Dipping into the Blogpond

At the risk of stating the obvious, unless you have a really large budget, driving traffic to your website can be quite a challenge. This year I’ve been experimenting more with social media, as a distraction, an outlet and, to a lesser extent, as an advertising vehicle.

Below is a summary of some of the things I’ve tried.

Blogging

I’ve been blogging for two months now – my how time flies! I don’t think it’s getting any easier (and I’ve been a bit slack lately), but I’m hanging in there. I’m not sure how particularly appealing this blog is, or even how widely read it is. I only have the basic statistics that come with WordPress & I think my feeds are split over two places (i.e. some from WP and some via FeedBurner).

None-the-less building up a huge readership was never really my goal, and when people land at this blog, I’m still pleasantly surprised (and grateful for all comments). WordPress tells me that in the last 2 months I’ve had over 5,577 visitors and my best day was 373. Small potatoes.

Visitors to this blog have directed about 150 visitors (via hyperlinks) to dLook, dLook Dating and Obits, with an average of 3.5 page views. Clicks on the banners are not counted.

MyBlogLog

I joined MyBlogLog on the 11th of January. I’ve had a lot of fun, met some great people and discovered some terrific blogs. I have 3 communities – one for this blog (118 members), one for dLook (24 members) and one for Obits (16 members).

In terms of traffic, it’s great for getting people to a blog, and many are returning. Networking can be time consuming, but the more you do, and the more communities you join, the more successful it is in terms of traffic dividends. I haven’t been very active (either blogging or networking) in the past week, but MyBlogLog basic statistics show 154 visitors to my blog in the last week.

In terms of traffic to my other sites – it’s directed 81 visitors to dLook (2.2 page views each) and 73 to Obits (at 1.4 page views each). So, it’s obviously more geared to blogs.

StumbleUpon

I was reading a post by John Chow the other day (yep, still hanging in there), and he mentioned a guy by the name of Mitchell Harper.

“Harpz” is an Australian, so I thought I’d have a look at his blog. It looks promising. A post he had written about StumbleUpon had me particularly interested.

I’ve been slowly familiarising myself with this service (? add on, tool bar….) since 25th Feb. It’s a little tricky to navigate, but pretty unobtrusive and if you’re into randomly browsing it’s a really good way of finding out about unfamiliar websites, and other users (fast approaching the 1.9 million mark), and there seems to be quite a few Australians using the tool.

Reading Mitchell’s post, and previously at Search Engine Journal and ShoeMoney, made me think about paying for some traffic to dLook. At 5c US, it’s certainly cheaper than many AdWords.

It’s funny that Obits has actually had a fair bit of unpaid traffic from StumbleUpon, whereas dLook hadn’t prior to paying. So far Obits has had 68 visits from this source, with average page views of 2.91. dLook has had 227 visitors (paid) at 1.31 page views each, and dLook Dating has had 33 with 3.4 page views per visitor.

When setting up a campaign, what I find limiting about StumbleUpon, is that you can only pick one category (or topic) per campaign. Initially I chose “advertising” for dLook (and it is thus shown to Stumblers who have an interest in advertising), but this was really too limiting to get any sort of traffic volume. I subsequently added another campaign with the topic of “internet”.

Whilst setting up a campaign is really quick and simple, and it’s great that you can target your market by age, location and interest, the ability to add different topics at once would be handy. Having said that, I just noticed that if you go into “edit campaign” you can elect to “duplicate” the campaign for a different topic. But again, your campaign must wait for approval (granted they are very quick at approving these).

I’ll give it a few more days, but I really think that the nature of the site isn’t what stumblers are looking for.

Other

Included in “other” is traffic generated from
1. Posts on other blogs (thanks particularly to Alister, Cameron, Luke, Hugh and Clarke)
2. Comments on other blogs
3. Forum posts, either via comments or a mention from a forum member

The traffic from these sources, whilst valuable (and I note that the average number of page views are higher), doesn’t amount to an earth shattering amount. Unless of course you get profiled on a really highly trafficked site like Techcrunch, but then that has its problems too.

At the end of the day, traffic is traffic, and exposure is great. What is not measurable is the word of mouth (or email) referrals that are potentially generated from each visit, and unique opportunities that may arise from the additional exposure. With the exception of the paid StumbleUpon traffic, mostly the cost is the time and effort you are prepared to put into each experience. But I do wonder if we will see a significant increase in businesses harnessing social media to seed their products.

Transparency, is really required to be successful in the social media arena.