MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Ok, as I mentioned, we did a few tweaks to the blog to see what would happen.

The changes we did were:

1. Append "about the author" to the end of each post
2. Append "related posts" to the end of each post
3. Append a link to our free internet marketing course to the end of each post

Sadly, I don't think there are any conclusive differences for you data-driven folks.

Comparing the 2 weeks of having these plug-ins to the previous 2 months without, the big differences are a ~30% increase in page views/visit and ~45% increase in time on site. HOWEVER, those 2 months include 3 posts that got very high on Reddit (I think they all reached the front page), so I don't know if the data is reliable. For instance, in those 2 months 90% of our traffic was new, versus 70% for the 2-week test.

Does that matter? Does "social media" traffic provide any benefit to a blog like this?

Not much for us. There was no major difference in traffic sent from the blog to our marketing course, which is one of our key metrics.

When you scale the control down to just the 1 week prior to installing the plug-ins, there is no statistical difference anywhere.

Do with this data as you will, but so far it appears these plug-ins aren't making much of a difference in increasing reader consumption. If you aren't familiar with finding and installing WordPress plug-ins, it doesn't look like these are worth the time it will probably take you to figure them out.

PS - This data is probably worthwhile also. When we got all that Reddit traffic, our RSS subscriptions hardly changed.

Last 5 posts by

• VIDEO: Maximizing Traffic Marks Results and Getting Back Links Fast - August 11th, 2008
• 150% More Traffic and 133% More Sales From A Few Tweaks. You Can't Be Serious... Can You? - May 26th, 2008
• The More You Give, The More You Get: How To Get Interviews With Experts In Your Niche - May 13th, 2008
• The Beach Bum's Guide to Landing Pages - May 5th, 2008
• The Future of AdWords for the Small Business - May 2nd, 2008

About the Author

Mike is an internet marketer at MindValley responsible for running marketing tests, designing product launches, and leading an eCommerce project.

Check out other posts by Mike W.

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