Site Traffic – Page 2

Is Stumble traffic really good traffic?

In the last few months I’ve seen more and more bloggers getting excited about Stumbleupon and adding “stumble” buttons to their posts in order to encourage their visitors to stumble their latest entries.

While it’s nice to see your traffic stats go up I’ve often wondered if there’s any value to traffic from sites like Stumbleupon.

On Thursday evening I spent some time adding several of the recent posts on Odd Planet to Thoof. The posts that I’ve added to Thoof in the past have always brought in new traffic to my sites.

What’s more, the people who’ve decided to visit one of my sites after seeing the posts summary on Thoof have often taken the time to stop and leave a comment on the post. Some have also enjoyed the posts enough to add them to Digg, StumbleUpon and other social bookmark sites.

The great thing about Digg, Thoof and other social bookmark sites is that when people visit those sites they pick and choose what websites they visit. On the other hand when someone uses StumbleUpon they are taken to new sites, ones they may or may not want to visit. I suspect that most people quickly visit site to site when they stumble, not stopping to explore the site they are on at all.

To prove my point – some of the posts that I added to Thoof on Thursday night have turned out to be quite popular on Thoof. Popular enough to bring in about 500 new visitors in the last two days. Several of these new visitors added the posts to social bookmarking sites, dugg the post and yes a few stumbled the posts too.

The stumbles resulted in more than 4,500 stumbles for ONE Odd Planet post yesterday.

4,500 visits. That’s amazing isn’t it? Shouldn’t I be happy about that?

While it’s possible that some of the stumblers might have bookmarked the site yesterday for future visits or added it to their favorite social bookmarking site I suspect most looked at the funny picture that’s posted, had a little laugh and moved on.

None of the stumblers stopped to leave a comment. This particular post was published on October 3rd and the last comment left on the post is October 6th – well before all this stumbling occurred. Yet the posts that were very popular on Thoof got quite a few new comments and hopefully some of the new Thoof visitors will return.

I’ve monetized Odd Planet with Google Adsense. This site usually does ok with Google Adsense. It doesn’t make a lot of money each day, but I’d say it usually averages a dollar or two. Yesterday the site had more than 4,500 visitors. Do you know how much I made on Google Adsense on that site yesterday? 34 cents. Uh huh. Some of my other sites that only had 100 visitors on Saturday made quite a bit more than that.

This only re-enforces my opinion that StumbleUpon traffic is hit and run traffic.

My other worry is that Google, who doesn’t like sites that create “false impressions” of their ads, could see all this hit and run traffic as an effort to increase ad impressions and end up banning my account. I’m actually glad that there wasn’t a huge increase in Google Adsense clicks as it might have raised Google’s suspicion.

At this point I think I’d much rather have an extra hundred or so visitors to a post from a site like Thoof or Digg where people have chosen to visit the post on their own rather than thousands of empty hits from StumbleUpon.

Since I run several websites and blogs on my hosting account I worry about getting too much traffic too. I’ve had to change hosts twice so far this year and the next move will probably be an upgrade to VPS hosting. You can read about my hosting problems and CPU resource over usage on The WebFiles. A huge increase in extra traffic – sometimes 6 hits per minute on the post I’ve been discussing could be the final straw that causes my host to shut my account down. If it was real traffic I’d deal with it ok, but to worry about my hosting account over empty traffic – no way.

The stumbling is still going strong. Looking at the Statcounter Stats for Odd Planet there’s been 1,304 page loads in the last 3 hours and forty five minutes (yes it’s 3:45 am) and the majority of those page loads were StumbleUpon visitors.

Once all the stumbling stops I’ll keep an eye on the site to see if the traffic has increased a little bit over it’s past daily average. Of course since a few posts were popular on several of the sites I’ve mentioned in the last few days I may have trouble deciding which site caused a slight increase (return visitors) in the average traffic once all of this dies down.

Have you had some of your posts become popular on StumbleUpon, Digg, Thoof or a social bookmarking site? If you have, have you analyzed the traffic from those sites to see if you gained any benefit from the increase in visitors at all?

Do I really have CPU resource issues?

by Tricia

Arghhhhhhhh! I’m still having hosting problems!

I finally contacted my web host the other day after not hearing from them for well over a week and they tell me that my CPU resource usage for my sites – which ones I don’t know! – is still high.

I’ve got several domains and several different types of programs running the sites on the domains so it’s hard to pinpoint which domain let alone which website might be causing the problem if they won’t help me by telling me where to look.

I just find it odd that now that I’ve upgraded every single piece of software that I can they aren’t sending me daily messages but when I actually ask them they say the CPU resource usage is still high. You’d think they’d be writing to me daily when they get their reports if it’s still high.

Promote your site with a Squidoo lens

by Tricia

Have you heard of Squidoo? I’ve been a member of Squidoo since 2005, shortly after the site opened it’s doors to those who wanted to promote their websites in a very different way.

Squidoo allows members to make what they call a lens. A lens is a window to promote perhaps another sites or a number of similar sites on the internet. You can add as much information to your lens as you like in order to point others towards your website.

I made my first lens, as I said, back in 2005. It was for my reptile and amphibian care website
. I have information on that site about a lot of different reptiles but the majority is for one type of lizard – the water dragon. So what I did was to add snippets of care information to the lens that I created that lead to specific pages on my website where my lens visitors could learn even more in depth information about the care of the water dragon lizard. I did the same thing on another lens for iguana care.

I was also able to add modules to my lens that allowed me to select items from online stores like overstock.com, Amazon and many others for which, if I sold any items through my lens I’d get a percentage of the royalties that Squidoo made off the sale. Profits from a lens can also be donated to a number of charities as well.

I didn’t do much with my lens over the last year, but I’ve recently gone back and given them an overhaul adding new modules and updating the information.

As I said you can do as much or as little to your lens as you’d like. If you were to create one for your website you might add your RSS feed so that visitors could see your latest posts, as well as write a summary of what your site is about. You can also add link modules in order to link to similar types of sites.

I’ve now created lens for all of the blogs that my husband and I run. Each one has a summary of the blog, RSS feeds, links, shopping modules and I’ve added as many tags to the lenses as possible that describe the site accurately so that people will be able to find my lens easily on Squidoo or perhaps even via a search engine.

Visitors to your lens can rank your lens from one to five stars, so if you create a lens try to do a good job so that you’ll get a good rating. I believe the rating system helps with a lens popularity on the site as well.

The people as squidoo also send out newsletters telling members of popular lenses each day and you can apply to have your own lens promoted in order to get more visitors and ratings for your lens.

Check it out for yourself. At the very least it’s another way to promote your website and at the most it’s a way to make a little bit of extra money if your lens does well!

Visit Squidoo to make your own Lens.

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