< How to improve your search engine ranking : While stumbling around, I found the light switch >
I recently stumbled across StumbleUpon. I've tried various ways to get new visitors to my site, so I thought why not give it a try? I downloaded the toolbar and off I went.About StumbleUpon
You choose from a variety of interests, click the Stumble button on the toolbar, and you're taken to a website. You use the thumbs up / thumbs down icons to indicate whether you like or dislike the site. You can add a short review and move on to the next site. Read what's all about.
There is one thing that seems rather odd though. Have a look at this: How do I suggest a site to be included in your database? The bit that stands out as being strange is this:
Please submit sites which are good starting points for exploration rather than deeply nested pages which are very specific.
By the time I'd read this, I had already submitted a few pages from my site. Armed with this knowledge, I was able to look at my stats and see how well my submissions fared.
What did I submit?
I submitted the following pages:
Ben Barden dot com (home page)
Redefining the album concept (blog entry)
Hidden in the Beyond (listen page)
Besidewalk Plight (listen page)
The Path of No Return (track page)
All of my submissions generated a good deal of clicks. The blog entry jumped from 40 to 260 hits in a couple of hours. My referrals were boosted. But how many of these were "good clicks"? How many people stuck around and browsed my site?
The rather disappointing answer is that not one of these pages had the desired effect. I got the visitors, just not the "real" activity.
So what happened?
The home page seems like a good place to start. It looks busy, but anything less would mean that the people who do like my site don't find most of the good content (the "What's Popular" sidebar is particularly handy). The home page didn't set the pulses racing.
Next, I tried a blog entry. Sure, I got the clicks and the hits... but no comments. Did anyone like it? Did anyone read beyond the first paragraph or two? It's very difficult to tell without comments.
I submitted the two "listen" pages at roughly the same time. These generated no downloads of my tracks. To download from those pages, you have to click into a track, then click the download link. Not one person did that. So I submitted a track page, which would only require the download link to be clicked, and also removed the element of choice. Again, no downloads.
If I had linked directly to the music file, if people had actually listened to it and maybe even liked it, how would they have got back to the site? That's why I drew the line here and took a step back to assess the situation.
The figures
On Saturday I had 143 unique visitors.
I submitted on Sunday, and had 438 unique visitors.
On Monday, I had 260 unique visitors.
I've had a total of 631 referrals from StumbleUpon in the space of a couple of days.
From the figures, I've done very well out of StumbleUpon - but I haven't really made a real impact yet. Not only did nobody download anything as a result of those clicks, nobody said they liked the site (or disliked it, for that matter). Why is that? Don't people rate the sites they visit?
I'm not giving up, but it's frustrating to be no better off in terms of knowing whether I'm doing the right thing or not.
Tags: stumbleupon, blogging, traffic, referrals, click-throughs, unique visitors, attention span
Posted by Ben on October 23, 2007 23:05 / Edited: December 24, 2007 18:25
Comments
Hi Sandy - thanks for the comment. Glad to know I'm not alone in this, but on the other hand it's unfortunate that people aren't commenting on your sites either.
Some blogs let you subscribe to an entry you commented on, so you get an email if there are any follow-ups. I haven't been too happy with this when commenting on high-traffic blogs as I get emailed for every comment posted on the entry thereafter. By a high-traffic blog I mean one that typically gets 100 comments on one entry. That's a lot of notifications.
As you said, I do reply to the majority of the comments I get. Sometimes I don't if it's someone I know and I have nothing to say in reply (because I'll talk to them at some point anyway). I think that people have no grounds to complain about hardly ever getting comments if they don't reply to the ones they do get.
I don't get a lot of comments though, and this is another reason why some might not be commenting - apparently nobody wants to be the first to comment.
It's one of those things that's hard to get started. Perseverance is the key. Maybe next time I use StumbleUpon I'll have better luck.
I came here via stumble, read your post and chose to go to your music page, as I am a musician myself.
IMHO you need to include file sizes on the listen pages, "Message for a Child" for example is 6meg, and took almost as long to download as the track did to play.
Keep up the good work, hope this comment helps :)
Hi there Araldia, thanks for stopping by and adding a comment. I think that's a fair comment, and as my site is powered by my own system, I'll add that to my to-do list. Again, thanks for the comment, it certainly helps. :)
Hi Ben, It is difficult to know just how interested visitors are to ones blog or site as so many pass through without signing a guest book or remarking on a topic within a blog.
I use statcounter and I do get plenty passing through and some stay a very long time but even though I can see that someone has stayed a while I still don't know if they have actually been reading all that time or just forgotten to close the page before moving on to somewhere else.
I even added a rate me poll to one of my extra htlm pages on my Yuku profile and have only had 2 hits on that and those without any comments left.
I know myself I read many blogs on the web and hardly ever comment although usually on my first visit I always let them know I have passed through.
I suppose I don't comment often because... 1) I think that I wont stumble across that particular blog again to see any next comments and 2) I have found the majority of people just can't be bothered to answer the comments they get, although I do know you are not one of those people.
Those are my reasons but I don't know why others don't leave a message as they pass through.