This might be considered as a follow up to my last post (about stumbling) but it’s not really. I just felt compelled to share my latest experiences with a few popular “social web” services.

First let me start by saying that I’ve generally underused these services in the past. I always found out about them early but never took advantage. This was partly to thinking I didn’t have the time to “mess around” with them, was lazy or felt my content simply didn’t fit into the picture. I was wrong to think those things.

The simple fact is that most of the Internet is crap and therefore the great majority of content and websites that circulate through these systems is also crap… after all, great sites don’t need to waste time marketing that way.

Back to the point… many of the websites that make the web more “social” (like Digg, Stumble Upon, Reddit, Delicious, etc.) really work. Not only do they work but they work exceptionally well. The trick is simply to find the ones that work best for you and be persistent.

A concrete example, one of my weblogs (about design and interiors) never really fit into many of the more tech oriented sites like Digg (so I never even tried) but fits very well into the more generally themed Stumble Upon. I started to present users with the stumble upon buttons on my website as well as telling friends and like minded forum members to help me promote my website (often in exchange for me promoting theirs).

This had very little effect. I was generally “stumbling” the home page over and over and hoping for traffic. I got some but not a lot, probably just a hand full of people each day (let’s say about 5-10).

I then decided to experiment by stumbling sub pages (old and new) in conjunction with the other social bookmarking services (such as delicious and Reddit). The results were somewhat surprising and at the same time very logical… traffic increased.

My “golden” combination at the moment is to write a new post, then bookmark it using delicious and reddit… followed by Stumble Upon. When done in this order (bookmark first then stumble) I seem to get a rather large spike in traffic from ALL of the web services mentioned, a spike of several hundred visitors for that day.

I’m not exactly sure why but here are my thoughts:

• fresh content might get slightly more attention and “points”
• since my homepage was already stumbled upon several times before, this might be helping my sub pages (remember I used to stumble my homepage only)
• the social bookmarking sites are providing solid links and since I stumble immediately after submitting to the bookmarking sites, my links are usually still visible (as new links)
• as traffic comes in from all sources simultaneously people continue to stumble and bookmark the page and therefore reinforce my earlier actions.

Now I’m not sure if any of this is valid or if it’s just a total coincidence but considering that this technique has been working on an almost daily basis for about a week, I’d wager to say there’s a little truth in it.

Try it out and leave a comment, if nothing else you’ll get a free link for your feedback.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Traffic. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.