Image credit: too much stumbleupon
Around about a week ago I was happily stumbling away when all of a sudden this warning page came up, telling me that my account had been disabled:
Stumbleupon warning
Stumbleupon has been temporarily disabled, because you have used it too much.
- Stop stumbling and disable stumbleupon toolbar
- Do your work
- Don’t think about stumbling
I feel really stupid now, but I fell for this thing hook, line and sinker. I thought that I had been caught stumbling my own blog too much and that someone at stumbleupon was messing with me.
The page is possibly one of the most popular stumbles ever, it was discovered about 8 days ago and already it has received 351 reviews.
I wanted to find out more about the page and who created it, so I used the form on the website to contact the creator. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions for me, but wishes to remain anonymous:
Question 1: How long have you been a member of StumbleUpon?
Answer: I have used stumbleupon since April 2007, So it is about 1,5 years ago.
Question 2: Did you create the page for fun? profit? Or both?
Answer: It was just for fun, I was bored and playing with new firefox 3 and surfing on the “about:robots” page. I noticed how easily the source of the about:robots page could be copied, I remembered those funny “stop stumbling” images and got the idea. I created the page, uploaded it to my site, added it to stumble and forgot it.
Question 3: How many unique visitors has the page had so far?
Answer: Here are my traffic statistics according to AWStats and Google Analytics:
- AWStats - 101,789
- Google - 89,901
Question 4: Has the amount of traffic you have received surprised you?
Answer: It was a big surprise to me, because I almost forgot the whole page… The last popular page I had: a joke about vista’s source code, only received 9,240 visitors.
Question 5: Have you ever thought about a career in viral marketing?
Answer: Nope.
Going off this page’s performance, I would definitely be interested in taking this guy on for his social media skills. He is not a professional and as far as I am concerned he hasn’t even marketed the page - One hundred thousand unique visitors and going strong.
Here is a link to the warning page and the 350+ comments at SU.
Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
July 14th, 2008
You know how you get some people who just take to blogging? I was not one of them people. I started blogging for all of the wrong reasons. It was very much a case of keeping up with the Joneses. Many of my competitors were getting blogs and I thought that I should have one.
If you look at the 1st few posts on this blog you will see that I blatantly did not know what I was doing. I would say that I started to enjoy it and get the hang of it around Christmas time. IMO the Mixx review getting linked to by TechCrunch was a complete fluke.
Over the last couple of weeks a lot of the hard work that I have put in seems to have really started to pay off.
About two weeks ago, Lee Odden from Top Rank Blog added this blog to his big list of search marketing blogs and yesterday Liz Strauss over at Successful-Blog.com made me an official SOB.
Other blogging achievements include:
- Around 150 RSS subscribers
- Linked to by most of the major search blogs
- Technorati top 25K
- Over 100 unique visitors per day (without the main site)
- Good SE authority - most of the posts rank well
Over the next 6 months I would like to achieve the following:
- 400 RSS subscribers
- Technorati top 10k
- 200+ unique visitors per day
I would also like to start making some money doing this. If I can get this blog (including the rest of the site) making over £1,000 per month off advertising I can cut down on doing SEO a bit and focus on doing more blogs. I will start looking at monetization strategies this week.
Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 16th, 2008
Image Credit: energy transfer
If you have really good content that you want to get thousands of visitors to, then this guide should come in useful.
With social media optimisation (SMO), it helps an awful lot if you either know the right people or are active in the places where you are looking to target. Once you do or are it is fairly easy. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your good content and your SMO campaign, for once you find your feet:
Forget Digg: I know it has been said many times, but it is even more true then ever now. For nine out of ten sites Digg is a big waste of time and getting any kind of e-commerce site on the homepage is virtually impossible. The only people who look in the upcoming section are the digg staff and fellow marketers. Spend 30 seconds getting your free link and then move on.
Planning is Everything: Make a list of all of the social media websites you are going to submit your content to and then work out roughly how long you think it is going to take for your content to go popular on each site. For example with Reddit you can be fairly sure that if your content is going to go popular, it will do within and hour or two. With Mixx it will normally take a good 6 hours and with Stumbleupon you just can’t tell, so you leave that out of the equation.
Once you have done this you need to choose a time for when you are going to plan to have all of your submissions go popular. You might say to yourself, I want all of my submissions to be going popular 7 hours from now at 11.00pm. Then you add the time you need to submit next to each social media site on your list.
Go to work and do everything as planned. If you have submitted to all of the major social sites and if all of the elements are in the equation, then when the time comes you should be able to make it into the top 10 on popurls and you should be getting a load of traffic from JimmyR.com. I have had over 3,000 uniques from popurls.com and I have had over 2,500 uniques from JimmyR.com. If you make it into the top 10 on popurls you have won and you will generally receive over 50,000 unique visitors in a short space of time and lots of trackbacks.
Comment Management: Once you have started to go popular on some of the social media sites you can make your content go a lot further by dealing with negative comments. There are lots of different ways to do this and trying to talk to the negative commenter(s) isn’t always the best one, here are a few ideas:
- Have all of your friends down vote the negative comments heavily
- Take the mick out of the negative commenter(s) or their comments
- If they have a good point, you might want to think about possibly changing your content
With good planning you can consistently get content to go popular on the social media sites, generate buzz and generate trackbacks.
Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 5th, 2008
Just been looking at my statistics tonight and I am pleased to report that according to Google Analytics Sphinn has sent 286 unique visitors to my last article Linking To The BBC Will Boost Your Google Ranking.
When I wrote the traffic estimate article on the 19th of February I said that on average it would send between 50-200 unique visitors to a popular story, but to be honest with you I had never seen anything above 120 or so, someone else persuaded me to raise it to 200.
Is this a normal amount of frontpage traffic for Sphinn now? Or was I just lucky? Should I update the traffic estimate article? Or not?
Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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May 10th, 2008
Image Credit: headlight morning glow
This article has been added to the Mahalo Social Media page, the social media traffic averages change quite regularly so the page will be updated with new stats from time to time.
If you get your content right, social media sites can send 10’s of thousands of visitors to your site in a short space of time. But how much traffic do these social media sites really send?
I have been speaking to a couple of friends and looking at some of my client’ stats and have come up with a rough guide to how many unique visitors on average you can expect to get from a popular story on some of the top social tagging and news sites. I have worked out my estimates mainly from Google Analytics.
There is a new sheriff in town, there have been reports of Yahoo! Buzz sending over one million visitors to a frontpage story. From what I have heard off one or two bloggers you can generally expect just short of half a million uniques.
Frontpage Traffic: 100,000 - 1,000,000+
Social news site Digg is renowned for crashing servers, this is mainly because of the volume of visitors it sends in such a short space of time when a submission 1st hits the frontpage.
Frontpage Traffic: 2,000 - 60,000+
In my experience a submission to StumbleUpon will generally go popular and send some decent traffic when it gets to around 50 stumbles, the bulk of the traffic will usually spread over 2-3 days, after that it will come in dribs and drabs.
Traffic: 1,000 - 50,000+
If your submission is liked by the Fark community it will without doubt receive some good traffic. If a link makes it onto the frontpage it will receive huge amounts.
Frontpage Traffic: 5,000 - 45,000+
The mother tech news site Slashdot (/.) can still send a huge amount of traffic if you get your submission approved. The bulk of the traffic popular links receive is spread over the 24 hours or so that they are on the frontpage.
Frontpage Traffic: 1,500 - 30,000+
Humor site Ebaums World has been largely overlooked by internet marketers as a good traffic source. The newly created link submit category can drive thousands of visitors.
Frontpage Traffic: 2,500 – 20,000+
Another site that seems to have been overlooked by internet marketers is I Am Bored, popular submissions will generally receive many thousands of unique visitors.
Frontpage Traffic: 2,000 - 20,000+
Providing you have some descent news or a story that will interest the community Reddit is a sure thing for a quick burst of visitors. The amount of visitors a popular link receives will depend on how far up the frontpage it goes and how long it stays there for.
Frontpage Traffic: 2,500 - 15,000+
Social tagging site Delicious tends to send traffic over time. However links that hit the frontpage will generally receive a good couple of thousand visitors in short space of time.
Frontpage Traffic: 500 - 5,000+
With Propeller you will not get very much traffic for just making it onto the frontpage. But if a submission makes it into the top 5 it can receive a good couple of thousand visitors.
Frontpage Traffic: 50 - 3,500+
Social news site Newsvine is not to be overlooked, if a breaking news story is submitted it will normally receive a good amount of traffic.
Frontpage Traffic: 500 - 2,000+
Community based internet news site ShoutWire can send some real traffic and is well worth submitting to. Frontpage submissions can sometimes receive over 1,000 visitors.
Frontpage Traffic: 500 - 1,500+
The popular links site Plime doesn’t send a huge amount of visitors, but it is still worth submitting to. If a submission makes the frontpage it can receive a good few hundred visitors.
Frontpage Traffic: 150 - 700+
The newest social news site to make some headway is Mixx, it is still only very new, but traffic is increasing all of the time. Submissions that make it to the frontpage can receive a couple of hundred visitors in a short space of time.
Frontpage Traffic: 50 - 250+
Internet marketing social site Sphinn can drive some really targeted traffic if you have the right content. Popular submissions can receive a couple of hundred visitors in less then 24 hours.
Frontpage Traffic: 75 - 250+
There are of course many other social tagging and news sites out there that are worth targeting, but these are the ones that I have experience with and I believe i have covered most of the best traffic drivers.
Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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February 19th, 2008
