How I hit 5000+ visitors in 72 hours with StumbleUpon.

I have always wondered how many blogs sites really create a significant visitor traffic and create revenue through advertising posted on them. I tried several suggested techniques to create traffic such as: improving design, submitting sitemaps to search engines, joining social bookmarking and some other stuff. I also experimented on different social sites to promote my blog and there are quite a handful of them like: Digg, Technorati, MyBlogLog, Delicious and none did stood up to its promise until I began experimenting on StumbleUpon and hit 5000+ visitors in only 72 hours!.

How it started

• The Posting: Last August 24, I posted on my blog site a news article taken from another site which has inspired me so much an decided to copy and use it for my future reference.

• The "Thumbs-up": Since I'm a registered member of StumbleUpon, I clicked on "thumbs-up" recommendation on my own posting and forgot about it since most of my own StumbleUpon recommendations didn't help in the past anyway.

 

• The Traffic: Immediately after that, traffic increased quite consistently until after 24 hours it hit 1,103 viewers. The following day, it still continued to increase and reached 2,461 visitors and finally on the third day a whopping 5,018 visitors! I know this may not be much from professional bloggers but it is to me specially since I'm quite a newbie on this thing.

 

• The Surprise: What is even more surprising to me was, a week after it's first peak, visitor traffic peaked again but this time the traffic was even better than the first. So, it wasn't just a one time thing after all.

 

Observation: What went right?

• The Post: The post's title was "Do what you love doing. - Jobs says". It's a very inspiring speech delivered by Mr. Steve Jobs about his life's challenges and successes.
• The Category: I tagged or categorized this post under Lifehacks. Take note, I has another original post under this category that also made significant traffic.
• The Source: Among all social media sites that I joined in, only StumbleUpon has referred a significant number (93% to be exact) of people to my blog and majority of which came from the United States.
• The Recurrence: This totally caught me by surprise but the recurrence of increased traffic was due to my accidental mistake on resubmitting the same post after the first peak has subsided six days after.

Lessons Learned: My Analysis

• Search engines don't help. So don't bother submitting your site map to major search engines because they only bring in 1% to 2% of your total site traffic.
• People like to be inspired. Inspiration spans nationality, race, age, gender and even time. Blog postings that make people inspire will surely be a hit and it is never seasonal. If you want to appeal to a greater mass, then inspire them often.
• Focus on the 'Stumblers' and drop the rest. Focus only on things that matter to you and forget everything else. If it's traffic you want, then just use and be involved in your network of StumbleUpon users. If you don't have one, register. I guarantee it works, at least for me.

10 Essential Tools for Bloggers

There are multitudes of user tools and utilities you can add to your site as a blogger but I made a short list of essentials that you, as a blogger wouldn't go without. This is particularly helpful for beginning / professional writers who are just getting into social media and quickly get started.

1. Blogger Platform : This serves as a writer's canvass or repository of all things you write. There are several blog platforms you can use such as: Blogger and WordPress are two popular platforms you can start. I suggest using Google Blogger because its easy and flexible to use. I use Blogger for this blog with custom template.
   
   
2. Offline Blog Writers: You can't be too dependent on Internet just to make your blog entry. You can create your blog offline and publish them as soon as your online. This way, you can blog anywhere you want. If you have a Google account, you can make use of Google Docs offline document management to write and publish your blog or, you can download Microsoft's Windows Live Writer. This free product from Microsoft is fantastic!
   
   
3. Image Editors: A good blog should always have images and images attract and says a lot about your post. Now, we will be doing with away with softwares you can install and buy. I would recommend using the online image editors so you can edit images anywhere without having to install them in every PC just to use them. A good and simple online image editors are Photoflexer, Picnik and for a little more advanced users- SplashUp will do the job.
   
   
4. Content Distribution: It's not enough that your blog just sits in your webhost and waits for someone to hopefully read them. To reach a broader audience and eventually followers, one must use a content distribution services to to deliver your content to different aggregators or through emails. I can only recommend one of such service and that is FeedBurner.
   
   
5. Analytics: To know just how many people visit your blog, the posts visitors are reading, and other measures to determine its effectivity, Google's Web Analytics provides a complete and detailed analytics report about your blog site. This aids you as a publisher to identify which areas on your site that need working on.
   
   
6. Advertising: Not many would go in this direction of monetizing their blogs. Some find it too commercial and just provides too many distractions to readers. Just in case you would want to try your hand on making a decent earnings then you can try your hand on Google's AdSense. Other advertisers includes Microsoft, Yahoo and Widget Bucks.
   
   
7. Blog Promotion Tools: Besides just writing a good blog, you must also promote it to increase your sites readership. You can sign in with the likes of: Del.icio.us bookmarking, StumbleUpon, Digg and other social markers to gain awareness.
   
   
8. Image Sources: To make things simple on looking for images, I usually use Google's Image Search Engine to find the image I want. There are quality photos you can find on Flikr and other commercially sold stock photos.
   
   
9. Research Tools: Nothing is more important than finding a good and timely information for your blog. As a somewhat beginning blogger myself, I subscribe to other news and aggregate them using an RSS aggregators like Google Reader or BlogRovr. If your following on a certain product of a specific company, the bast way to do this is use Google Alerts. For statistical data, check the Google Trends. Other useful tools also include dictionaries, encyclopedias and a thesauri.
   
   
10. Copyright License: Lastly, you have to protect your work from malicious individuals from copying your original work or getting sued by someone just by quoting their words. Check Creative Commons and learn more about it.

These are just the right tools to get you started. Please note that these only aids you in the process of making your blog and initial promotion. This will surely not guarantee you success in monetizing or increasing your traffic.

My Zen Art of Blogging

When I first started to write my first blog, it took me several months trying to convince myself to get it started. Trying to find good reasons why I should blog like everyone else. Many blog sites I found was just in it for the money like advertising or selling some kind of goods. I almost fell into that scheme and soon realized that it ain't enough motivation for me to sustain the habit of blogging.

One day I said to myself, “What the heck! I will just get it started anyway and write anything I want to write. Inspiration will just set in later - probably.” And so I blogged away. One post followed by another post and another post. Twenty-six posts after, it now became clear to me my real purpose for making a blog and why I should make it a life long habit.

In the course of my habit to blog, I finally found my motivation why I should carry on this habit and why I think everyone should care to blog as well. Here are my reasons:

• Make your thinking process clear.
• Improve public perception and reputation.
• Makes you understand yourself better.
• Serves as your personal guidebook.
• Improves communication skills.
• Clarifies personal goals.
• Spurs creativity.
• Blog to learn.
• It's fun and very addictive.

These are my internal motivations why I continue to blog and why, I think, you should care and start your own as well. I know many bloggers out there would add some more to my list but surely it will just be more of the blog site features rather than real reasons.

My advice is, grab a blog account and just do it! Happy blogging!