social_media_communities_main.jpg Regular readers of my blog know that I have written a lot of articles about my traffic ranks lately. I have been doing this for a couple of reasons, building traffic measures your success as a blog and it also brings you the opportunity to monetize your traffic if you so choose. It depends on what your personal goals are with your site.

I told you that I would be sharing some of the methods I have been using to drive traffic to my site and this is part 1 of that promise.

Social Media is something that I have only recently been experimenting with but I have already seen the effects that it can have on your traffic and honestly you would have to be a fool not to take advantage of what it has to offer.

I have experimented with Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Blogging Zoom so far and the best results in terms of sheer volume is hands down StumbleUpon and it has quickly become my favorite so far. I will be sharing my results with the others in the near future.

If you aren’t familiar with them then take a minute to read this article and check them out yourself. If you become a proficient Stumbler and understand how it works then you can easily average 1000 pages hits a day, I know because I am doing it.

Some Facts About StumbleUpon

1. The Quality of your “Stumbles” makes all of the difference in the number of visitors you receive. The more “friends” that a stumbler has and the more sites they have “stumbled” then the more weight SU gives them for their stumbles. What this translates to is this….you want to build up a large friends list and use the Stumble Bar regularly. It’s very easy to do and you can build yourself into a “power” stumbler in no time.

2. The Quality of the sites that you Stumble will improve your Stumble Authority as well. If other Stumblers give sites that you discovered or submitted the thumbs up then you will add to your authority…so submit quality sites and you will be rewarded.

3. StumbleUpon traffic will come in waves. If you are fortunate enough to get a hot article that is garnering approval from the Stumble community then you can count on hundreds of visitors and occasionally into the thousands and even tens of thousands of visitors over the next few days. Another benefit of SU traffic is that it doesn’t “age.” What I mean by this is even your older posts can be stumbled and draw traffic which is something that Digg doesn’t allow.

Downsides of Stumble Traffic

1. Stumblers are a fickle bunch. It is so easy to blow on to the next site so you want to make sure you catch their attention early. Catchy headlines and intriguing pictures at the tops of your posts can’t hurt. If you have an ugly site…then you likely won’t garner a thumbs up.

2. Some Stumble detractors will argue that Stumble traffic won’t benefit your site. That they come and go and are rarely repeat visitors. Well I say yeah but so what. If you gain 5 RSS subscribers out of 10000 hits then so be it. You have no downside to Stumbled traffic. They are no different than any other visitor, if they like what they see, then they stay, if they don’t then they leave. Write good content and you’ll be fine.

We’ve shared some upsides and downsides of StumbleUpon traffic and now it’s time to share my stats with it. I have read a lot of posts from people crying about how Stumble traffic is bad traffic, that you can’t monetize it, that it isn’t loyal, even implying that it is “trash traffic.” I say baloney. Check out my stats for SU for the last month.

stumble2.jpg

This is difficult to see in my picture due to the resize but my Stumble traffic breaks down like this:

  • 6914 hits over the previous 30 days. (Bear in mind I’ve only been using it a few of those weeks.)
  • Visitors visited 2.12 pages on average. Meaning they didn’t just read the stumbled post…but at least 1 other.
  • They stayed on site 1:42 seconds. This is a bit low but as an average not horrible. The ones that come and go quickly skew this average quite heavily so don’t get too wrapped up in this. Page views is more important in my opinion.
  • 94% of users were new to my site. Great exposure.
  • 27.64% bounce rate. If you’re not sure what Bounce rate is then this is the percentage of visitors that click in and out of your site within just a few seconds. Their first impression is bad enough that they don’t stay.

A few things to be aware of…this snapshot is for the previous month, but I’ve only been trying to be active in the StumbleUpon community for about 2 weeks…so if this trend continues I can look forward to about 15k Stumblers alone in an average month.

The best part is this…Stumble is only one of a NUMBER of Social Media outlets that you can use to drive traffic to your blog. A number of bloggers simply won’t take the time to work the Social Media scene. They’re lazy. They think their blog is a gift to the world and that hordes of readers will just come like magic whenever they post.

It is my opinion that beginning bloggers should allocate as much time “promoting” their sites as they do in maintaining it. It’s that important. TV Shows, Movie Premiers, new books, Broadway shows etc ALL promote themselves in order to attract traffic. Learn from that, embrace Social Media and watch the visitors roll in. Get Started Today.

I’d love to hear about other people’s results with Stumble……argue with me or agree with me..just make sure you tell me what you think and maybe, just maybe if you like my article, you could help a brother out and Stumble It. :-)

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  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • Propeller
  • De.lirio.us
  • Furl
  • Bumpzee
  • Reddit
  • Mixx