StumbleUpon Sent me 149 Readers in One Day
Posted on November 6, 2007 - Filed Under Social Networks
I experienced a pleasant surprise today when Google Analytics reported that StumbleUpon referred 149 readers to my blog. The more surprising discovery was that the post which had been stumbled - Writing Great Content for Your Blog - was an article I had spent less than an hour writing. That is way shorter than two other articles took - Overcome Writer’s Blog with a Writing Process and The Marketing Factor for Blog Branding – 4 hours and 2.5 hours respectively.
In case you have no clue what StumbleUpon is (where have you been??), it is a community where you share favourite pages on blogs you “Stumble Upon”. You can add reviews to pages that others have “stumbled” or connect with friends who have “stumbled” on the same pages as yourself. The real action truly starts when you are actively stumbling and interacting with fellow stumblers with the same interests. This is a great way to promote your blog and get friends to review your site. Darren Rowse of Problogger mentions in a post that StumbleUpon sends a more consistent stream of traffic to blogs compared to other social network communities like Digg or Technorati. While Digg was a major contributor in the surge of traffic from one of his posts that went viral, StumbleUpon actually sent him more traffic over a six-week period compared to Digg. He follows with a guest blog by Skellie on how to draw StumbleUpon users to your blog.
Back to my post - I was curious, performed an investigation on this unexpected result, a look back analysis if you will, and listed a few things that I had done differently on the said post:
Engagement. Writing Great Content for Your Blog is an amulgation of lessons learned from years of my experience in writing and producing content for the mass media and employee communications. As the topic was close to my heart, I made the effort to engage readers, edited sentences for clarity and appeal, identified with pain points of fellow bloggers, and advised them as a friend. And in that process, I developed a human voice, someone that they can relate to.
Tone of Authority. Top bloggers write with the tone of authority, as masters of the field who are on top of their craft. You won’t find them wasting word count on weak or irrelevant points. They know what they are talking about, cut straight to the point, and position themselves as leaders in their areas of expertise. They know how to get and hold your attention. This stance of confidence invokes trust and convinces readers to subscribe to their blogs. If you have been writing articles that you know contain premium content, and have been diligently promoting it via social networks and link baiting without much resulting traffic, reworking your tone might be something you want to look into.
Avoid Inflicting Heartburns. Clarity is a big factor that adds to popularity with readers, so make your content “bite-sized”. Separate key points into clear paragraphs and give punchy sub-headings. Look at the stats for the post – the article contained 623 words divided into 7 paragraphs, each containing 4 sentences with 23 words per sentence. This means that the article is very readable. It gives space and time for your thoughts to concretize and develop into a lesson learned, that you can easily remember. Punchy sub-headings give your readers’ minds mental “hooks” that they can access when recalling key points in your articles.
Add Value. It can’t be repeated enough. Take the time to give your readers a little more and you will make a good article great. In Writing Great Content for Your Blog, I publicized the free eBook and course that Brian Clark is running on making money from content. I also included a “techie” tip that is fun and easy to use, as well as introducing a great tool for improving your writing. They are valuable resources to bloggers who are constantly churning out content on a daily basis.
Change Your Font. While there is no way for me to confirm this, I suspect that the change in text font added to the attention I got for the post. Bad Internet connectivity was slowing down me down, so I decided to complete my article in MS Word while I still had the “juice”. What I didn’t realize was that my default font in Word (Verdana) would override the CSS font style of my blog (Trebuchet). Verdana gave the post a cleaner, simpler look which made it easier to grab attention.
Mull over these points that I’ve written. I did. And it was an interesting journey that while dissecting your own post, you can actually learn a tip or two from yourself. As they say, most geniuses are accidental.
I would like to hear your thoughts on scoring high with StumbleUpon users for my post. If you like what you read, remember to Subscribe to my feed
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[…] StumbleUpon Sent Me 149 Readers in One Day was my second post to get stumbled, and presented a self analysis of my post for “Writing Great Content for Your Blog” whereby I called out the factors that earned the stumble. In it, I applied the same factors that I called out as having made the first article popular with StumbleUpon users. It was published on Nov 6, and got 12 Stumble votes. […]