19-Feb-2012

StumbleUpon for Social Media Bookmarking

At the onset of building this website, I knew creating good content and attracting visitor traffic were two key ingredients for the success of this advertising revenue website. And I knew the Web 2.0 era offered sharing and collaboration to be leveraged through social media networking. To date, Facebook and Twitter have been the two social media networks which I utilize, with Google+ added in late 2011. Recently, an Internet acquaintance suggested StumbleUpon as a good source of visitor traffic. I proceeded to investigate and here are my findings.

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These charts show the percentage of referred traffic from each social media network. Throughout the history of StatCounter tracking, Facebook and StumbleUpon have jockeyed for top position as shown in the following chart.

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Since these networks demand a commitment for active participation, one has to choose appropriately based on the type of website or business being promoted via the social media network. Given the prominence of Facebook and StumbleUpon, it is prudent to indulge both of these to increase visitor traffic to this site. I am increasingly becoming aware of the short-comings of Twitter for this website based on the above global stats as well as my Google Analytics metrics.

Several months ago, I conducted an experiment by posting various URLs of this website on Digg. To date, I have not received any significant number of backlinks from the Digg network nor have I received significant visitor traffic from Digg.

I had my LinkedIn account before the days of social media and I did not see LinkedIn as a good fit for this website so I never endeavored to develop my LinkedIn network. LinkedIn drives less referred traffic than Digg and is subsumed in "other".

I will be leveraging StumbleUpon to bring visitor traffic to this website. I will also look for Google recognized backlinks from StumbleUpon. My Google Webmaster Tools metrics already show a significant number of backlinks from Facebook as well as Google+. Backlink building is a vitally important SEO activity which achieves high placement in search engine results to provide targeted visitor traffic.

The following infographic contains information that is important to assess the attraction and performance of StumbleUpon engagements. An explanation of the infographic stats can be found on a StumbleUpon page. Note that the information is presented from a StumbleUpon perspective (e.g. they picked a time period when StumbleUpon was leading Facebook in the August to September 2011 timeframe). But even with that in mind, I am concluding that it is well worth the effort to leverage StumbleUpon to drive visitor traffic to my site.

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Forest Nature



If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong? Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again, making mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is. - Steve Pavlina