My Great Page View Experiment

I was somewhat frustrated with the last page view update. Surely, my articles would draw more traffic than that? I'm sure many of us AC content producers have had similar thoughts.

I've been a content producer since late January and, at the time of this writing, have published 31 articles at AC. For my 31 articles, I have 7,646 total page views for an average of 247 views per article. I'm not sure how this compares to others, but I would like that average to be higher. I read rumors on the forums that higher page views equals higher initial offers for articles and, as we all know, the page views themselves generate more income.

My lowest viewed article is After School Snacks for Children: Keep it Healthy with only 27 views. On the bright side, my highest viewed article, Abreva Cold Sore Treatment: All Help or All Hype, has 941 views. This seems to be a true evergreen article as its views increase each time the page views are updated. It was published on March 19,2007 and it is still performing well for me. I'm confident that this article will cross the 1,000 threshold at the next update.

All of my other articles fall somewhere in between, with some doing worse than I thought they would and some better. A handful have not broken 100 page views yet and a few have made it over 500.

Up until now, I have been a sporadic promoter of my articles. One article I promoted as much as I could, Celebrity Moms and Their Breastfeeding Views, Practices. It preformed modestly with 356 views. I received a nice compliment from the CM when I was given an offer for this article and told to promote it, so I did. I finally got over my fear of Digg and this became the first article that I Dugg. I put it on del.icio.us, I told my family and friends about it, sent out a Myspace bulletin and even posted in the Promote Your Content forum. I'd always been too modest to do that before.

Somehow, self-promotion is hard to do. It feels like school-yard bragging to me. Gradually, I am getting over it and realizing that I have to self-promote if I am going to be successful at AC.

I read Carol Gilberts article titled Create an Article Promotion Plan to Increase Page Views and was inspired. Thanks, Carol, for sharing this article with us. I now have a plan that I am going to put into action.

My plan consists of entering each article in five separate bookmarking sites. I've been using del.icio.us for a while, but I admit I don't use it for all of my articles. This will change. I have recently added Digg and Yahoo and will sign-up for two others. Of course, I know I have to bookmark others' articles as well, least the sites think I am spamming them. This is no problem for me. I've long had a habit of bookmarking articles that I really like on del.icio.us and have already Dugg many articles other than my own.

Today, I signed up for a Squidoo account and am beginning to create a lense for some of my environmental articles. This seems a little labor intensive, but once I get it all set up, it should be pretty easy to maintain.

I already have my RSS feed on my Myspace page. Of course, I only have 13 friends on Myspace, most of them family, so that doesn't generate many views for me. It does save me from having to constantly pester them to read my articles. If they are interested, they know where to look. I have sent out a Myspace bulletin for one of my articles, but I will do that only occasionally when I have an article that I am particularly proud of. I don't want my family and friends to feel like I am spamming them. I also don't want to change my Myspace settings to generate more views. My page is set to private and will remain that way.

I am going to get more creative in my articles and include links back to previous articles. I think this is a neat tool and I do appreciate it when I see it on someone else's article. Likewise, I am going to include links to other CP's articles in my articles if they fit in with my topic. One way to help yourself is to help someone else.

I do, already, read and comment on lots of articles by other CPs. But, I am an avid reader anyway and have read some great stuff here! I don't really do this with page views in mind, but realistically, I know it doesn't hurt either.

Finally, I am going to start promoting my content in the Promote Your Content and Just For Fun forums here at AC. I also vow to figure out how to get my CP link in my e-mail signature. I'm sure it won't take me long to figure it out. It's just a matter of doing it. And, I will start putting my CP link on my messages when I am participating in the forums.

So, that is it in a nutshell. Overall, I'm going to be more organized about promotion and spend more time on it. My goal is to break 10,000 total page views by the next update. I plan on writing a follow-up article once I know how my efforts paid off. I'd like to be able to track which method worked the best to generate page views. Since I can't, I will just have to go with my overall effort. I am confident I will see a difference.