This Guest Post Courtesy of Mark Dykeman of Broadcasting Brain Fame
Is SU a Performance Enhancing Drug for Blogs?
The long term impact of using social media to boost your blog readership is frequently debated by social media users. Some people yearn for the server-crashing success of hitting Digg’s front page. Other people seem to prefer the less dramatic, smoother influx of traffic from a site like StumbleUpon. Either way, sometimes it feels like you need a fix of DFP (Digg Front Page) or StumbleJuice in order to keep your stats high. Is that a good thing? I wonder.
I’ll admit it: I used to submit a lot of my own stuff to places like Shoutwire, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. It didn’t make for the smoothest of starts to social media, especially because I hadn’t met any other social media users yet. Fortunately, I found some good articles on using social media (Tamar’s articles were very helpful; I wish Muhammed Saleem had written his guide when I first started!) and I’ve learned a lot.
I’ve learned to appreciate social news and other social media sites for what they are and I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment from finding and submitting other people’s material to these sites, as well as voting up their submissions. I’ve also become a regular blogger in this time and have become focused on building up Broadcasting Brain. I rarely submit my own posts to social media sites anymore…
With one big exception. StumbleUpon. I became addicted to Stumble juice and using it to enhance my page views.
Without getting into specifics, I can say that Stumbled posts seem to get up to 10x of the “unjuiced” traffic that the same posts would get. I’m sure other people see better results. That’s pretty darned attractive. However, it still requires me to do some promotional work, either solo or with a helper or two, to get the Stumble traffic.
Yesterday, I wrote a new post about Digg which I though was fairly good. I didn’t Stumble it myself, nor did I ask for Stumble assistance.
So I waited to see what would happen.
My page views increased… sluggishly. Very very slowly.
I stayed firm. Finally, probably about 12 hours after I posted the story, someone discovered it and Stumbled it. As I predicted, it increased traffic by roughly 10x.
The increase in traffic was wonderful, but it felt fake, knowing that it was enhanced by Stumble juice. It does make me wonder how much social media tends to enhance blog stats, though. Or does it jump start them instead?
Athletes get in trouble for using performance enhancing drugs. It would seem that social media is our steroid, our juice.
Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? I’m not sure. What do you think?
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With the amount of volume of data coming out, people seem to turn more to recommendations of what others tag and bookmark. Mainly when you trust that person before.
I saw your blog from another person that followed both of mine, so here I am. Adding some juice to the mix never hurts if it is done above board and without mal intention of getting traffic just for the revenue stream and not for the content itself.
Revenue stream? You have a revenue stream? I can’t cover my hosting costs! It’s all about the love.
Nice blog, by the way – http://thesocialnetworker.com
I think it’s so addictive, because it is so simple. You have this pretty toolbar and in two clicks you’re done.
Beautiful
Cool comments, folks!
Self-promotion is about image in large part, so getting traffic numbers a bump is good for perception. The issue isn’t the same as with performance enhancing drugs because they are used against the rules to create unfair advantages in competition. There are no rules in online promotion. It’s not like someone’s out there saying “No fair, that traffic isn’t real, like mine!” Also, the traffic is real. The point of blogging and participating in the online community is to get viewers. The problem I would think arises when one can’t convert the new traffic into loyal readers or whatever the main goal of the blog has, if one becomes too focussed on getting traffic that the content suffers. Then it does become create long-term damage in exchange for short-term perceived benefit.
Did that make sense at all?
Peace.
It is addictive. I am just waiting for someone to come out with a StumbleUpon Anonymous social networking site for those of us that can’t seem to go a day without stumbling.
I actually find myself using Stumble Upon as a bookmarking tool the more involved I get. It is one of the best ways to see what my favorites are reading as well as writing so in terms of “fake” traffic, it’s not all fake.
It a populartity contest, and yes I feel pretty oh so pretty.
StumbleUpon isn’t a free ticket to massive pageviews, unfortunately, they have an algorithm too and it resists being forced. Sending out your new article to all your stumblefriends SHOULD result in enhanced pageviews but it often doesn’t. So, how do you get your posts to the attention of non-friends? If the only answer is “create good content”, then that has to be a good thing!
Very Nice Article…
I agree with a few that making “Loyal” visitors is the real job…
There’s no point in getting Higher Bounce rates. That actual hurts you by purchasing more bandwidth and also hurts the revenue stream as in case of Adsense you’ll get more Impressions and very few clicks and that’ll drop your eCPM to which you’ll be ashamed of
i agree completely! i’ve been getting a lot of traffic from SU too! great site.
@kristen, i would need to join SUA if they had it!
btw… i would subscribe IF i could do it by email! (i simply don’t use a standard rss reader. so email is the only way i go.)