
Yesterday has been an exciting day for Dukeo because it has received a good amount of feedback in a popular Reddit category which resulted in an important quantity of traffic visiting this blog.

Now that the rush is over, I spent some time checking analytics in order to see if this traffic was of any value for this blog.

Here is a small recap of what happened.

As usual when I’m posting fresh content on this blog, I am bookmarking it myself on several websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Reddit.

This allows me to get a few backlinks from popular websites as well as trying to get some exposure for these posts.

Yesterday was “Quote’s Sunday” (yeah it’s going to be a recurring series because I’m lazy on Sundays and it’s easier to share interesting quotes, and btw who wants to read long posts on a Sunday?).

So after posting this quote:

I went over and bookmarked it on Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Reddit.

To my surprise, it received an interesting amount of attention on Reddit.com totaling (at the time I’m writing this post) 154 votes and 52 comments.

It ended up in second place in the /r/business/ category which brought it even more exposure.

And some of these people even shared the quote on their Facebook account bringing in a little more visitors.

As a result, after only a week online, yesterday was a traffic record for Dukeo with a total of 853 unique visitors and 1034 pageviews.

Not so bad for a newly born blog, isn’t it? ;) I don’t expect to receive any more traffic on this quote from Reddit because it seems it has been flagged and removed from the category listing, but that’s still quite good.

Now, more than just being happy with the traffic and moving on to something else, let’s take a look at some additional data coming from Google Analytics.

Before yesterday, the blog was averaging 63% bounce rate, but after receiving the traffic from Reddit it went up to 84%.

This is the reason why I am questioning Reddit traffic quality: the bounce rate has been huge on this source of traffic.

Of course, the reason for this big bounce rate may be that this was only a quote, so when people were clicking the link on Reddit’s website, they might have been looking forward for more content to read and have been deceived.

But another interesting fact is that only a very little percentage of these visitors (around 6-7%) went to a second page on the blog.

So either Reddit visitors are not curious at all, either I’m going to question my blog layout, but for whatever reason it didn’t work as well as expected.

It’s a well-known fact that visitors from bookmarking sites are not the best quality visitors you can get on your blog because they just come and read the page which is bookmarked then head back to the bookmarking site to rate and comment other news.

It’s pretty hard to convert these readers into regular visitors.

I’m going to continue my efforts to get some of my posts ranked on this type of site to see if I can get better results after learning from this first experience.

At least it already taught me a good lesson about titles on Reddit, because some more interesting posts I did write, such as “Success is impossible without setting your Goals” or “How do you deal with Procrastination?” did not receive the same exposure even though it brings more food for your thoughts.

Now, I will definitely need to wait a few more days to see if it has any consequences on a longer term for my blog.

Maybe I’ll see a faster increase in my RSS subscribers or some of these Reddit folks will visit again to see what I have to say…

Even if their was no monetary profit from this traffic, it has been an interesting experiment and I just couldn’t wait to share this with you because it’s been really exciting to see the unique visitors adding up yesterday.