Does posting purchase links in social network comments lead to book sales?

It’s been only two days since I started my Annoying Links test, and though I originally intended to stretch the test for a full week, I am going to cut it short. Why? A couple of reasons. One, I simply feel dirty posting links everywhere (even though I stated very explicitly up-front that the links were for study purposes only). Two, though only two days have gone by, the test isn’t looking too positive.

The abbreviated results

Will posting self-promotional links in social network comments lead to book sales? Maybe. But is feeling like a dirty sales person worth it? No.

The process

Over the course of 2 days, I posted a total of 42 comment replies on Facebook and Google+, each containing two links at the end of the post. The posts themselves were genuine responses to comments, things I would have posted even if I weren’t conducting a test.

The two links at the end of the post were 1) a self-promotional link for my book I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin and 2) a link to the original annoying link blog post which explained why I posted annoying links in the first place. Examples below:

The results

44 visits to explanation blog post. During the two day test I received 44 social referral visits to the You may notice some really annoying links out there during the next week post. The most important ones to look at are those from Facebook and Google+ (which are the two networks on which I posted links).

• 19 visits from Facebook
• 1 visit from Google+

10 visits to the I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin purchase page. The I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin campaign page was established strictly for the purpose of this test, so it was restricted from being indexed by search engines which would potentially disturb the test. In other words, the most likely way someone could get to this page is through one of my comment posts.

• 6 visits from Facebook
• 1 visit from Google+
• 2 direct visits (meaning the URL was likely copy/pasted)

1 click on a link to purchase a book. I tagged each one of the bookseller links on the buy page with a Google Analytics event tracking code so I would know exactly how many times each was clicked.

• 1 click

Was it worth it?

Out of 44 annoying links I received 1 potential book sale. In short, no, it wasn’t worth it.

Sure, expanding the networks in which I posted links may have helped. I could have also posted more than 20 (x2) links per day. I might even have had some success by being more strategic with my posts. Or perhaps by rejecting the desire to qualify the links with a comment about their annoyingness could have helped. But, even with those assumptions, I’m just not comfortable with the shotgun link approach.