Social Networking's Influence on You Site's Traffic

Ok, time to step back and do some full disclosure to see if my input on this blog of the virtures of social networking is truely valid.  So, behold the graph below:

Weekly traffic for this blog

I started this blog earlier this year around March, did a few posts and then got side tracked, leaving it abandoned until about 2 months ago when I started forcing myself to make daily posts.  This graph shows the weekly traffic to the blog, starting on the 14th week of this year.  As you can see, from week 14 to week 35 traffic is basically non-existant, reflecting my lack of attention to the blog.  However, traffic starts to pick back up right around the same time I started posting to the blog again.

One week after making regular postings I syndicated the blog through Feedburner.com and Technorati.com.  Consistant postings plus this additional distribution of the blog helped the traffic improve quickly through week 38.  I created an account with LinkedIn.com to promote myself, I started adding my blog URL to my signature file in all my outgoing emails and also sent out an eNewsletter to all my customers with links back to my blog.  This really saw my traffic spike on week 40 – everything was working good.

Then the economy happened, stocks tumbled, and the government talked about using $700 billion of our dollars to bailout Wall Street and traffic to my blog dropped.  Who has time to read how to better rank your site in search engines when the world is ending.  So, in the words of that famous chef that starts with an “E” – I think it’s Ernie, or Elmer or maybe Ebert? – it’s time to “Take it up a notch”.

So, in week 41, I stepped up my Twitter efforts by increasing postings there and I also joined a new site called Biznik.com.  Biznik allowed me another avenue to promote myself and I had an article published there that got a lot of attention.  All this led to my blog traffic seeing solid improvements once again.

Using all the freely available online social networking tools is a great way to grow your business.  Tracking your website stats is a great way to find out what is working and when to adjust your marketing when traffic patterns change.