A few days ago, I decided to do a bit of an experiment with Technorati.
I had heard a few rumours that it can deliver a blog quite a lot of traffic if you get listed in the “Top Searches” section, but I’d never actually bothered to try and find out.
Well, when I finally did get around to experimenting, Technorati dumped a few thousand people on one of my other blogs over the course of a few days - in fact the deluge is still happening as I write this.
Basically all I did was to go to the front page of Technorati and take a quick look at the “Top Searches” which is just a list of tags that people are interested in at the moment.
On the day I happened to check, all of the top 5 tags were on a similar theme and all of them happen to correspond to the theme of one of my other blogs - I guess that was a bit of luck.
I then wrote a post incorporating all of those tags in the subject and then used those same tags to tag that post also. (Tagging your blog posts is a habit you really should get into if you want a little extra traffic).
While I got lucky with the theme of the tags that were popular at the time on Technorati, which made it easy to write a relevant post, you should be able to incorporate at least a couple of the top tags into a post for your site with a little imagination.
Anyway, then I just went away and forgot about it. I checked my stats for that site this morning and was pleasantly surprised to see that I had had around 3000 visitors from Technorati.
Now, a few interesting points.
While my visitor count went up, my click through rate for Google Adwords went down.
At first, that would say to me that the traffic wasn’t very high quality and for the most part that would be true.
However, the surge also raised the percentage of people who added my blog to their favourites folder from around 21% to about 26% which would indicate that the traffic was reasonably targeted.
While the post itself didn’t make much money, the subject of the post did not allow targeted Adwords ads to be shown (which would account for the low CTR), I am pretty happy with the effort as it may have brought in a few extra regular readers to that blog.
If I could manage to retain a modest 5% of those readers, then I have just added 150 regular readers to that blog - not bad for about 15 minutes work.
Technorati Tags: technorati, tags, blogging
