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.
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.
