More Strategies for Stumblers
Spiritual blogger, veteran Stumbler, and guest author Reddy Kilowatt continues our group discussion about using StumbleUpon in a coalition of like-minded web publishers.
I found Slade’s last article, Stumbling Again — Traffic Experiment, extremely informative and illuminating, and it was the catalyst for the subsequent productive discussion, note sharing, and experimenting in the comments. This was a stimulus for quite a bit of discovery, which I shared in a rather lengthy summary in the comments. Slade kindly offered to turn my rambles into a guest post, so here it is:
I am discovering that a lot of the advice given by Bart the Bear of Moxie-Drive.com in a series of blog posts about the use of StumbleUpon for bloggers is sage counsel, and I want to summarize a few points which I have found important.
First Principals
First, content is king. You know this already. If you get 1000 stumbles, and no one is interested in your content, they will hit the stumble button without so much as a thumbs down. And if you cannot pique their interest immediately, even if you do have good content, they will stumble to the next site before the page finishes loading. Which brings me to the next two points.
First Impressions — Titles & Graphics
You must have an intriguing title, one that promises a benefit, arouses the curiosity, or otherwise immediately grabs the viewers attention. Then an attractive, attention-getting graphic can be of immense help. First impressions are critical.
The Initial StumbleUpon Discovery & Review
Once you have good content, a catchy title, and a stunning graphic, the next factor is the initial StumbleUpon review. There are two factors in this:
- First, who reviews the article and gets it into the SU database. If someone has a higher SU profile, with lots of stumbles, friends, good reviews, etc, it will help if such a person is the initial reviewer.
- Second, the keywords that person uses are critical to the ultimate success. For instance, a self-help blogger such as Slade would want his posts categorized as self-improvement, self-help, spirituality, blogging, etc. If the keywords are minimal or off-topic, it can be problematic.
Bart the Bear mentioned that if a number of stumblers review the article, rather than just give it a thumbs-up, it can help tremendously. And if they all use well-targeted keywords, all the better.
A Concrete Example
To give an example of all this, let me tell you of a recent post on our blog. It was an excellent article by Swami Nirmalananda, How to Misuse Your Power of Thought which was of a nature that it was of interest to a wide range of people.
We added an intriguing title, and a striking graphic.
Andrea of Empowered Soul, who subscribes to our feed, took an interest in the article and was kind enough to give the article a review. Since she has a good SU profile (she has 50 friends and has received 12 reviews), the stumbles started hard and heavy.
People liked the article and began giving it thumbs-ups. (It stands at 50 so far.) Although there are only 3 reviews at present, the quantity of positive impressions kept the stumbles coming.
The article broke onto the SU main page, and from there onto sites that do aggregations of social media sites. In the next 20 hours we have had 2725 visits to the site. (We normally have about 100 visitors a day, not including feed subscribers, when StumbleUpon is not bestowing its grace.)
Expectations
Should we expect such results whenever we post a great article? I have my doubts. I think part of it was the moon phase, the planetary positions, and the kindly look of the StumbleUpon genie. I frankly had no expectation of results for this particular article. I had not even done any solicitation of SU friends to have them take a look at the article.
I was focusing my attention on the next article, 19 Exceptional Web Resources for Spiritually Minded People, which I had anticipated would be a more popular article. It was a list article, and it had excellent resources, which are characteristics which are supposed to draw a lot of traffic and get quality links. (Is this a subtle hint to spirituality and self-development bloggers? ;-)) However, the newer article has yet to get the SU traffic I anticipated. Perhaps it followed too closely (two days) upon the more successful article. And perhaps it will yet take off. I’ve seen traffic from StumbleUpon come in unpredictable waves for the same article.
A few last observations culled from the comments:
Results from StumbleUpon seem to be accumulative. Your first efforts will yield small to moderate results, but this will increase somewhat with every new article reviewed, especially if Stumblers register their approval with thumbs-up or reviews. Our articles began with about 100 Stumbles per submission, now they average about 500–600. This can vary, though. Some get less, and some, like the Power of Thought article, have topped 1000.
Too frequent stumbling of your own articles can get you in the dog house with the SU genie. I am currently unable to do an initial review for an article from my own blog. If someone else does the initial review, then I can add one. How long does this last, and how many reviews of other sites need to be done between your own? That is yet to be ascertained. But I suspect this applies to too frequent initial reviewing of any site.
Summation
The moral of the story: as a means of drawing traffic to your site, StumbleUpon can be a tremendous tool if done with skill, and with a prayer to the SU genie.
About the Author
Reddy Kilowatt is the pseudonym for the monk who maintains the Atma Jyoti Blog — A Meditation and Practical Spiritual Life Resource (Atma Jyoti means Light of the Spirit in Sanskrit.)
Have an idea for a Guest Post?
If your blog’s mission or content focus is spiritual development, you may not have the opportunity to share your expertise as a copywriter and marketer. The reason I maintain Slade on Blogging is to share the behind-the-screens tools, techniques, and strategies that work for me — as the publisher of Shift Your Spirits — with my peers in this niche of the blogosphere.
General problogging blogs — blogs about blogging about blogging — are everywhere. Slade on Blogging is blogging specifically for writers and publishers within the Personal & Spiritual Development niche. If you have an idea for a guest post that speaks to this group, please contact me with your pitch.
Comments
10 Responses to “More Strategies for Stumblers”
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Awesome post, ReddyK! And I’m so glad my initial review resulted in so much traffic for you!!! Thanks for all this information … and of course, I’ll stumble this article
Thank you, Slade, for hosting this post here.
Blessings,
Andrea
Before I forget - ReddyK, how can you tell how many stumbles your article receives?
Slade,
Thank you for kindly hosting this guest post. Now I are a riter.
I hope fellow spiritual bloggers and stumblers can glean some beneficial information from it.
Andrea, regarding telling how many stumbles I’ve gotten, I use a WordPress statistics plugin called FireStats, which is one of several you can find which can give you fairly detailed information about who visits your blog. It is donation-ware, and it works very well.
Two bits of information as an update to this article: StumbleUpon keeps sending a steady stream of traffic to the Power of Thought article. The total stands at 5491 visitors as of this moment. I’m stunned. This may be small change for the big guns, but for six days my traffic has been 10 times the average traffic. Perhaps this is because it reached a certain threshold and made it to the SU main page.
Second, it seems that for any page which makes it to StumbleUpon, the maximum number of thumbs-up which will be shown for that page is 50. I checked the feedback on a number of very popular pages which should have been much higher, but 50 was all that was shown.
Reddy K,
Thank you, man!
Everything you’ve contributed here in the last few weeks has been jam-packed with useful information that (I know, I, at least) might not have discovered any other way.
Nothing makes me happier than contributing to the worthy self-esteem of a writer… It’s a particularly complex, multi-layered Ego Thing, maybe.
One thing I’m certain about is that a lot of people have the talent to write — the ones that put it out there are the writers. It ain’t about being perfect…
I’m honored by the collaboration.
Thanks for such a great honest review of how stumble works. I’ve stumbled Slades articles a few times, and others have stumbled mine, but I never really understood the process.
Thanks for the Stumbles, Michelle!
Understanding how to make the most of tools (especially, in a convergent group) is empowering…
ReddyK: I wanted to let you know I just installed FireStats. I love it! Thank you for that tidbit!
FireStats WordPress Statistics Plugin:
WordPress Plugins Database
http://wp-plugins.net/plugin/firestats/
FireStats Page
http://firestats.cc/
Slade and all,
Just an update on the articles mentioned in this post.
As I suspected, once the traffic slowed down on the “Powers of Mind” article, it picked up on the the “19 Spiritual Resources” article. Since the review of the first article, our blog traffic has not gone below 800 visitors a day (800% above normal.)
Total current visits to these articles, mostly from StumbleUpon:
• 19 Exceptional Web Resources for Spiritually Minded People–‎9524 visitors
• How to Misuse Your Power of Thought –‎8660 visitors
All this is in the past 10 days.
This is a fantastic article! Follow the tips outlined in this article and you will see results. I am new to StumbleUpon and I know that first impression is key to achieving a thumbs up and a review. My profile on StumbleUpon is
http://inspirationforch.stumbleupon.com/