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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