Word of Mouth Marketing, Blogging, and A Model for Web Traffic
Generalized Model for Web Traffic
Earlier this month, Europhysics Letters published a paper titled “A Theory of Web Traffic.” In it, the paper’s authors, Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury, discuss a mathematical model they created to describe website activity. Their model is based upon the observation that traffic (pageview/visits) is not uniform, i.e. that steady traffic is typically interspersed with traffic super spikes as seen in the graph below.
Referrals from search engines, article directories, RSS feed subscriptions, and other relatively static sources account for the steady traffic seen between spikes. Traffic super spikes are created when a reader from one of the aforementioned static sources encounters an interesting page and posts it to a blog/forum/other location with greater visibility than your own site, triggering an “avalanche of blog and forum postings.” For those who follow the web startup space, this is very much the Techcrunch effect in action.
So, Is This Applicable to Your Small Business? And If So, How?
This “Techcrunch effect” is indeed applicable to your small business! Techcrunch doesn’t have sole claim to this effect - in fact, there are probably a number of blogs that, (1) have access to your target demographic, (2) have an audience size large enough to trigger an avalanche of posts that can drive significant traffic back to your business website. Regardless, you can tap into this phenomenon to grow your business.
While slow steady growth of the ‘low frequency baseline’ can, over time, result in a large customer base, super spikes are clearly beneficial: they bring about an onslaught of potential customers (sales boom) and result in a higher subsequent baseline (faster long term growth). To generate super spikes, you must create custom content, such as blog posts or visual media (pictures, videos, etc). While not all content you construct will get picked up by bloggers, continuously pushing ideas into the blogosphere increases the chance that the content (and hence business) will be linked to and written about. Keep a static page and you will have, at best, a single super spike, after which the blogosphere will have nothing new to discuss. So, by creating content, link building, and networking with bloggers in your market space, you can increase the chance of multiple super spike occurrences and leverage the power of viral marketing to grow awareness of your business.
Hopefully, the near future will usher in more studies like that conducted by Simkin and Roychowdhury. By understanding how web users identify content on the internet, online businesses can better strategize their marketing campaign and break into larger markets.
-Tom
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