Wah, what happened? How is it July, and not even early July but mid July? How have I not posted in so long?
Well, here’s the truth: I’ve been posting every week, but the damn zombie post has been eating them. Because they were smart posts, and thus full of brains.
(You: “Doesn’t that mean this post is dumb?” Me: “Probably. Let’s move on.”)
Anyways, people mostly ignore everything I write, but I have gotten questions about the growth hacking experiment. “How did it turn out?” they want to know. “Have you disappeared off the face of the earth because you’ve been so very busy hacking away?”
Kind of?
Unfortunately for a data-driven marketer, I can only bring anecdata to the table, and the reason why illustrates the difficulties of testing things without true split conditions. I quieted down on the blog for a couple of weeks, unlinked the blog from the LinkedIn profile, and generally tried to control things so that changes in views and incoming requests could be attributed to the title change and nothing else.
But at the same time, I had been working on a piece on the KISSMetrics blog about landing page optimization, which was a great opportunity, and one that I didn’t have that much control over. They ran the piece when they ran the piece, and I couldn’t really say, “Hey, could you hold off for six weeks? I’m doing an experiment.” So the piece ran right around the same time I Growth Hacked my job title.
So– yes, I did get a lot of traffic to my profile, and I did get a lot of inbound requests from people wanting hacking. But did it come from the title change? Did it come from the KISSMetrics piece? Did it come from putting my Lean slides on SlideShare, which also produced traffic?
It’s hard to say. My gut– which even a data-driven marketer has– says that yes, the title change did produce some traffic and some inbound opportunities. I admit, this is not a resounding answer.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to carefully cull Andrew Chen’s posts and Twitter so I can get ahead of the curve on the next buzzword opportunity.
Hacking and perfectly controllable conditions are like oil and water anyway, right? Now I’ll be watching you for the next buzzword. 🙂
Anecdotal, but interesting to see. Assuming you saw a persistent increase, beyond the KISSmetrics bump, and disconnecting the blog and feeding all your posts to the zombies would normally have dropped LinkedIn traffic (at least in my extremely anecdotal experience), sounds like a good case for hacking your LinkedIn profile!
— @wittlake
Although I saw just as good a bump (and incoming leads) from the KISSMetrics post. So again, hard to say the buzzword was the cause.