PR Pop Quiz: How Much Traffic Do New York Times Links Generate?

by Stella Fayman on October 22, 2012


(photo credit)

The other day, Entrepreneurs Unpluggd was linked to in the You’re the Boss section of the New York Times. Here’s what it looked like:

“Stella Fayman explains why fake it until you become it should be every entrepreneur’s mantra.”

Being a complete NYTimes junkie, I was really excited. So, I tweeted the article. Here’s what happened:

 

This is exciting because NYTSmallBiz has over 200,000 followers on Twitter. With such awesome press, I was curious to see how the link would impact traffic, how the tweet would affect traffic from twitter, and how the tweet would raise our follower count. Let’s take a look at our analytics:

 

That’s right, that link generated a grand total of 141 visitors. Four came from Twitter, and 131 came from the link in the article. 

How about Twitter followers? We started off the day with 1719 followers and ended with 1735. That’s 16 new followers…not bad.

Of course, links like the one above, are special for their domain authority weight (SEO) and ability to use in social proof (throwing the NYTimes logo on your website). However, I’m always curious to see the effect of PR, so hope this was helpful!

 

 

 

 

 

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  • Dan

    Interesting on an anecdotal level but tough to make any conclusions from this information. The page from which they linked is littered with links, it’s very easy for a reader to get lost in all of that blue underlined text.

    • http://www.facebook.com/stellachka Stella Fayman

      definitely. im always curious though, to see how big of an effect on traffic these kinds of links have…then you can determine how much of your marketing/pr resources should be spent there

  • Dan P.

    Yea, that’s interesting, because it looks almost like one giant resource/link directory, only on NYT. As the other Dan said, I’d be more interested in the conclusion: Why did people click it? And how many people would have clicked it if it wasn’t surrounded by all those links?