My Great Page View Experiment - Update

I've been anxiously waiting for almost a week to see if my efforts at promotion have paid off since the last page view update. If you read my first article on this topic, My Great Page View Experiment, then you know that my short-term goal was to reach 10,000 total page views. I outlined a promotion plan to help me get there. The week following that article's publication, I worked furiously at promotion. But, over the past several days, my efforts have tapered off. Some of the wind had gone out of my sails because I was anxious to see how I did.

Now the results are in and I am here to provide a full report. But, the official numbers have to wait until the last paragraph. No good writer gives all the answers away in the beginning!

The first part of my promotion plan was to begin using bookmarking sites more often. I had already been using del.icio.us and occasionally Digg, but I added Furl, Netscape and Yahoo to the mix. My goal was to have all of my articles, now 38 in number, bookmarked on each of these sites. But, I discovered that bookmarking takes time - a lot of time. I managed to bookmark 14 of my articles on all five of these sites. However, 27 of my articles are bookmarked on at least one of the sites.

In the midst of my bookmarking frenzy, I began reading some threads on the AC forums that scared me. Some CPs were getting banned from Digg for misusing the site. It seems that Digg can be kind of touchy about receiving too many articles from one author at one time. So, I slowed my efforts down. I decided to bookmark only a couple of articles a day. I also realized that not everything fits on Digg. Many of my articles are about parenting topics and there is no parenting category on Digg. Instead of trying to stick my article in another category where it didn't belong, I decided that I didn't need to Digg everything. I will save those articles for the other bookmarking sites and save Digg for the articles that really do belong there.

The next step in my promotion plan was to create a Squidoo lens for my environmental articles. This lens is still a work in progress, but you can view it here. Squidoo seems like it could be a great promotional tool, but in order for it to work, it needs to be promoted as well. I still plan on working on my lens and will increase my efforts to promote it.

I have been utilizing the Promote Your Content and Just for Fun forums here at AC. These have been a great promotional tool. I even joined one of the page view groups, Reciprocal Friends Part 3. I posted one of my lowest viewed articles in a Worst Article thread and I even started a Best Article thread.

I had some help in promoting my articles during these 11 days. My friend and fellow CP, Amy Weekly, included two of my breastfeeding articles on her Squidoo lens about natural parenting. And, Timothy, a fellow CP, blogged my article, Time for a New Lawn Mower, on his Featured Freelance Writers from Associated Content blog. This is a great blog which I urge everyone to read when you get the chance.

I read a very wise post in the forums about promotion (I think it was by Michy, but I'm not sure), that said promotion efforts should actually be focused on the best articles, not the worst. This revolutionized my thinking. I had gone into this experiment thinking I needed to pull up the numbers for my worst performing articles. But, I realized that focusing on the best articles, the ones I already knew had been well received, made more sense. If, without effort, readers were finding their way to my highest performing articles, then, with effort, I could draw even more readers to them. Simply put, they are an easier sell.

My highest viewed article, Abreva Cold Sore Treatment: All Help or All Hype, became the focus of a lot of my efforts. It went into this experiment with 941 page views and ended with 1,288! I was quite surprised to see this high number. I had hoped it would break the 1,000 mark, but did not dream it would go well beyond that.

My great page view experiment paid off with all of my articles. Each article went up in page views and my grand total went from 7,646 views to 10,003. So, I made my goal of 10,000 by the skin of my teeth, but I made it. My average views per article went from 247 to 263. Better still, I learned that promotion does pay off. I will continue to promote my articles, both new and old, and am confident that my page view average will continue to increase.