John Makes Things

Getting a Blog Off The Ground Part 2

Back in January, I wrote about Monkeys & Elephants, the financial markets blog that I am involved with. I was trying to solve the problem of getting eyeballs on the site. A couple of weeks ago we solved that problem, in a small way.

SeekingAlpha.com is a stock market news and financial advice website that lets people submit articles to their website. They review the articles and post them if they’re deemed worthy. The beauty of this is that SeekingAlpha is a pretty respected website and they have partnered with other financial news portals like Google Finance and Yahoo Finance (how original) and the articles are linked to from each company’s respective information page. We were able to get a bunch of our articles accepted and published by them which has helped bring some traffic back to our site as well.

But not everyone who reads those articles actually arrive back on our blog. Each article so far has attracted around 2000 page views. Once published, they attract around 400-1000 page views a day. But looking at our site traffic, we only seem to get a bump of about 30-50 new visitors when the article is published.

I’ve come up with a few reasons for the low conversion numbers:

1) If the article doesn’t link back to a previous article on our blog, people are less likely to even notice that there is another blog behind the article. Most of the people who read the article move on to another article once they’re done. They aren’t doing research about who wrote the article and what else they have to say. Some are, but not all.

2) Some people just don’t click links.

We’ve also come up with some tips on how to get more page views for the Seeking Alpha articles themselves:

1) Make sure to refer to a company by its full name (eg ‘Gran Tierra Energy Inc’ instead of just ‘Gran Tierra’. Or ‘Petroleo Brasileiro SA’ instead of the nickname ‘Petrobras’). Google Finance keys on full company names when showing articles related to the stock you are viewing.

2) Refer to many companies (with full names) within a particular article to get more exposure from different company’s stock info pages.

We’re still learning here and making up new rules as we go, but so far we’ve been able to increase our daily traffic by 2-3x. And there is a long way to go still.

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