Blogging Experiment Twitter Feed Follow-up

I have been conducting a blogging experiment the past month to see how adding a twitter feed to my blogs affects traffic.  Up until a month ago the Twitter feed was on 2 of my blogs so I added the Twitter feed widget to all of my blogs.  I liked that the new widget design could be customized to my blogs theme colours.  As promised here are the results of that experiment. 

I am not as active as I could be on Twitter.  I usually tweet new blog posts via tweetfeed, current events and chit chat with others on Twitter.  From time to time I tweet older blog posts to help promote my blogs.  I currently have 827 followers.  Just a quick note on followers, not all followers are active in that they may read your tweets but they may not respond or click on links.  Some followers haven't been active on Twitter for a few months as well so at some point I will clean up my stream to remove these but it is quite common for someone to take a longer break from Twitter then become active again so deleting too soon likely isn't a good idea.  I do not solicit followers using some of the dubious gain 1,000 of followers if you join here type of thing.  I think letting my followers grow naturally will result in a following that is actually interested in what I have to say.

During the month (April 28 - May 28, 2010) long experiment I received 27 visits to my blog through Twitter.  That works out to almost 1 visit per day to at least one of my blogs.  Of those 27 - 17 were directly from Twitter and 10 were directly from the Twitter feed.  By far my cooking blog received the most visits via Twitter (13) and the Twitter feed on that blog sent traffic to some of my other blogs.  This doesn't sound like a lot of traffic but it is still 27 visitors more than I had before.  I noticed that the number of no referring link in my stats increased with some of those having an entry page from Twitter feed.  So the Twitter feed is bringing traffic to my blogs between the six blogs and within the blogs.  What I also noticed in the cooking blog stats is readers had clicked on a link in the Twitter widget to go to another post I had tweeted the link.

Twitter traffic tends to be sporadic but my theory is the more active you are on Twitter the more traffic it will bring to your blogs.  The Twitter feed helps to bring traffic between my blogs and within them so this is one way to direct readers to certain blog posts of interest.  I will be leaving the Twitter feed widget on my blogs and continue to monitor their effectiveness.   My experiment for June will be increasing my blog promotion tweets and Twitter presence with a goal of several tweets daily.  I'll report back on the results the first week of July.

Garden Gnome
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