The StumnleUpon effect

Still I think StumbleUpon is an amazing tool worth investing into.

I don't get that many visitors on my blogs. I haven't got much time to blog and even less to market them, so the number of visitors are quite low.

Buy after reading several threads in BlogCatalog about StumbleUp, I decided to test it. I create a little post and went on asking my buddies at BlogCatalog to stumble it. The result was instant:

The big spike in my Analytics is from stumbling Breaking New: Whole Foods Market launched in London on Business Matters. You can see the effect: big rush of visitors (about 200 compared to a normal 4-5!). Sadly they don't stay very long (about 1-2 minutes) and don't stick either. Still I think StumbleUpon is an amazing tool worth investing into.

You must design ways to get them to come back: email/RSS subscription sounds like good idea, you could bribe them with freebies as well. Another option if you are into making money is to ask your buddies continuously to stumble your post (although they could get bored of it) as you will get spikes and spikes of visitors. If you have ads for instance that pay per view it is not a bad thing at all!

If you actually wanted to use it for yourself as opposed to just increate your traffic; basically you need create an account, then you should really install the FireFox toolbar for StumbleUpon and then you get lots of new buttons; 3-5 of them really matter.

One is called "Stumble", when you click this, you get instantly a new page loaded. The pages I believe is selected from the the interests you listed on StumbleUpon while creating your account and from the people stumbling pages. The 2 next important ones are "Thumbs up/down" which tell StumbleUpon if you liked what it showed you. I supposed the software behind must refine the selections based on your input. Finally, if you are nice guy or gal, you want to review some sites using the "Review" button which will give them more exposure because the reviews will appear in StumbleUpon are visible to all users.

All in all, StumbleUpon despite looking a little bit nerdy, is a great tool to give a boost to your Analytics ratings and also a cool way of visiting sites you will not normally look at.

Improve Your Technorati Rank

RTCunningham has started a new experiment to see how to increase your Technorati ranking. I am definitely up for it. As you can see from my previous post blogging and money, I am always keen to increase my ranking. Like everybody else, this is like an obsession.

I found that these little scheme works quite well. I believe my blogs ProLight and Master the Web ranking on Technorati went up for similar reasons (linking scheme). By the way you are wellcome to fav them (fav Master the Web, fav ProLight). This experience could help understanding the mechanics behind the Technorati beast even further.

So here is the deal, create a post on this experiment and link back to my little post. You can for instance use the text below (sadly Blogger insists in converting the code back to a link so use View/Source to get the code):

I am always keen to increase my ranking. Like everybody else, this is like an obsession.

Have fun.

Are we loosing the blogging fiber?

How much time do you spend actually writing new contents?

I have been trying to boost the ranking of my blogs in many different ways for a long time. It came to the point where I would literally spend all my time available on the computer finding ways to increase my ranking rather writing actual contents (not that I have much time).

That is really odd as the point of blogging is to write contents (which is actually what I like to do). What happened there? Why are we all become obsessed with making money through our blogs? Is it that we are all obsessed about money that we could not resist the lure of making money while blogging? Possible.

Actually that does not make much financial sense. I believe very few people make money out of it. Imaging you spend about 5 hours per week writing, monetizing and researching. The average wage in United Kingdom is about 5 pounds per hour. That means per week you need to make more than 25 pounds per week or 100 pounds per month.: below that you are making a loss. Looking at the How much have you earned from Adsense? thread in BlogCatalog very few people can make that much money per month.

It does not make much sense. Something else should explain that behavior. I don't think this is really about make money then. I think it is more about popularity than money. How much money you make is a good way of representing the popularity and success of your blog. If not why spending so much time to make so little money?

How much time do you spend fishing for links ?

How much time to spend researching ways to make (more) money?

How much time do you actually spend writing new contents?