictors that developed to determine whether a blog will send traffic.

**Non-Geeks resume reading here.**

Needless to say, you can see why I haven’t been quite as engaged in my own comments section as I normally am.

I won’t bore you non-geeks with with the detailed charts or the correlation coefficients or the preliminary regression models that I’ve been running. (But I want to use some statistics jargon because it sounds so fancy.)

Based on all of that data, here’s what I learned.

What worked. What didn’t. What mattered. What didn’t.

I’ll also tell you five observations about the top five referring blogs and a few questions that I’ll be looking to ask (with your help maybe) in the future.

Check back all week for the whole series. It’s cued up to go live every morning at 8:00. And this Saturday I’m headed with the Frau to New York City for Book Expo America! Expect many exciting from the road posts while I’m there. 

Image by  Osvaldo Gago of an “auto stoped highway” courtesy of Wikicommons.