BlogStorm was launched on Thursday 7th June and the first week was certainly a success. We received lots of positive press as well as a nice stream of traffic from some of the popular blogs and social networking websites.
The main referrers are listed in the report below from Google Analytics. As you can see Digg sent a load of traffic as did del.icio.us and Stumble Upon.
Most readers might be surprised to see SU sending so many visitors but if you can create some really top quality content and seed it with a thumbs up its really not too hard to see over a thousand visitors.
Some of you will no doubt want to know how much we have spent on the site so here are the stats so far, which don’t really compare to the $12,107.09 Kawasaki wasted on his new site.
- $0. The total development cost was zero since I coded the site myself. Taking into account my $60 per hour charges the costs might be considered a bit higher than zero, however.
- $0. We haven’t done any marketing of the site yet, I have a budget for this in the future though.
These figures just go to show the power social media can have in launching a site. Forget about paying for conventional marketing, just make sure you hire somebody who can work the blogosphere.
Positive Press
Thanks to the following for their support:
Al, Self Made Minds
I reckon Patrick has come up with a winning tool here and I must admit I do have the feeling of “Why didn’t I think of that”, nice job.
Azzam from OS Candy
If you look over at the site you will noticed that the A list of blog sites are tracked by BlogStorm a marvellous feat and achievement for one man in the humble hills or Yorkshire, UK.
Darren Rowse, Problogger noticed how many links one of his posts had attracted and commented that BlogStorm
could be useful as a blogger wanting to track incoming links on your own blog on a post by post level.
Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
a great way for bloggers to see which of their posts are more popular.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Patrick,
I think the reason to your success has been the top-notch content you put out since day one. I loved you articles on Google Analytics!!
Let me be the first to congratulate you on an excellent achievement in the numbers of the traffic received and certainly on a simple, brilliant but obvious solution that one day will be a common tracking tool as any other analytics tool.
Thanks guys.
There are plenty more awesome posts to come.
This article doesn’t say how you got the visitors, it simply says you did get them.
To be fair to the Kawazaki guy, he didn’t spend the money to get the visitors, he spent it on getting some custom scripts built, getting legal advice and domeain registration.
He got the visitors by knowing the right people, getting the right media attention and blogger links for free. Guess you did the same? Or not?
We didn’t really use any existing relationships with people, I just emailed a few key bloggers. Something anybody could do I guess.
I will be posting more in depth about how to get on some of these sites in the future.
That is really awesome. How many visitors did you have before?
Last week was our first full week so we didn’t have any traffic at all before then.
Let me be the first to congratulate you on an excellent achievement in the numbers of the traffic received and certainly on a simple, brilliant but obvious solution that one day will be a common tracking tool as any other analytics tool.
congratulate you on an excellent achievement in the numbers of the traffic received .
great post.keep up the good work.
“We didn’t really use any existing relationships with people, I just emailed a few key bloggers.”
Didn’t you just contradict yourself there?
The secret is quite simple. You’re good!
You are known / credible because of the quality of your work, including:
“Patrick writes about SEO and social media for the popular E-Consultancy website and has been quoted in publications such as The Times, Guardian, TechCrunch, Mashable, the Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, Ars Technica, ZD Net, CNet News.com, Information Week, The Inquirer, Web Pro News, CNBC, and Wired.”
I doubt very much that someone anonymous can achieve the same result as you have. Or the kind of buzz Dean Hunt talks about on his onw blog.
What doesn’t look impressive, though, are stats for average pageviews and time on site. One would expect people to visit more than 1.54 pages of a new expert blog.
Your google traffic looks impressive in terms of pageviews. But those were only 75 visits.
What are you engagement stats like a tear on?
Great stats…All referrals.
Patrick, pretty cool stuff. Did you have well established social media accounts?
good info. thanks guys
Really cool, thanks for the info….
Florence
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