11 May, 2007

Stumble into more page traffic

A couple of years ago, when I first started using the Firefox browser, I found this add-on, a toolbar really, for something called "Stumble Upon." I thought it was pretty neat. One signs up at the SU site, and declares their content preferences. Then, when one are bored, or has a couple of minutes with nothing much to do, they click the "Stumble!" button on the toolbar, and it takes them to a page that somewhat fits the preferences they declared.

The toolbar has several other options on it. It has the "I like it!" button and the "No more like this" button. Plus it has a comment button. These are the main ones. There are others to assist narrowing down what one is in the mood to view, but I'm looking at these because they can assist in increasing traffic to one's blog.

I hadn't even thought about it at all since I started blogging. I wasn't 'stumbling' much, and hadn't even installed the toolbar when I migrated to Vista or on my new machine at work.

But, as I look at more and more ways to 'get the word out' and generate traffic for my blogs, I thought about SU. First I started by just adding my blogs main pages to SU, but that really didn't generate much traffic (ok, zero traffic). But then I got the idea to click the "I like it!" button for individual posts. WHAM! that generated some huge traffic. The day after I "liked" an article I had written, I received 161 hits on that specific article. Wowsers, I never expected anything like that.



The good thing is, that many of those visitors, went on and visited other pages. Granted, SU hasn't generated that traffic consistently. The day after that post, I got only about 75 folks from SU, then about 50 people from SU. But the third day SU sent about 115 people. So it seems a bit up and down.

So what I am getting at here, is that StumbleUpon is a way to generate traffic to your site. Unfortunately, all of the links back to the articles are 'nofollow' links. That means that spiders do not follow these links, and thus, they don't get counted towards the PageRank. But for the time it takes to click the "I like it!" button, one can't beat the traffic.



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