Yesterday, I started presenting the statistics from our High Calling Blog Tour… I made the audacious claim that I have found a formula for predicting the traffic that a blog can drive through its links. Today, I’m going to build on that foundation a little bit more.
I’ve already posted most of our strategy on the High Calling Blog Tour page. Essentially, I recruited bloggers I knew online to be part of the tour. Start with your friends, right?
I found most of these people during the past year of exploring social media. Some of them are actual friends. Some of them are just really good bloggers. Some of them are really good writers. Some of them are just good people. And all of them get it.
They get the high calling of our daily work. And they get blogging.
So my model for this blog publicity stunt (a bloglicity stunt?) was the blog tour I’ve learned about from readers of the Christian Book Association, often called simply the CBA. Every month, a group of several bloggers agree to post reviews about the same science fiction or fantasy book recently published by a Christian press. They call it the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour, and it is basically a virtual version of your normal book tour. Instead of meeting the readers at a bunch of bookstores across the country, a writer meets readers on their blogs. Of course, it isn’t as powerful as shaking the writer’s hand, but it does get readers excited.
After participating in this for several months, I began to wonder about the return on investment. What would it take to convince Thomas Nelson to sponsor something like a blog tour? How long before the marketing department at Thomas Nelson has a Vice President of Social Media? And how would such a person measure success?
So that’s what was going through my head. Then I asked the bloggers to promote TheHighCalling.org. On one level, I suppose that was pretty shameless, but the new site is cool. It was worth promoting. And if people wouldn’t promote it because I asked them to, they certainly wouldn’t promote it without being asked.
It needed to be TheHighCalling.org because I have access to those traffic numbers. Remember, this experiment is about measuring traffic generated by referrals from blogs. (To see the graph in more detail, just click on it.)
I wanted to prove that this social media stuff works. Verifiably. So that was my main goal.
1) Demonstrate a direct increase in traffic from blogs.
2) Use these traffic numbers to speculate about what variables affect traffic.
3) Use the blog posts themselves as an informal focus group on the new site.
To accomplish these goals, I told the bloggers to do three things.
1) Link to us. (I originally tried to give them the links in an email and got myself labeled as a spammer. That was a bad day.)
2) Review the site.
3) Post about the site over three days.
The reason for a link is pretty obvious. Without the link, someone’s participation in the tour (or not) would not send any traceable traffic. I needed to see the referring source in google analytics in order to be able to see the relative effectiveness of the different blogs.
Reviewing the site was my back up plan. If the tour was a disaster, at least I could read the reviews and see what people were thinking.
Posting over three days was an idea I got from the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy blog tour. In order to generate a spike in buzz, the CSFF folks work to have many links over a short period of time. The jury is out on whether this has any effect at all on book sales. However, it generates a lot of enthusiasm and good discussion for Christian fans of science fiction and fantasy.
Tomorrow, we’ll start getting down to the nitty gritty of stats and conclusions.
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