Let me explain why I started to do BuzzFeed posts, and why I stopped (even though I managed to get on the front page of BuzzFeed relatively easily).
It was November of 2015 and I was serious about growing my blog traffic. I wanted exponentially increase my traffic (I was at a measly 1K a month) and I wanted to do it fast! My answer, BuzzFeed of course! It was seemingly easy and food blog posts are perfect for BuzzFeed’s list posts – who hasn’t seem BuzzFeed’s post on the “21 Ways to Eat Pudding as a Grown-up?” I read a bunch of articles and researched the best practices to help to get featured on the BuzzFeed’s front page. After some trial an error, I was successful! I managed to get 6 of my posts, featuring my recipe of course, featured on the front page of BuzzFeed.
At one point, I hit over 20K in visitors within 30 days! This was terribly exciting! The excitement though, did not last long. I quickly realized that the traffic coming from BuzzFeed was not MY type of traffic. I’m a healthy plant-based blogger and most of the traffic coming from BuzzFeed was not that. I got VERY few email signups (I’m talking like a maximum of from those 6 front page posts), the time spent on site was incredibly low, and the bounce rate was very high.
This really came to light when, during my BuzzFeed craze, the Veggie Health Institute ending up sharing my post in their email newsletter and I received 50 email signups in less than 24 hours. I realized that THIS was the audience I wanted. I wanted readers that actually appreciated my stuff, and wanted to come back for more.
BuzzFeed, though it has definitely had some positive benefits (like increasing my domain authority and increasing my traffic) has been, overall, more of a vanity metric. It sounds good to say that my post is on the front page of BuzzFeed and I got 20K traffic but if those people are not staying on my site and engaging with my content, it’s not very useful for me. At the end of the day, I just could not justify the time and energy spent into creating and promoting BuzzFeed posts.
I am now focusing my energy in creating recipe videos. The market for recipe videos is not saturated (yet) and I’m taking full advantage of this fact. You can read more about how to create recipe videos.
You can read about my blog traffic journey in my traffic reports.
Questions? Comments? Suggestion? Let me know. 🙂
