Another Wordpress Blog

Friday, I wrote Five Tips for Getting Traffic From Stumble and then experienced the powerful pulse of traffic that comes when a blog post gets Stumbled. (If you look carefully, you’ll also notice several other posts got stumble traffic.)

It was a bit odd, because, though I wrote a post on how to use Stumble Upon to get traffic, I didn’t actually expect to get over 1700 visits to that specific post over the course of the next two days. That’s quite a lot for this blog, which, while growing, still has a relatively small readership.

Did the StumbleUpon readers stay?

As you can see below, the visitors lingered a bit, averaging 1.71 pages, and having a bounce rate of 41%. That’s pretty good for visitors who have never heard of me or my blog. Oh, and guess what else? If you look at chart above, you’ll see that some of the Stumblers who visited Friday’s post went on to Stumble other older posts including Block Spammers From Your Trackbacks.

How does StumbleUpon compare to other traffic sources?

If you examine the figure to the right, you’ll see for sheer volume of traffic, StumbleUpon rocks. Once the initial Stumble began, and other people found and stumbled the post, my traffic zoomed.

In my case, the time spent on site and number of pages view beats Google search engine traffic.

However, I should point out two traffic sources that have longer times on site and lower bounce rates than Stumble: Sitemeter referals and Bumbzee referrals. Sitemeter referrals are visitors who I liked: Clearly, they want to read the post. Bumpzee referrals are very targeted, and I encourage you to join a community there.

(I also got some traffic from a long-winded comment I left at TechCrunch. At least some of people were clearly curious, and stayed for four minutes on average. That said, many just bounced out.)

Will using my five tips work for you?

It will, but probably not instantly.

My intention, (and my advice to others) was, and still is to apply the five steps regularly for a period of time.

Why did it happen immediately for me? Well, the truth is, it wasn’t immediate. I’d used two of the tips before posting my advice. It turned out that my audience already had two or three readers who do Stumble, and I got Stumbled — and by Sunday, that article had 17 Stumbles. Many from people I had never, ever heard of, but many from faces I recognize. (I’m reading everyone’s blogs blogs now- and many are great. I may soon write a post on reflecting on thought provoking things they said).

So was the Stumble Success really due to the tips?

Well… who knows? But I’ll make the case that it was!

Tip #4 was to thank people who have Stumbled you. When I checked who discovered the post, I found it was discovered by “Autorave”, aka Maki of DoshDosh. (I’m under the impression that Maki first became aware of my blog through Technorati, and have explained why I think this. )

Tip #1 was to Stumble people who link you. My reason wasn’t to get them to stumble you (at least not immediately). My reasoning was that some of the people Stumble sends to their blog will visit yours! (Which works!)

But, it turned out that Slevi, happened to like L’s Linky Love, the plugin, had mentioned it in an article about Top 15 wordpress plugins.

Well, it turned out Slevi also liked my article on getting Stumble traffic! I don’t know if he had “remembered” my blog because of my previous Stumble- but it couldn’t have hurt.

Some of the stumbles were from people I linked!
Mind you, I didn’t suggest you should link people hoping for a Stumble. But it stands to reason that if I come up with the idea to Stumble people who link me, they might do the same. So, this is sort of the correllary of tip 1.

What about the other three tips? Well, I don’t have data to show that stumbling people’s post after they stumble mine helps my stumble success. I also can’t prove stumbling my friends and commenter’s posts helps, and I can’t prove linking people who stumble me helps.

I probably never will be able to prove these things because the data will be indirect. But, what do I know? Josh Spaulding of Make Money Blog, Stumbled me, and also said he plans to remember to click the thumbs up button when he reads a good post anywhere.

Since he visits my blog, his decision to be active rather than inactive with Stumble will tend to help me and all blogs he visits.

Will I follow my own advice?

You bet! (Unless it works so well it becomes impossible.)

I did take the time to visit the 17 people who stumbled my Friday post (as of Sunday), looked a their blogs long enough to find a post I thought excellent and either stumbled one of their posts, or stumbled a post they had previously stumbled or discovered. I also made them friends and thanked them, when I could. (Some had setting adjusted to prevent that.)

Heck, in some cases, I even left comments at their blog. For example, I enjoyed Tinu’s article Social Media Traffic - Is It About Titans Reciprocating? Or Vote Whoring? Or… and left a comment. But, oddly enough, I forgot to stumble it Sunday. (But I just did. )

I plan to link some of the Stumblers, not only because they stumbled me, but because I find many of their posts interesting and thought provoking. With luck, when I link them, my posts will interest them. Since they know where the Stumble button is, I may get a Stumble.

All with no spamming!

Will I be stumbling my friends and commenters posts? You bet! I’ve been reading their posts- and enjoying them. But until now I didn’t Stumble. In future, I will be liberal with that Stumble button!

Does it sound like I’m claiming to be give-give-giving?

Well… sort of. Except you know what? I find I share common interests with people who Stumbled me. So, the reality is I and finding interesting blogs!

I’ll be linking and stumbling things I like. What could be better?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 2:13 pm and is filed under StumbleUpon, Traffic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.