btw, i’m looking for a logo for the series, steemamp if anyone wants to pitch me an SBD price to make one. i’m not loaded and of course i’ll give credit as a quote each time it’s used, any takers, let me know in the comments.

AMP UP YOU'RE BLOG POSTS!

the first in a series (as you might have guessed by now) i like to make different hashtags series because i like to jump around a lot on to different things i enjoy. i guess i really enjoy things in about nine areas, i’ve spoken about these before. today, i’m starting a new one - #steemamp - a series about ways to amplify traffic to your steemit profile and ultimately you're blog posts. ..

today we are going to be looking at the giphy.com platform and why animated gifs are a really good way of driving indirect traffic to your posts over time as a residual searchable resource.

https://giphy.com/channel/steemit <— my personal free to use archive of animated gifs i have made and all future ones will be posted over here.

i’m kicking off with a bunch of promotional banners, feel free to use them, i’ve scaled them to 840px wide and a number of different height sizes and you can use them as banners or whatever you need, if people want custom sizes of banners please let me know in the comments and i’ll see what i can do to help, a donation of SBD always helps! :)

so like, giphy get’s a lot of traffic. ..

as you can tell from the graph both sites are doing pretty awesome in rankings, i was especially surprised to see how well steemit.com was doing, you can see however that giphy has a global rank of 340 and a country rank of 282, really high, that’s right, it’s in the top 300 websites in the US for traffic, crazy. another important figure however is the bottom right engagement area.. ..

total visits for steemit 5.89 million with a whopping 124.58 million to giphy, giphy has become a dominated force for hosting gif files and so they have a lot of traffic from lots of sources that use them as a host, integration into slack and lots of other applications where you can call their api and get the images, can you imagine if steemit had integration in the editor for giphy? maybe some people would hate that! :)

the average visit duration figure is also interesting to see for steemit, six minutes is pretty good, means people are reading and on average go to four pages, looks like people are scanning the content especially those fast readers, i noticed the pages on giphy was small, i think people pretty much pick a gif in a few pages and go with that, it’s about speed, find something that works and be out that’s why i believe the 66% bounce rate reflects on that.

the figure in the last graphic i want to really share is the social one, a massive 54% of it’s traffic comes from social, that makes sense because giphy is hooked into so many different applications that you can get to gifs from slack, twitter, desktop, open source applications, it’s everywhere — i don’t have a list of the people using their api but it’s well used and distributed — the dev’s of steemit could learn a lot from what’s going on with giphy and we could really improve on that 15% figure if we really did promotional work on rss feeds, third party applications (imagine an app like clipboard but for streemit with really nice social sharing features in there) i’m certain we can get the social traffic up!

but it’s just animated gifs so what?

sure, at first glance all giphy is useful for is for hosting animated gifs but the fact that they get such a sheer amount of traffic makes them a perfect position to activate on some of that traffic in different places in a subtle way, people searching for keywords, tags can find the original gif and link it back, you can attach a url to take people back to a source, i even found that i could upload my original mp4 with AUDIO and you could download the source file, kinda cool for dropping things onto the platform and hiding audio inside of files (but that’s another thing all together)

bottom line, traffic, it’s about traffic, people finding the banners, wondering what steemit is, posting those banners on their posts, generates interest, yada yada, give it a go, make a giphy account with 100/1000 gif animations on and link back that gif to the place where it was used, that could be, you guessed it, your steemit blog post. instant traffic generation. simples.

i’ll be doing a lot more of these steam application ideas in the coming weeks and months, i’ve got a handful of little shows/series i’m doing right now, it helps me maintain some level of mental clarity! hope you enjoyed this and don’t forget to use the gifs! - hope you like them! :)