Is Web 2.0 Working For You?

By Steven · Friday, January 4th, 2008

During my Trend Blogging case study I ended up tracking some statistics regarding the "effectiveness" of Web 2.0 sites, and to what extent they were contributing traffic to my blog.

Even though I will be writing a separate blog post on the actual methods I used to drive the traffic to the blog, I wanted to share with you guys my findings…1. because I found it interesting and thought you might want to know some of these numbers, and 2. because you should know which web 2.0 sites you should be spending more time on.  By the way, I will be writing a separate blog post on the actual methods and reasons why I received a significant amount of traffic on this blog in the next week or two.

Ok, so let’s start with the Web 2.0 properties I used during my Trend Blogging case study:

As you can see, I did not actually use some other popular Web 2.0 services such as: StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Furl, nor did I use Onlywire or spend the time building pages in the various Web 2.0 communities (such as: Squidoo, Hubpages etc.)… for no other reason than that I was being lazy. 

By the way, in case some of you did not check out my case study on Trend Blogging, you should know that the blog was centered around the Entertainment niche.

So, how did it all play out? Check out the stats taken from Google Analytics below. The results are based on approximately 20,000 visitors visiting the blog over a 3 week period of time. And notice that the majority of my traffic came from organic search results (Google Search), not Web 2.0. I have highlighted the Web 20 properties with a red box.

Web 2.0 Case Study

As you can see:

  1. Digg is the "winner"! It drove in the most traffic by far and served 6.34% of overall visitors to my site (out of approximately 20,000 visitors).
  2. Propeller was the runner up, driving in about 2.5% of the overall traffic. You’ll notice that the propeller.com url show 2.35%, however there were sub-categories not displayed that served some visitors as well.
  3. Shoutwire served 1.73% of the visitors, which was surprising.
  4. Sk-rt drove in about 0.2%
  5. Plime and Reddit served an insignificant amount of traffic (only a handful of referrals each). The low amount of referrals from Reddit was surprising as it’s often considered a "decent" web 2.0 property for referral traffic.

A caveat, these numbers were a bit skewed as I did not start using Shoutwire, Sk-rt, Plime and Reddit for the first couple of days of this case study, and believe Shoutwire would have probably matched or eclipsed Propeller in the amount of traffic served if I had started using them from the beginning (in other words, USE Shoutwire!)

In conclusion, you can see that the few social bookmarking / social news (or social voting) sites I did use served about 2500 visitors in three weeks. This is direct referral traffic that you would not have received from the search engines. So, if you have a brand new site or have not used web 2.0 before it is certainly worthwhile considering it gave me 12.5% more traffic for 2 minutes of extra work per post (on a brand new blog).

Will you receive the same amount of traffic? It’s hard to say as it will depend a lot on posting frequency and whether your posts are "buzz worthy". There are software out there that can automate a lot of this process, and make the process very painless.

One that I use frequently when bookmarking Blogger or static sites is Social Bookmarking Demon.

Topics: Traffic Building, Web 2.0 · Tags:
  • Thanks for the reply, Steven. That makes a lot of sense.

    Now to get busy with it all!
  • Steven
    Richard,

    I only monetized the blog with Adsense and some links to Clickbank merchants.

    During the three weeks where I actively blogged, I averaged $16.34 per day in Adsense. I also earned an average of $9.96 per day from Commissin Junction (Cost Per Action).

    So I earned roughly $25 per day from my efforts. Not bad considering I spent about 30 - 45 minutes per day.

    Could I have done better?

    Yes, absolutely.

    I just didn't take the time to investigate all of the avenues, i.e. the monetization was sort of an afterthought.

    For instance, I could have looked into PPL, which would have converted a lot better than my choice of products from CJ.

    All the best,
    Steven
  • Steven
    Hi Chris,

    Actually Social Bookmarking Traffic is generally very targeted.

    Remember, you are either placing your bookmark in a category and/or "tagging" each entry with keywords.

    So, people who click through are clicking through because they are interested in the topic.

    Hope this answers your question.

    /Steven
  • Steven
    Hi John,

    So far I have to say:

    BlogRush = Blows

    I'm giving it the benefit of a doubt, but I can't see much in terms of traffic from it.

    I've also tested the "Real Traffic Exchange" by Jonathan Leger and it's suffering the same fate...

    /Steven
  • Steven

    Andy and Shane,


    Thanks for visiting my blog!


    I have to agree that Social Bookmarking must have helped the rankings. Albeit there are only a few of the ones I used use "do follow" links (Propeller by the way uses "Do Follow"). To be quite candid with you, I never tested this and don't know how much of an impact it had on my blog postings. Just keep in mind that I only used 6 bookmarking sites, and not all of the posts were bookmarked by all 6. All the best, /Steven

  • Hi,
    I just found you from Digg. I'm new to this stuff, but playing around with it. Impressive results. I do have to agree with Andy's question above. How much of an impact do you think your social networking activities improved you search engine rankings with high quality backlinks?
  • Hi Steven!
    Thanks for the results. StumbleUpon can be a massive source of traffic
    as well. But I read you just were lazy in your testing. I understand.
    However 12.5% is 12.5%

    Would be interesting to see how well the different traffic sources convert into $$$ or whatever your desired action might be.

    QUESTION on the side: I still see the BlogRush widget here. I don't want to conclude that it works for you. Does it? I have it still on my
    blog, becasue I just don;t want to thro away my 60+ in the downline. But it's not really doing much. At least bin an internet marketing related blog. Might be better in other industries. I hope you don't mind the direct question.
    Wish you lots of success in 2008

    John
  • Thanks for this. Shoutwire was a new one to me.
  • Very interesting post as always ;-) I was surprised you didn't get more from Reddit too, in my first test of bookmarking a few weeks ago it was the site that sent me the most traffic, i suppose it depends on the category. I really can't wait to see exactly the steps you took :-) The software looks interesting, I'm sure once i've got bored of doing things manually it will be even more appealing lol

    Jayen
  • I have to say that I am having more success with social networking and other Web 2.0 marketing strategies than I've had with any other method.

    This is especially true with my primary business which is a network marketing company. There is so much power in being able to come across as a real person and attract people to your business who have similar interests and goals as yours.

    The #1 Web 2.0 marketing tool I've been using is video mail. When someone subscribes to my newsletter or submits their information to my leads capture page and I send them a personal video mail, they're totally floored.

    People are so used to seeing automated marketing that when you go that extra mile and connect with them on a deeper level, it really makes a huge difference in the response.

    Sheree
  • Steven,

    I want to thank you for doing this series. It's been very, very informative and shows the kind, generous nature that lead me to follow what you've been doing online for a while.

    I do have question about this, though. I realize that there is a lot of traffic that can be harnessed from social bookmarking but just how effective is it when it seems to be so untargeted?

    Is there any way to make social bookmarking traffic more targetted?

    Thanks!
  • Richard
    Steven: Were you able to do a better job of monetizing all that traffic? Earlier in this series you stated that you had not really done so yet. Did you report on this further?

    Thanks
  • andy
    Also note that the web 2.0 sites gave you backlinks that increased your rankings in the SERPs. This probably increased your organic search traffic by a significant amount compare to if you hadn't submitted to any web 2.0 sites.
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