AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

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>

That first Stumbleupon rush is wonderfully addictive! I was able to track the progress of what happens when your page is stumbled for the first time today.

It wasn’t the first article I’d stumbled. I’ve stumbled other posts from my blogs before. I’ve even stumbled other peoples.

I stumbled an article on my personal blog a couple of weekends ago, but I had just changed the template and I intelligently forgot to include my Statcounter script in the new one! I was able to get a rough idea of what happened from the site stats but I didn’t get all the detail I get with Statcounter. From what I could see on the site stats I’d gotten about an extra 100 visitors for that day.

The article I stumbled this time was the first one on my new Blogumnist.com blog which is about my wildly optimistic decision to quit my day job to blog.

I stumbled it at 11am this (Sunday morning). Within a minute I had my first ever visitor to Blogumnist.com. Every time I refreshed the Statcounter statistics the hits kept going up. Within 20 minutes I had about 50 hits from just over 40 unique visitors. Then it suddenly stopped. For the next couple of minutes the hits stopped going up.

The next time I refreshed the Statcounter statistics, I could see that the flow of traffic was changing. Whereas for the first 20 minutes the hits were to Blogumnist.com what started to happen then was that people began to follow links from it to my other blogs. I then watched for a couple more minutes as the hits to Blogumnist.com remained static but those of my other sites started to go up. I won’t say climb, but there definitely was a noticeable effect.

Then after another five minutes the hits to Blogumnist.com started climbing again. And climbing. I was sitting at the computer eating my breakfast watching this. It was the most fascinating thing I’ve watched for a long time! For a moment I got a feeling of what it would be like to have a popular web-site. And how many potential readers there are out there. This was Sunday morning after all! Probably the quietest time of the week.

It all ended abruptly at 11.48. The total number of hits that my first post on Blogumnist.com got between 11.00 and 11.48 on this Sunday morning was 132 with 83 unique visitors. So far today there have been no more visitors. I would think that 83 visitors to my blog on the first day isn’t a bad start anyway!

The length of time that visitors spent on the site was encouraging. I have a blocking cookie to exclude my own visits so as not to distort the figure.

- 32.4% stayed for less than 5 seconds

- 28.2% stayed from 5 to 30 seconds

- 29.6% stayed from 30 seconds to 5 minutes

- 8.5% stayed from 5 to 20 minutes.

- 1.4% stayed from 20 minutes to one hour

I think those visit lengths are great. The fact that 32.4% stayed for less than 5 seconds isn’t bad. It’s doesn’t mean that 32.4% clicked on the site and then immediately clicked off, although it might. It just means that they only visited the front page of the blog and didn’t click on any internal links. Therefore Statcounter was unable to assign a visit length to them.

Even if 32.4% did stumble across my blog and immediately stumble away again isn’t discouraging. I have channel-surfed like that myself lots of times. I was encouraged that 67.6% stayed longer than 5 seconds. This means that they clicked on internal links on my blog so that Statcounter was able to record the visit length. Since I have only one post on the blog so far that is quite an achievement!