Social media sites
Oct 23, 2007 in Reddit, Social Media, Stumbleupon, Traffic, Uncategorized
I didn’t intend to do it but as it turns out I have adopted different ways to promote my various blogs. I have mainly gotten the word out about this one by leaving comments on similar blogs. My main traffic source for the gardening blog was via Adwords. The gardening blog also receives search engine traffic but that has happened by itself. Since I started promoting my new Blogumnist.com blog at the weekend I have been using social media sites. For my personal diary blog, I have taken no special measures at all and have just let nature take its course.
My launch of Blogumnist.com at the weekend was my first use of social media web-sites in a serious way and now, after it, I see what all the fuss is about! Submitting your articles to these sites is a great way to get noticed. My experience from the submission of my post about how I quit my day job to blog breaks down like this:
Stumbleupon brought the most amount of hits, but it did so in a very concentrated way. My submission to Stumbleupon brought me 83 unique visitors in 50 minutes and nothing after that. The next most valuable source after that was Reddit. My submission on Sunday is still bringing me traffic today. It’s a more prolonged and steady flow rather than the rush that comes with Stumbleupon. Next after Reddit was Sphinn.com. It too is bringing a slow, steady stream to my site rather than a surge. Apart from those three sites the rest of the social media sites, including Digg, where I submitted my posting only brought a handful of visits.
Of course it depends on the article too. Another I submitted yesterday from my personal blog, a humorous one about sheep was taken up well on Reddit but hardly received any notice at all from the other sites, including Stumbleupon. The flow of traffic from Reddit on that occasion was heavier; just over 100 in the space of four hours. I am still getting visits from Reddit today to that post but nothing from the other sites I submitted it to. Someone else took it the post and put it onto a discussion forum which has been bringing me more visitors today.
I came across a good script on Monday which is pasted below. Paste this code onto your page where-ever you want it to appear and it allows your visitors (or you) to submit your post to the major sites as well as many of the others. It is much simpler and less cluttered than pasting all of those social media icons to the bottom of your posts. It might be worthwhile having a couple of direct links to the most important ones and using this link for the rest, just in case:
<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript” src=”http://ekstreme.com/socializer/socializer.js” mce_src=”http://ekstreme.com/socializer/socializer.js”> </script>