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Where Bloggers Get Their Biggest Levels of Traffic

Posted By Darren Rowse 6th of May 2008 Blog Promotion 0 Comments

Last week I asked readers about their biggest sources of traffic to their blogs.

The results reveal a fairly striking winner – Google.

Traffic-Sources

The comparison between Google and ‘Other Search Engines’ was fairly amazing – but what did interest me was the number of bloggers reporting Social Media sites as their number 1 source of traffic (15%). I’m sure if I’d asked this same question 18 months ago that they would have barely registered on the results.

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. Even i get a high %age from Google.

  2. Thinkjayant says: 05/06/2008 at 10:28 pm

    Nice article. I am in the process of rebranding my site & narrow it down. The article will help me a lot on where to focus. Thanks

  3. Well well well, this is a very interesting post indeed and thanks for sharing this graph with us (PS. based on how many responses? maybe I missed it?).

    Nevertheless, to clarify issues for myself I would like to raise some questions that might put these numbers into perspective:

    1) who makes up this sample, people who blog to:

    – make money through advertising or affiliate programs
    – sell consulting services by having clients read what the write
    – etc

    In addition, are these people blogging for themselves, as freelancers and/or as part of a corporation?

    2) As we have pointed out somewhere else, if you want to have a loyal readership, traffic by Google, Digg and Facebook is of little use – they take what they need and off they go possibly never to come back

    http://commetrics.com/?p=12

    3) I am curious how people can get so much traffic from social media. Nevertheless, digg.com is one site that brings such traffic. We and others have found out that Twitter traffic is limited:

    http://commetrics.com/?p=37

    So from which social media service does all that traffic originate.

    4) What about culture, are your respondents – the bloggers all from the U.S. and are things the same over the pond?

    I could imagine that things could be different in those places that might use another language than English with a slightly different culture :-)

    At least this is our experience over here.

    I find polls are usually very interesting indeed and the graphics like the one above look wonderful. I just get worried if data raise more questions than they can answer.

    Keep up the great posts and thanks for giving a suit a chance to comment.

  4. Definitely very interesting stats you have here. I’m speculating that if you run the poll again six months later, the percentage from social media sites will be higher.

  5. I can easily see how a small or medium sized blog can get a larger percentage of their traffic from a social media site. One of my posts got stumbled last month and it drove my traffic for the day up almost 900%. The spike only lasted 2 days but it was enough to skew my normal monthly metrics.

  6. I’ve noticed a lot comes from google but even more from google images. Has anyone noticed that?

  7. If I combine my three main efforts–social media, return readers, and other blogs–I potentially have only 8% less potential traffic as Google (which I also court…) alone…

    ~ Alex

  8. Interesting. For myself, a fairly new blogger, I’m just happy with traffic, period. I can’t wait for the day I actually have more data to analyze!

  9. Interesting but I can’t understand why Google works so good than the others engines. Imagine what if Yahoo, Ask, worked like Google. Traffic!!!

  10. I’m despondent at how much traffic is driven to blogs via Google. That said, we (at Gear Patrol) don’t rely on Google traffic to refer most of our traffic but rather simple word of mouth marketing from our repeat readers. We’re a new blog in an already very-competitive market but it’s exciting to see organic growth… albeit very slowly. Any tips would be appreciated!

    http://www.gearpatrol.com

  11. Keep in mind this doesn’t really say anything about which is better, social media or Google. You can work Google and you can work social networks, but you can get Google hits without doing anything more than posting, whereas one must for the most part work the social sites to get traffic from them. At least this would be true of small blogs. Large blogs, on the other hand, would get viral feedback from their readers’ activity in social networks. So a person who does no marketing at all, no doubt, get pretty much all their traffic from Google.

    What would be more telling, would be the results of someone who spent equal and considerable time on SEO and social networking working Google and say the ten most popular social networking sites.

    An afterthought, to reckon that in the future there will be a lot of consolidation in the social networking arena. This was what happened with search. In the late 90s we were using a lot of different search engines. Yahoo was the most popular. Google certainly didn’t take off right away, but it eventually displaced everything out there, really for one main reason, it searched way better than the competition.

    The same will be true of social networking even though the various sites do different things. And it might not be any of the sites we know today that wins out. Also, I believe we will see major corporations that spent billions to buy up social networking sites, just shut some of them down and eat the cost. But it’s obviously not going away. It is too ubiquitous.

  12. Google is very good to my site. Some of the stuff from my site end up on their first page. Love it!

  13. google and blogger, it’s amazing wedding :) huh… What happen if google make a deal with Yahoo, so hart to thinking.

  14. As a fairly new blogger this information is AWESOME. Thanks so much, I’m definitely going to push some more of the SM sites :)

  15. Google is lone winner for traffic to my site

  16. Once you break the code to get in the list of Google blog alerts for your keywords, you’ll see some nice traffic.

  17. I can double my traffic on any given day by begging for stumbles in a few dark corners of the net where this is considered appropriate. I don’t bother very often because it is mostly meaningless traffic. It rarely garners real readers or commentators.

  18. My number one source of traffic is Google also, second is organic, and third is from other blogs. I think this getting readers from other blogs is fabulous way to cross pollinate.

  19. My blog is only a few months old and most of my traffic is from SM sites. I just submitted a sitemap to Google so maybe that will help. I will just keep writing my best posts and commenting where I can on others. I wonder does Google care if your posts get comments? or is that not relevant as long as they visit.

  20. It’s no surprise to me that Google dominates, but I do have to give social networking some kudos. For me SEO, social networking is the order for me, however I’m getting more and more into the idea of PPC. Scary, but hands down will boost site traffic. The next thing to tackle is getting those visitors to keep coming back!

    So many steps! :)

  21. Nice job, this Site is full of some great info and is surely a really good resource for us Blog Addicts, is it listed on Blogged.com? I was wondering because I think Blogged is a great way to get more traffic to your Blog (it’s not my site, just a good resource that I personally use), so this means more Money, just thought it may help, keep up the great work, we need more good stuff like this!

    Thanks – http://blogprofitbank.blogspot.com

  22. i agree! most of my traffic comes from google…

  23. Can anyone tell some examples of Social Media Sites? Thanks…

  24. I would say social networking sites are the best when it comes to traffic building. I personally use blogcatalog and stumble upon and i think they are awesome!Google also plays a main part, yes, but social networking is really a boon!

  25. Social Media Sites are e. g. Mr. Wong
    but it´s the only searchengine google :(

  26. I get barely any traffic from google yet (my site is 5 months old). Am I doing something wrong? Most of my traffic comes from commenting other sites

  27. I agree with the results except for the social bookmarking sites.

  28. I definitely agree with Google being the largest part of my traffic. My second largest is generally digg.

  29. traffic varies, but right now i am doing ok with social bookmarking plus google search

  30. It would be interesting to do the poll again a year or so later and see if social media sites have increased.

    It would be interesting.

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