In running this website I have learned over time some great tools to promote your website and its content to maximize traffic, here are some of the main tools I use in my arsenal:
- StumbleUpon (Including http://www.su.pr/ – Often ignored and possibly will disappear with revamp of SU)
- Pintrest.com (New kid but promising up and coming site, get allot of 503 errors presently, need a better host (Try http://www.islandnet.com, Might be worth using a caching service like Varnish, Islandnet.com is testing one presently ).)
I wanted to say a little about Pinterest as its really got some awesome potential to be a major traffic drive for my website, I can post an image in a posting, pin it on pinterest which is almost like thousands of pin boards that people can use to organize whats important, I can them stumble that as well as my post in StumbleUpon and have that link back to my site. Pinterest is very visual and initial usage of it really does leave me impressed except for some lag and 503 errors.
Other Tools that will help you are:
Google Analytics
They have real-time analytics now in BETA and I average about 50 to 150 people at any one time on this site and I can see peek times and helps he plan peak times to post, share and stumble.)
AddThis
Prefer it to ShareThis but both have merit. Addthis is also running a Real time system, Using AddThis I was able to explain why I had a major increase in traffic within 2 months of really working on the site, apparently Jeri Ryan of Star Trek Voyager fame tweeted about one of my pages and threw my visits into the stratosphere causing some angst for my Hosting Provider Islandnet.com who were most excellent to me.
su.pr
StumbleUpon have a lesser known URL shortening service and in using this with an URL shortening plugin I was able to almost setup and automatic schedule of when pages should be added to StumbleUpon and it allowed me to really improve on my usage of StumbleUpon which counts presently for 85% of my daily web traffic.
feedbox.com
Just signed up, will see how it goes, anyone else using it? Let me know how it works for you.
Reddit.com
A recent increase in traffic was directly attributed to reddit.com and so I have to pay more attention to this service.
To investigate…
- Check out the potential of http://www.pearltrees.com as a way to drive traffic.
- Created a bo.lt account and installed Chrome plugin, going to add a few of my pages and see what traffic increase I get.
