If you read my tutorials and my posts here, then you know that I disparage or at least dismiss social media as being more a distraction factor than a worthy blog-building activity.
I focus my blog marketing attention on building subscribers – the essential capturing and retention of traffic. My major criticism of traffic from sites like StumbleUpon is that, while the raw numbers (in terms of hits, visits, and pageviews) can be huge, the conversion rate is weak.
Back in November, 2007, Andrea Hess and I were talking shop and discovered that we disagreed — some of my most effective subscriber-building strategies, Andrea considers her weakest, and vice versa. Considering that Shift Your Spirits and Empowered Soul share a very similar niche, I’m a little bit stunned that we could have such different results.
Slade on Blogging continues to evolve from my general, professional web development days of a few years ago into more of a place where I share my experience in the personal development blogosphere, specifically — the peers among my Shift Your Spirits readers who are also spiritually-motivated bloggers.
A lot of New Age & Personal Development bloggers I consider my peers and colleagues tell me they don’t read meta-bloggers — the bloggers who blog about blogging. Really? I assumed you were just as burned-out and saturated on those kinds of blogs as I am, that maybe I’m wasting my breath with this resource…
The lesson ultimately is that some strategies work for some bloggers; what works in one niche may not work in another. Different strategies may work for different bloggers in the same niche… So, as long as I continue to receive questions and requests for advice about blogging from you, I’ll continue posting my opinions here, and sharing what works and doesn’t work for me…
In the case of social bookmarking, a few years ago, blogging entirely about web design resources, del.icio.us brought me tons of traffic because del.icio.us users tended toward practical problogging interests. Blogging about spirituality and metaphysical subjects, I’ve never seen a single blip of traffic generated by del.icio.us or digg users.
I have seen a lot of traffic coming in from StumbleUpon.com, without actively courting it. I still had a Stumble account floating out there from 2005… Three years is a long time in the virtual world.
I’d love to be proven wrong. I value Andrea’s opinion, and I’m not so set in my ways that I wouldn’t give it another look (especially since I’ve publicly dismissed it).
Andrea invited me to participate in an active, traffic-building venture, so I dusted off my account and quizzed her to try to see if there was something I was missing. Andrea shared a few tips with me that make using StumbleUpon more active and engaging and highly-targeted:
- Reviews – share a blurb or brief comment about the pages you add to your account
- Fans & Friends — focus on the networking functions — make sure to explore the collections of those in your network — the more highly-targeted, like-minded connection doesn’t come from the stumbling “masses” — the most valuable traffic and potential subscribers are the other bloggers who share your niche.
- Stumble One Another — the personal one-on-one alliances with other peer bloggers can be actively used to promote and review one another’s posts
Update: Andrea offers some additional tips:
In the comments, Andrea added “These methods really upped the quality of traffic I was receiving from StumbleUpon”:
- 1. Reviewing other people’s stumbling blogs. Not their written blogs, but their collection of stumbles. It’s a great way to make friends.
- 2. Saying thank you through Stumble when someone reviews your stumble blog, or even just a blog post.
- 3. Visit the profiles of your friends’ friends. I always check out who’s been visiting me – they will come and visit your stumble profile to do the same. If they visit your blog, based on your stumbles, it’s excellent quality traffic!
The simple fact is Yes, StumbleUpon does increase my traffic. The jury is still out, for me, on whether or not this traffic is impacting my subscriber count (but my conversion tactics are weak on both my blogs right now, following a little re-design work).
The More, the Merrier — Wanna play?
Andrea and I share the opinion that if we are indeed benefiting from this experiment, then the more the merrier!
So I’m inviting you to join in and participate. I plan to continue watching the performance closely; having other blogging peers actively stumbling and reviewing one another’s posts should have a noticeable impact.
I easily discovered and added Andrea and Albert to my network of friends, but you may already be there, and I haven’t found you yet.
If you would like to join our StumbleUpon network, please leave your Profile/User Page address in the comments — or add us as directly through your Stumble Friend requests.
- Slade — http://slade.stumbleupon.com/
- Andrea — http://andihess.stumbleupon.com/
- Albert — http://urbanmonk.stumbleupon.com/
If I’m going to be wrong about my judgment of social bookmarking, and whether or not it’s worth the efforts, then I’d like to be really, really wrong.
Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.
Hey Anmol,
Glad to have helped and welcome to the group here.
-Desika
Anmol,
You’re welcome! Thanks for participating. I hope it leads you to some great networking opportunities with other spiritual bloggers as it as me.
Slade, thanks for starting this group. It’s helped me make some great new connections. =)
Also, welcome Anmol! =)
Hi Everyone,
I have added all of you to my SU friends. I am currently trying the “Send To” feature from the tool bar to share articles with all of you (which shows up a red number on your toolbar when it arrives).
I got a few requests to check out some articles from some of you, and I enjoyed the process (and the articles too
.
If anyone prefers to be emailed instead about worthy articles, please let me know.
Best,
Anmol
Question for the experts.
Since we recently started this experiment. Which so far looks promising, does anyone have any experience with older articles which were SU before and being re-energized, vs. newer articles going into SU for the first time?
(Maybe we need an email group
Thanks,
Anmol
Anmol,
I’ve noticed that with older articles (that have been previously stumbled) it takes a lot more stumbles/reviews for it to have an impact on traffic. The longer it’s been, the harder it is.
If it’s an old article that hasn’t been submitted/stumbled it will have a greater chance of receiving traffic.
Basically it works like this number of thumbs up + number of reviews
Thanks for these ideas. My SU name is calexb.
Alex Blackwell
Anmol,
Good question about older articles. In my total, overall, general experience blogging, my older posts require a lot of extra “help” to gain exposure.
Although I currently refrain from stumbling my own posts (to avoid “gaming the system”), I did initially add some of my favorite older posts into Stumble’s database to see if I could get some additional traffic to a few gems at the bottom of the blog. I also asked a few people in the network who are active in commenting and stumbling my posts to look into my archives and review some of my older posts that they particularly liked.
I agree with Jonathan’s statement that newer and more recently discovered posts seem to get a flurry of traffic when they are first introduced.
I’ve found that some of the best ways to get those older posts to float back to the surface of everybody’s attention is through more traditional “Best of” and “Most Popular” lists in my sidebar. I also have a page for New Readers that highlights some of the better/most popular posts, regardless of age.
But the attention, traffic, activity – period – seems to clump around the most recent material.
Alex,
Thanks for your SU profile name — I am already a subscriber to your blog, and have added you to my friends network as well.
Hey Slade… I’m cruising your site today, looking at some of your posts. I liked this one. I notice that you are not particularly active on SU. Honestly, as much as I’ve read about blogging, and watched other bloggers behavior, it sure strikes me that to really win at the social media game you have to write “social media posts” if you know what I mean. Lists, lots of “how to”, etc. Not that lists are bad, or how-to articles are bad (in fact, they are very, very helpful to readers). But you almost have to shift your content to enticing the social media crowd. And a lot of spiritually oriented articles just don’t fit that profile.
It seems to me that if one has patience, if one interact with one’s audience, if one WRITES good content, then the ultimate source of good traffic, sustainable traffic, is the search engine. I’ve notice that many successful bloggers report that over time their traffic from search engines grows and grows vs social media. What really brings readers in the long haul is Google. And the secret is content, content, content. IMHO.
What we are after is not traffic, but targeted traffic. People that want to “buy” whatever we are selling. It could be RSS subscribers, email subscribers, coaching clients, like minded souls, info product purchasers, whatever. But sheer volume doesn’t equal “sales.” Targeted traffic = sales.
Okay, I’m starting to ramble. All that to say, “I’m social media skeptical” at least as far as TRYING to make my site grow via social media. I would rather focus on great content and making connections with amazing people. I suspect that, in the end, that will be what pays off well. Whatever “pays off” may mean.
Tom,
I am seriously skeptical about social media — which is of course my whole reason for being open-minded and engaging in this experiment.
I absolutely agree with you about the bottom-line goals of writing and engaging with your audience.
Now that it’s been some months experimenting with StumbleUpon, I have to share some of MY experience:
Ironically, I received 100 even 1000 times the traffic from StumbleUpon before I actively engaged with it or tried to “work” it.
In my experience, the absolute adverse is true — “working” social media and “trying” to network produced the opposite results.
In my experience, the “best practices” that many have offered here may indeed work for them, but the additional work load and activity is almost entirely counter-productive to my productivity.
I do use StumbleUpon in a very genuine, authentic way — I use it to review and record what I REALLY want to.
This not necessarily include reviewing posts that are sent to me “please review this.” Not that there is anything at all “wrong” with those posts, many of them are excellent, but the vast majority of them are NOT within my niche, my personal reading interests, nor do they necessarily represent my audience.
A LOT of personal development bloggers have very respectfully and with the best intentions asked me to engage with them in a way that is really not authentic — just for example, I do not read, aspire to, or hunger for Productivity and Time Management exercises or concepts. And so while there is a lot of good content in these areas, which is perfect for the audience seeking that type of information… I am not a member of that community or that audience.
I don’t know a good way to explain this without perhaps sounding like I’m being a snob, or exclusive, or judgmental… I’m just being totally honest.
What works for me, in obvious addition to producing content, is prioritizing my relationship with readers, corresponding with them individually as much as possible through comments and email… I put a lot of time, effort, and attention into making myself available to both my audience and my colleagues — the vast majority of that interaction is free, not just to clients.
Depending on my workload at a given time, my comments on other people’s blogs “suffers” — that is one area that I would work to improve long before participating in social media or any kind of schemes or strategies.
What works for me in blogging, building my business, my exposure online, etc is actually VERY simple. My advice to anyone who wants it — strip away everything “extra” and do what you do — do it well, do it consistently, do it often (but be careful, be realistic, err on the side of a smaller workload, be wise about how you define a “full schedule” — make your goals less than you can potentially produce — you need room in your schedule to expand for other projects and workload).
As long as you see growth, you’re growing. Slow and steady is just fine by me…
Hey Slade,
Love the comments above. I keep getting a clearer and clearer: write first, produce good content, establish connections with other bloggers and my readers, and play with social media on the side and as time allows. Playing the social media game seems somewhat pointless. I’m increasingly moving away from it. I think SU is fun at times, I like connecting with people, but trying to generate stumbles just doesn’t seem to be where it is at.
Thanks for your ongoing thoughts….. Tom
Tom,
The interesting (perhaps ironic?) thing about our last few comments — you and I literally met via StumbleUpon!
So, clearly, there are great networking benefits, for which I’m very grateful. But the best networking (in my experience) both in life and online occurs in its own sweet time and is usually about quality over quantity.
I suppose the most significant connections compared to their points of origin seem infinitely magical.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that my audience, my clients, my colleagues, my friends — my truest relationships — are not “numbers games” I pursue like contests. I’ve often noticed a similarity in the way people market themselves, whether it’s personal dating or business. I realize from this conversation that this is definitely true for me.
To me, social media like StumbleUpon is one more wonderful additional path — I do not require it to become a superhighway.
Hello, again, Slade.
The number of responses to your article shows the interest people have in Social Media: Is the hype true? Does it work? Is it a scam? Which is more important, quantity or quality of visitors?
The discussion has done much to educate me and your other readers, and the experiment has been a bit of fun, besides. While numbers can be valuable from a PR standpoint, I agree that the quality of the visitor is paramount, that is, the content has to reach readers who will resonate with the content offered.
It seems SU has stumbled
to the fact that people will try to leverage the system to their benefit, as has changed its algorithms to account for that. Gone are the days of skyrocketing hits from SU, and slow and steady now seems to be the name of the game. For now I am content to try and publish the Abbot’s exceptional articles, and let chips fall where they may. Time does not allow for the extensive commenting and pushing of articles that successful blogging sometimes requires.
Thanks for your great articles, and allowing us to participate in this illuminating experiment.
ReddyK,
Thanks for weighing in again with your own experience — it does sound like we’re all on the same page… It is extremely helpful to be able to compare notes in this way.
Yes, our networking experiment was an amazing success when you consider the size of the discussion in these comments — wow!
I’m really proud to host such honest, hype-free internet marketing dialogs. Thank you for your collaboration!
[...] blogger, veteran Stumbler, and guest author Reddy Kilowatt continues our group discussion about using StumbleUpon in a coalition like-minded web [...]