Wednesday’s newspaper article in the Alpharetta Neighbor was great publicity for GA Jim and it also provided a great opportunity to view the symbiotic relationship between print newspapers, blogs and other forms of social media. Here is what I found out.

The Neighbor article helped set a new record for visitors on GA Jim. I don’t post new material on this blog every day so my web traffic varies a great deal and the most visitors I had ever had in any day prior to Wednesday was just under 100. On the day the article came out my readership was 103 and for the following day I had 80. Since then my traffic seems to have settled in to the previous range of about 20-30 a day so I credit the Neighbor with adding an additional 150 or so visits to my blog. That is great exposure and I assume most of those readers would never have visited GA Jim otherwise.

Now let us take a look at what the article did for the Neighbor’s web traffic. As I look at the Neighbor website this morning most of the articles of note show about 140 web hits. The article about local bloggers, though, shows a total of 681 views. That means the article about bloggers received about 550 additional views. That is nearly 4 times the average traffic for an article on their website.

For analysis purposes let’s assume that the bloggers that were profiled in the article accounted for the extra views through their blogs and other social media like Twitter, Facebook, etc. Let’s also assume that as one of the four bloggers profiled I accounted for 1/4th of the additional traffic. That’s a lot of assuming but it does seem reasonable and if so that would mean GA Jim drove about 140 views to the Neighbor website and in return it received an additional 150 views. Sounds like a win/win for everybody to me.

I know my analysis is far from scientific but it is a good illustration of how blogs like mine and print newspapers complement each other. Print newspapers provide original reporting which serves as the basis for much of my content and in return I drive traffic to their websites. Much of what I do would be impossible without the hard work of professional reporters like Joan Durbin and Rachel Kellogg at the Neighbor so I hope the exposure blogs provide will continue to pay off for their advertisers.