If You Blog It, Will They Come?

Most of us by now have heard how blogs are search engine friendly and can supposedly pick up lots of traffic quite easily. Last month, I conducted a ‘top secret’ experiment to test this theory. Now it’s now time for me to unveil the results for you.
On April 1, 2006 I launched my Internet marketing blog, which goes by the name Sweetmantra. “Launch” is perhaps overstating the case since all I did was remove the password protection that was blocking access to the site. Only a handful of people knew I was launching the blog, and they were sworn to secrecy and told NOT to visit it.
Since I’ve spent over a decade helping people drive traffic to their Websites, it was very ironic (and at times frustrating) for me to sit on my hands for an entire month and NOT market my new baby.
The only “marketing” of Sweetmantra that I did was the following:
# Registered Sweetmantra with FeedBurner, PubSub, Feedster, and Technorati
# Added links to my new blog from a couple of Websites I have editorial control over
# Published a new post once a week
That was it!
Here’s what happened next:


On April 4, just a few days after launching the blog, pages from sweetmantra.com appeared in Google‘s index.
Then I got my first few visitors. All praise Google!
Then Google found Sweetmantra ‘content’ on FeedBurner and Technorati.
Traffic to my blog picked up some more.
Then the folks from iSummit discovered one of my blog postings that referenced their event and included it in their blog.
More traffic.
And so on and so on and so on…
All told, in the first 30 days of its existence and with NO “marketing” at all, Sweetmantra received 69 unique visits and 118 page views. While these numbers are not going to give any of the boys at BoingBoing sleepless nights, Sweetmantra’s traffic is significant because it came about organically. With very few exceptions, traffic to my blog was the result of being indexed by ‘traditional’ search engines like Google and blog-specific search tools like Technorati. (I’ve always been a fan of Technorati, and I’m even more devoted to it now that I’ve seen what it can do from a traffic driving perspective. You must register your blog with Technorati if you haven’t done so already!)
In addition to ‘attracting’ visitors from Internet users in Canada, my Internet marketing blog was visited by folks from the United States, Australia, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Russia, Singapore, and China.
Needless to say, I’ve witnessed first-hand the power of blogs and their interaction with search engines. Just wait until I actually begin marketing my blog…