Traffic

A small post to let you know that this blog has just surpassed 200,000 hits in five months! After having a few lapses with my statistics recording, the traffic for this site has only been recording since 11th January 2008.

It’s a big achievement and a big thank you goes out to the people who subscribe to the RSS and visit this blog, your dedication is appreciated!

Granted they are only hits, we have had more than 20,795 unique visitors in that time.

Here’s to the million!

Stumbleupon: The Richest Source Of Traffic?

Stumbleupon was one of the first social sites that I used, it’s been around so long, most people couldn’t have told you it was classed as a social site until the Web2.0/Myspace/Facebook era came into effect.

Stumbleupon started off as a way to “stumble upon” fun and interesting websites submitted by it’s users. As the years have passed and the social aspect of media has come to the fore, users have been able to recommend links to each other, communicate via the site and of course has attracted a lot of self marketers.

I won’t lie to you, I submitted a few of my most popular articles to see if it would bring in a new user base who wanted to read my content, it was shameless self promotion. Did it work? Yes.

I have submitted the same sites to Digg and to Mixx, these sites heavily relying on people to find my article, take the time to read it and then decide whether it was worth a vote. These sites had driven no more than 30 unique hits to my website.

Below is a report from the last month from my Google Analytics:

To put this in perspective, I only submitted links to Stumbleupon this week. The 28 hits from Mixx are based on three submissions over a monthly period. The sheer number of people that have “stumbled” on this site have produced the one comment and a rise in 4 RSS subscribers, I can only say thankyou to the people who found my content interesting.

I will not submit every blog post on this site, I have only submitted a few pages that would genuinely interest a viewer. Stumbleupon to me is a fair and useful way of finding content, it brings back the element of chance that people can find my submissions and vote on them from their toolbar. I will continue to promote Mixx as I would rather promote good content than my own, but Stumbeupon does bring interesting sites to you….fast.

Signing up to Blogrush

Firstly, you ask: “What is Blogrush?”.

Basically it’s a site that generates a widget for you blog that shows you whats popular on blogs similar to yours, it helps drive traffic to blogs on the interweb. It is completely free and will at random display five links for you to peruse and have a look at.

It also means that my blog posts will be visible on other websites that publish the very same widget.

I have added it to my sidebar to see how it works. Have a look and see how it works for you also.

Blogrush