troy smith loves wikipedia
June 1st, 2007
Remember the experiment that was Draft Troy.com? Click here for a refresher.
Yeah, Troy’s now a Raven instead of a Brown. And had Troy and the Buckeyes played better against or beat Florida for the national title, the site may have been a lot more interesting, but that’s a different blog post.
The real goal was to use the site as a marketing experiment.
With little to no investment, the site was able to drive over 40,000 visitors in a relatively short period of time. No. 1 was direct traffic, which largely, hopefully can be linked to word-of-mouth. Google was an important part of the traffic equation, which was no surprise to me, and adding almost 200 MySpace friends helped.
The biggest surprise, however, was the impact Wikipedia had. By adding just one line of content to a page on Troy Smith, I was able to drive over 21 percent of my traffic.
Granted, a lot of their traffic comes via search engines, but there’s no doubting that Wikipedia, if you can get past the editors (no easy task) and you have a popular topic, can be a significant way to drive traffic to your Web site.
June 4th, 2007 at 5:27 am
A good rule of thumb when trying to make certain changes to Wikipedia is, if you have to worry about “get[ting] past” those of us who are committed to keeping Wikipedia content high-quality, you probably shouldn’t be making those changes. But call me Mr Prude if you must.
June 7th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Mark, you forgot the exception to that “Prude” rule — if the external link is to Wikia.com (Jimbo Wales’ own private financially-driven wiki), then it’s okay to add as many as you care to. Count the number of external links from Wikipedia to Wikia — last I bothered to, there were over 4,000.