Pageview Study - What Gets More Traffic, and What Doesn't

Content producers are supposed to be responsible for a certain amount of promotion for their articles. There is, however, a lingering question of what works for promotion and what doesn't. After all, some methods of promotion are very easy, while others are quite difficult, and nobody wants to spend too much time on something that doesn't work.

Thus, I have performed a little study. Having never really spent too much time on promotion, myself, I've taken a lot of my articles and gone ahead and run a little test. All of these articles are either brand new, or articles whose pageview count has been rather stale for the past few months. I took each one of these articles, recorded their pageview count, and then used one method of promotion on each to determine which methods of promotion drove in the most traffic. Here are the results.

I started with the easiest form of promotion: Social Bookmarking (Digg, Delicious, etc.). I bookmarked three articles with Digg, three with Onlywire, and three with StumbleUpon. Digg performed the worst giving only 12 total views to the three different articles. Onlywire gave 32 views to it's articles. StumbleUpon gave the highest number of views, with 212, but of those, 150 came on only one article. Thus, it appears that Social Bookmarking is only really good if you have a very popular article to begin with, and that if you're going to spend time using this method of promotion, add your articles to StumbleUpon first and foremost, and the other sites later.

The next method I tried was to use Squidoo Lenses. I built two lenses for two large groups of content that I have submitted here, and while the lenses rank fairly well in Google (2^nd and 3^rd page), this method generated only 7 new pageviews across the entire eleven articles I posted! This is a method of promotion that probably requires the most work, and in this example, it provided the smallest payoff.