I increased my traffic by 179%, find out how.

This looks like a flabbergasting John Chowish title but there is a reason to it. It is actually an experiment I lead over 10 days and looks like @kurtavish and @blebon found out the trick and jumped on the wave. The Wave, that’s actually the idea of the experiment. It was an experiment on trends and their impact on a site. The other thing I wanted to see was the increase in traffic with the bounce rate that goes with it. All it cost me to do this was the time I put in posting the trendy topic on the site. The topic in question was to offer Google Wave invites for free (currently running at 15€ apiece on ebay).

The idea.

The idea in itself is simple. Being curious about everything on the web I got into the Google Wave waiting list just as it was budding. Like the 99 999 other lucky Wave enthusiasts, I received my wave login along with some invites to send. The marketing test idea was already here. 100 000 persons, this means a total of 2 million lucky Wave users compared to the billions of possibilities. So I launched out to give them away to see how people would react to the trend.

And they DID react. All in all, this site had a 179% increase in traffic. The increase is easy because of the low but really precise audience the Bureau has. So, it was more important to check the bounces. This would show whether the site was going with the trend or nor. I’ll let you find it out by yourself:

1.23% bounce rate. Meaning that the message got to the reader. This is where you can achieve great things. Related posts and all will drive the readers to check other parts of the site and maybe catch up some interest in your content.

The future.

The contest giveaway idea is not new but the way to do it is also important. The current technique for the Google Wave invite was to either have a tweet or a blog post. Why? 2 reasons:

• The site got 2000 visits with a 1.18% bounce rate over the 10 days, just take 15 persons with at least a hundred followers who will tweet your contest, you’ll be reaching 1500 persons in one go. Along with that, the person makes a back link to your site. Many would say: “A Twitter backlink huh?”. Well, my Twitter profile has a PR 4, other Twitter pages can be 3 or 2. In the long run, the total amount of back links will pay.
• Following the same idea, the blog posts and buzz over other blogs get you to have traffic from other sources. You can also receive the benefits of back links from these. These also will be a good element for your SEO in the long run.

These marketing techniques are really great for increasing your site’s presence on the web. Now, this is not a MMO (make money online) blog. Therefore the persons getting into the contest and actually reading the content are a targeted audience interested in the Web and Wave, while a lot of people on MMO sites would just come round and go. If you want to really use these techniques, you have to understand what type of readers will be attracted and what are the chances of having them staying and participating.