I just read an interesting post at SiteLogic regarding the value of social media traffic swells. Matt finds it all a bit salty:
Social Media provides a “sugar-high†approach to building links, much less an online business. It provides a lot of traffic, very fast. However the vast majority of that traffic is not engaged, rarely stays for more than a few seconds and can sometimes be rude.
Much of his analysis stems from the experience of a recently dugg post. The blog’s author wasn’t impressed by the candor of comments left by the digg community at digg or on her own site. It looks like she removed the comments on her blog, and a quick search for the site that got “kicked around in a peanut gallery (?)” returns no reference to the digg reaction.
In other words, no harm, no foul. So a few of those crazy little digg bastards left some negative comments. Oh well, 23,000 visits that day had to land some relevant traffic. And all of it was free.
Only an SEO consultant would view an impromptu traffic swell in terms of how bad the resulting conversion rate was. I love SEO people. I think they’re crazy, but I love ‘em.
3 Responses to “Digg swarm”
Be careful on the SEO comments:) BTW, conversion rate can be somewhat irrelevant in true organic results. The key is traffic, and it’s free. Here is why I say so…I personally know a couple “seo experts” that I actually term “mass content spammers” but their whole business model is based around pages, and loading content pages with natural flowing keywords, yet minimal knowledge value. 1 guy in particular has betwen 60,000-80,000 active pages and makes approx $35,000/mo on AdSense. Though each page was worth ~$0.50, he just adds more pages to earn more.
Not sure where I am going, so I will close with…23,000 visits is a great thing especially when they are free. Gotta cut before I delete this comment.
Yeah, I try not to antagonize seo types, but this one amused me.
I need to work on my adsense strategies – thanks for the reminder of how much I suck at it.
[...] This was a case where I dramatically underestimated the value of traffic segments based on the average population characteristics. My guess is that prejudices against digg, stumbleupon, del.icio.us, and reddit traffic are similarly offbase. [...]