What’s going on here? (Besides me having a little too much fun with the mark-up tool?)

That’s exactly the question I asked myself last Wednesday, November 15. Overnight, a blog article I wrote titled “How to Use Facebook Messenger to Get a 619% Higher Click-Through Rate and Other Brilliant Tricks” (since renamed, because who has time to read that title?) rose to the number one page on which our visitors were landing.

And it was attracting 17% of our total web traffic.

Now, this might sound like I’m bragging–check out how many visitors our blog post got!–but that’s not quite it… because one week ago, that same article accounted for only 0.44% of all visitors (impressive, I know…).

What changed? I didn’t rewrite it. I haven’t even touched it since I first published it on October 4.

Google Analytics gave me my answer (thank god, because I was getting nervous my dad was bribing coworkers under-the-table to read my posts). I clicked the article and opened up “sources,” to see where my readers were coming from:

Aha!

Last Tuesday, I created an Inbound.org account and posted the article under the category, “Future of Marketing.” And that’s all I did–it was so minor in my list of daily tasks that I honestly forgot all about it. I figured it would disappear off into internet obscurity and I’d never see more than a .0001% increase.

Apparently, I’ve been underestimating some tools at my disposal. And I bet you have, too:

5 Tools To Share Your Blog Content to Immediately Increase Traffic

1. StumbleUpon (currently our #1 source for all web traffic!)
2. Reddit
3. Inbound.org
4. Design Float
5. Scoop.It

There’s certainly a strategy to this: you can’t just post all your blog articles haphazardly and expect results (I’ve been temporarily banned from inbound.org because they told me, “you’re trying to post too many of your own articles.” Whoops).

Plus, it does take time to build a community on these sites–you don’t want to be that guy who shows up just to post his own content and then takes off, do you? By strategically following people in your industry, “liking” other relevant content, and even getting new blog post ideas out of the process, you’re likely to attract a larger, more long-term following.

But regardless, the important takeaway is this: overnight, we saw a 56% increase in blog traffic from these five sites alone. What does that really mean? It means that these five sites beat out Google, direct search, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, in terms of attracting new potential customers. And it means the people finding our website–and our business–doubled. Pretty cool, huh?

Check out our other posts about Search Engine Optimization.