Major increase in traffic from Aftonbladet to blogs

Two weeks ago I wrote about how aftonbladet.se noticed a 12% increase in incoming links after the news site started showing blog links to articles. Then I got an email from Roland Karlsson, the person behind the popular Swedish blog networks blogg.se and webblogg.se. Roland told me that the incoming traffic from aftonbladet.se to the blog network quadrupled since the introduction of blog links.

Number of visitors sent to blogg.se and webblogg.se from aftonbladet.se:

week 41: 5,005
week 42: 5,438
week 43: Aftonbladet introduces blog links
week 46: 15,084
week 47: 24,854

Aftonbladet leapfrogged into 10th place of sites that sends most traffic to the blog network, and #6 if you exclude Google, according to Roland Karlsson.

1. google.se 407,526
2. images.google.se 356,596
3. google.com 126,878
4. bloggtoppen.se 50,028
5. englasshowroom.com 38,928
6. lunarstorm.se 37,067
7. images.google.com 31,492
8. playahead.se 31,144
9. bloggkoll.com 26,341
10.aftonbladet.se 24,854

At first sight it might look like a no-brainer that Aftonbladet would send loads of traffic to anything it links to. But a recent example shows the opposite. When 7 bloggers, including myself, participated in blog panel at aftonbladet.se, none of us recieved more than about 20-30 visitors per day from the panel. So the question is whether our topic was too narrow for Aftonbladet’s readers or if it is more beneficial to piggyback on news articles than actually contributing your own original content. I’m leaning towards the former.

Footnote: During week 47 blogg.se/webblogg.se had 58,000 active bloggers.

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Aftonbladet sees 12% increase in blog links after linking to bloggers

The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet started to show blog links via its own blog portal Bloggportalen.se on October 23, 2007. I noted on that day, that we should “prepare to see a major increase in blog links to Aftonbladet.se the coming weeks”. The reason being of course that bloggers would be more encouraged to link to a high trafficked site that could possibly send them large amounts of new visitors. So was I right?

Well, on the launch day (at 11.45 PM to be precise), Technorati had registered 61,853 blog reactions to Aftonbladet.se. Today, a little more than a month later, there are 69,219 blog reactions (at 9.38 PM), which is an increase with 12%, in just one month. And I may be wrong here, but I believe that Technorati track links during the last six months which means that links that are older than six months do not count any longer (please correct me if I got this backwards). If that is the case, the increase cannot simply be due to a stretched measurement period, but something else is at play. I would not be surprised if the blog linking stategy has paid off already.

If I had had half a brain, I would also have scribbled down the number of incoming blog links to Expressen on Oct 23, so that we could compare, but unfortunately I didn’t.

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