On December 3rd I published my 10 simple steps to increase blog traffic via StumbleUpon strategy. The article received good feedback and now just before Christmas time and the New Year 2009, I thought it was the good time to look back and analyze my blog traffic from StumbleUpon since then.
My StumbleUpon account facts
Currently 54 people subscribe to my StumbleUpon account updates and 11 Stumblers have reviewed my account. I also have 205 friends at StumbleUpon.
I have been fairly active Stumbler by discovering / thumbing / reviewing 52 articles that I found useful around the net since December 3rd.
I did not need to give thumbs-up, stumble nor review any of my blog articles since December 11th get your blog article on top of Google results today post.
HowToMakeMyBlog traffic stats
StumbleUpon sent a total of 2298 visitors in 19 days. This is almost 45% of my total blog site traffic in these 19 days.
The traffic is growing in general as by increasing the number of friends and subscribers you increase the exposure of your blog. The spikes in traffic are because of my blogging schedule lately where I have been publishing new posts every second day.
This is a good point to remember and it helps me understand why probloggers like Chris Brogan publish articles daily and most days several times a day. By not posting daily, your traffic drops because of RSS readers and social media traffic, which in these days count for a big part of the total traffic of most blogs.
Lesson to learn is to post as frequently as possible to not lose the momentum of your traffic.
But always have a strict quality control. Never post for the sake of posting, always make sure that you have something useful and knowledgeable to share.
StumbleUpon Blog Traffic Details
All in red, which means that the numbers are worse than the total blog site average. Comparing to my Problogger guest post stats analysis which were all better than the site average, StumbleUpon traffic is worse than the average.
Social media does have a bad reputation in regards to stickiness, but still a reader spent 01:45 per visit on average. Pages per visit and the bounce rate correlate and I will be looking into how to improve those numbers in the future.
Top 10 Most Popular Articles
Thing to note is that in the top 4 there are two of my last 3 published articles, another sign that the total exposure of my blog in StumbleUpon is growing.
The things that stands out the most is the 05:55 average time spent on the case study analysis of the effect of the ProBlogger.net guest post on my blog traffic.
Lesson to learn is to analyze and provide facts and stats in articles to keep reader’s attention.
Conclusion
For a new blog like mine any source of traffic is good, even the social media sites that some bloggers do not rate highly. I would recommend other bloggers to start to incorporate my 10 step plan to increase StumbleUpon traffic into their daily marketing activities and see the blog exposure and traffic increase.
Image by: YukkonBlizzard
Join thousands of bloggers and get all my blogging tips for FREE! Subscribe to HowToMakeMyBlog via RSS or via e-mail.
If you liked this article, you may also like:
Why I run my blog on Thesis Wordpress Theme
Thesis theme gives my blog a professional, clean, easy-to-read layout and SEO friendly design. Thesis makes it simple to make your own blog unique. See more details and get your own Thesis today.
{ 18 comments }
Hello,
Sounds interesting, i will definitely take it into consideration, because i am running a new blog as well and as you said i don’t mind what the source of the traffic is, i just need traffic.
Thanks,
Firas
STUMBLED!
This is something I need to do, drill down my analytics and find out how much SU is bringing me and what people are doing once they arrive.
Great post. Particularly liked how you included “Lesson to learn” modules.
Great advice. I post regularly, but I don’t use social bookmarking sites nearly as much as I should… Maybe I’ll put that on my list of New Year’s Resolutions.
Great case study!
As for these social media sites, its just always like that they just make you popular for quite a short time. Bounce rates from these sites tend to be high also as most readers aren’t intrested with other parts of the site. But still, traffic is still traffic anyway…
That’s a very informational case study against social media. I think you’ve got a great plan going and if you did move to writing a post everyday you’d gain much more subscribers.
Why would some bloggers negate the importance of traffic you get from social media and bookmarking sites? Yes, search engines are still the life blood of any blogger or website owner, but from everything I’ve read, and that includes The Wall Street Journal, social media is growing daily and starting to give search engines a run for their money. Personally, with all the complicated algorythms these search engines use, I like the fact that a blogger has a bit more control of marketing their sites.
@Scott – I definitely agree with you. I appreciate all traffic and appreciate the fact that I can have much control over my branding, my message and other parts of marketing with social media. As you say, there is not much control a blogger has with search engines, we can do SEO as much as we want but in the end it is Google that commands everything and can change anything at any point in time.
Stumble upon is great for traffic, but you have to remebmber its not as effective if the same person discovers your articles all the time. It is usefull to send your articles to a different friend everytime, or rotate your friends when asking for someone to discover your stuff.
Its also woth a note, that when you stumble stuff between 12pm and 2pm EST it has a better effect on traffic for some reason. I once got 870 visitors in the space of 4 hours by doing this one day.
Seems good but there is something which you need to concentrate on that is bounce rate which you can do by deep linking.
take an example of my posts.!!!
I enjoy reading your articles!!
keep it up
Careful with purely focusing on SU/Digg traffic. It spikes and over the last year I’ve had ~100K visitors from my site to it barely any of it converts – social media traffic is very much just looking for the hot thing at the moment. Totally ADHD traffic, for the most part
You’ve been pulling off some good moves here Marko. I agree some people talk down on SU because of high bounce rate and so on. As for myself it’s one of my very favorite social platforms and also account for about 50% of all my traffic. What people need to understand is there is a difference in social traffic vs organic or paid search traffic. My contention is not one if better than the other. You want a healthy mix really.
Great! Exactly what I was looking for
!
good
wao whats a nice post because i m looking like this informative article and i also wana get alot of visitor in my web site from stumbleupon
thanks
Great post. Stumbleupon is really a great source of traffic. Once I got 700 unique visitors to my blog from stumbleupon. Not much but ok..
Does anyone know that Stumbleupon has hidden traffic strategy that can drives real targetted traffic? Here’s the hint…you can advertise on SU and it’s much cheap than adwords.
But seriously, not many people knows that SU has spaces for advertisements …
I recently started using stumble upon and my traffic is already doing great