I am finding that StumbleUpon is not having such a huge impact on my traffic in 2012, now they have revamped and face lifted the site but the mechanics still seem to be the same. I’m thinking it may be that the holidays are over and everyone’s knuckling down at work, my big fear is that StumbleUpon’s new design has ended up culling its following.
I am actively looking for the next big thing for driving traffic my way.
I’m using a http://www.bo.lt account to share some of my website earning successes, one below leading up to Christmas was a geeky gifts posting.
http://robtinbc.bo.lt/2hedj#.TxznvZCYSSo
I have spoke about viglink before, its my understanding that you dont have to use cloudflare (traffic washing and site optimization service that is free) to use viglink, I do believe they have code widgets you can embed.
I regret not discovering viglink earlier as this posting was viral in November and December as well as a little into January and I would of seriously cashed in if I got it setup before Christmas but I am going to try and be more aware of product blogging in conjunction with holidays and whats trending in the world on things like Android Market, Google Trends and Twitter.
Looking at my Geeky gifts postings I could of improved allot on it, the link to the buy is the price but I could of made this more obvious and captured more click through traffic and improved some of the layout.
I’m enjoying my efforts, its like playing the slots and Vegas, its a little hit and miss but can be lucrative if your in the right place at the right time and its fun, or I think so.
Looking at http://www.bo.lt as a network that could have potential to drive traffic my way, I created a user robtinbc and will post some of my website content from crazyasabagofhammers.com and see how fruitful that is.
I’m loving the service provided by cloudflare.com, I have been using it for only a few days but it has saved me GB’s of bandwidth, made my site load faster with its caching and using the add-on from https://www.viglink.com I have made $24 in 2 days from people clicking on products and buying them.
Because my website traffic goes through cloudflare.com to my hosting company islandnet.com cloudflare is able to manipulate the data with my permission (see Cloudflare terms of use as they ad tracking information etc) and by enabling viglink.com’s service any product manufacturer or re-seller that is on viglink’s database automatically becomes a link through to the website of the re-seller/manufacturer and if someone purchases an item then I get a little kick back.
I have a posting for Geeky Gifts on my crazyasabagofhammers.com website and each gift links to a page where you can but it, that posting went viral after being hit up on reddit.com and thanks to that person who posted it I got $24 in revenue.
Now if I was to do a website that specifically was product related like a review site then I could cash in I think.
Does anyone know a way to stop people linking to images for my post diirectly, I see in my web stats all the time direct links to images such as:
/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/wpid-facebook_302985649.jpg
What I would like to do is capture these and redirect them to the page or post that the image is on as I probably am loosing ad revenue from people stumbling the image and then others directly loading it and I want to minimize that.
I suppose I could use htaccess and redirect any image request coming from stumbleupon.com to a page in my site but I want something that could cleanly redirect any request from any domain that is requesting an image linked in a post to open the post and not the image.
Anyone?!
The importance of reddit.com
I had not considered the importance of reddit.com for driving traffic to my site until today I saw my visits in the Google Analytics realtime hit an all time high for my http://www.crazyasabagofhammers.com/ page.
Someone liked the geeky gifts post that already went viral before christmas and posted it on reddit and my site visits sky rocketed. I will be researching reddit and looking to leverage it in the future.
I did some reading of an article at imimpact.com and speed is important to websites, one thing that does surprise me is that your Google Ranking can be affected by the load times of your website.
Also, the attention span of people in a poll is 4 seconds so if your site is not up by then your toast… I tweaked http://www.crazyasabagofhammers.com simplifying the layout and removing some external loading RSS and badges from the widget area and my visitors and the staying rate in Google Analytics is higher and longer.
I run a few websites which I promote using several web bases tools such as StumbleUpon.com, I had great success with my Ads from AdBrite on CrazyAsABagOfHammers.com when @jerilryan tweeted one of my posts causing high traffic volumes, I knew this was the most likely cause thanks to using addthis.com and its stats information, Google Analytics realtime stats which is in BETA but seems to work well allowed me to monitor traffic and at times I have 900 visitors, This really illustrates the power of right place at the right time but with tools like Twitter Trending and Google Trends I am developing a model to help maintain good traffic and hopefully good ad revenue.
Pinterest.com is something that I think is going to be big if they can fix the 503 errors due to server loads which I have seem since I began using it but not in the past few weeks so fingers crossed.
As I work things out and discover new things I will document them herein for everyone else to use.
See Web Promotion Tools for more comprehensive article.
