My Random Content Experiment

Just before Thanksgiving I started a website experiment. I know that content is what makes or breaks a website and I had been sitting on a bunch of half-written articles for some time. The idea was to take all of those half-baked articles and just throw them out there on my website and see what would happen.

This is the first example in my new Experiment Based Blogging project. Like any good experiment I should list my thesis, materials, assumptions, results, and analysis.

My Random Content Experiment Thesis

Materials

Self-Hosted WordPress Blog / Website
Thesis Theme
Many unpublished psuedo articles

Thesis

So, why publish so many articles?

Articles are content. Websites are made to share inter-related content. That content was doing me absolutely no good just sitting in my head, on random scraps of note paper, or in my WordPress Drafts mode. I thought these articles would do much better out on my site – no matter how ‘good’ they were – than they did not being published.

Assumptions

Many of these articles were Search Engine optimized. I did the research to see that a lot of people were searching for specific industry-related terms so I wrote about those topics in the manner they were sought after. The assumption was that those search numbers – the number of people searching for those terms remained constant.

Procedure

I wrote 38 new articles in 2 weeks. I didn’t spend much time at all clearing out my drafts box. I translated the raw notes that I had in to barely-intelligible articles and pressed the submit button.

What I didn’t do is as important as what I did do here. I didn’t waste time with paralysis through analysis. I didn’t style the posts. I didn’t optimize images. I didn’t do any linkl building campaigns. I just published.

Results

143 new unique pageviews, 1 hr, 20 minutes of page views.

Google now indexes my site everyday.

Analysis

Quotes and Cross linking posts with trackbacks had the most views.
How-tos and definitions had the longest average times, lowest bounce rates and lowest exits.
Local links, my news summaries (not the ones doing a digest, just local news) performed the worst with the highest bounce rates, highest exit rates, and lowest time on page.
Google loves frequently updated websites with lots of content.

So, what do you think about my experiment? Do you have a bunch of half-written articles or other marketing materials? Have you ever quieted your pursuit fo perfection and just said, who cares? Let’s just do it? Let the world know by sharing in the comments section below.

For those who are interested, here is a definitive list of all of the content I published as part of my random content experiment.

My Random Content Experiment