Debt Prison

There is no comparison in Digg.com and Stumbleupon.com.  At least not when you are talking about the ability of a webpage to be seen quickly by many readers.  Stumbleupon.com can create such a surge of traffic to your site, you’ll think something is broken.  That’s what happened to me the first time someone stumbled one of my pages.  I was looking at my Google adsense account and within an hour I noticed a large jump in the number of page impressions shown. 

It was on February 23, 2008 that I published this post on Debt Prison.  Here is a screen shot from Google analytics showing the amount of web traffic I’ve had to this post within 60 days of posting.  On February 25 it had over 7,700 views.  Within the last ten days I’ve barely gotten any hits on the Hillary bill board.  But people are still hitting the image file (which I can see from my control panel).  A few people checked the source code and just added the image file link to their webpage.  Most of the people viewing it now are coming from a few profiles on myspace. 

Now I didn’t even have a stumbleupon.com account when this occurred.  In fact, it was while monitoring my web traffic that I stumbled upon stumbleupon.com.  Someone just found the pic, liked it, passed it around, and everyone else liked it too.  I thought the stumbling was over after a couple of weeks and then it picked up and started all over again.  It received another 6,000 hits on March 10th alone. 

Even now I don’t stumble my own webpages.  I don’t even have the stumbleupon.com toolbar installed on my computer.  I’ll just wait and let other people stumble my site the way it was intended.  If there is something worth stumbling it makes sense that someone will find it and put it on the map for me. 

So how do you get something stumbled?  It’s not simple.  You have to produce something worth stumbling.  It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words.  I don’t believe that a written article on my website could have produced this type of massive traffic. 

I’ve been kicking around the idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity.  This is not true if you are a politician.  Particularly true if you are a Hollywood celebrity.  But if you are a website administrator all traffic matters.  Here’s why.  The more traffic you get the more links that will be created back to your site by readers.  It doesn’t matter if the content was negative or positive.  Google search bot doesn’t see the world wide web in terms of morality.  It doesn’t comprehend good vs. evil.  But Google bot does understand links.  And the more the merrier. 

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Tags: digg, ranking, stumbleupon

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Self Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.