In the original post The Importance of Calls to Action on your Business Blog I placed a Call to Action (CTA) to download 8 CTA tips for your blog. Unlike the typical CTA that takes visitors to a landing page with a form, this CTA asked you to retweet a message via PayWithaTweet (PWaT) to your twitter followers in return for the tips document.
Before I go any further I want to make it clear that this was a blind, non-scientific experiment to see if we could get similar results to that of SEOmoz experiment but with fewer overall page views. Content Camp will not be regularly requesting your information for the content we create, you are our customers and we are invested in your success.
Overall the “test” was a success on all levels, including comments both positive and negative. Thanks again to everyone who commented on the original post! So what was the result of all these Pay With A Tweets?
Pros
- Just like the SEOmoz article written by Matt Gratt, "The Importance of Calls to Action on your Business Blog" post was indexed only hours after the post had been published, (July 14th 2011 @ 10am EST). By 5pm the post was ranking in the top three on Google for search terms including Importance of Calls to Action, Business Blog Calls to Action and many other similar search terms.
- The article was read and commented on by individuals outside the Content Camp community. Thanks to the Content Campers who participated and made this happen!
- Organic search rose overall for the Content Camp site. Never before and not since has the site reached such high Organic search volumes as it did on 7/14 and the following day 7/15. The verdict is out on whether or not the flurry of activity on twitter caused this spike in organic traffic. If you experiment with PWaT please let us know if you have similar results!
- There is a fair amount of friction and anxiety associated with PWaT
- One must have a twitter account
- Be willing to quote on quote “SPAM” your followers who may not be interested in the offer (a big concern of content campers)
- Trust a 3rd party twitter application that uses the new OAuth security which requires you give access to PWaT.
PWaT and other similar programs are a great way to inflate social buzz and quickly index pages, rank on keywords and potentially increase your Organic search volume for a day or two. Unfortunately the friction and anxiety is a big turnoff for many and should be taken into consideration when planning to run a PWaT or similar campaign. We will keep you posted when a solution with fewer cons becomes available.
In the meantime, if you want to utilize the Pros of PWaT think about providing two options for visitors who click on your blog CTAs. Have both a form to capture lead information and the option to PWaT if the visitor does not want to provide their personal information.
