Koka Sexton dot Com

Getting traffic to your website can be a daunting task. If you host your own website you have several methods of getting reader attention and converting them to followers. Bringing new visitors can almost become a full time job is you decide to do go that route. There are several bloggers that do just that with the intent of getting more ad revenue through their site. The truth is, it works and people like John Chow (for lack of a better example off the top of my head) have been doing this for years.

Blog for yourself.

I started this website with the intent of keeping in contact with my family and friends but what I had failed to realize besides the fact my blog gets indexed by search engines was that I was getting to know other ‘friends’ around the internet. They were just as interested in what I was writing as I was in theirs. I was no longer just blogging for myself, I was writing to keep in contact with the rest of the internet. Social Media brought the game to the next level. I want to highlight on one Social Networking site that has been very helpful in getting me new visitors and show you some results.

StumbleUpon is off the hook!

I started actively using StumbleUpon (SU) about a month ago. I had an account for the past several months but not really getting into it until recently. In the past 15 days StumbleUpon has brought me over 7000 new visitors. I didn’t believe it myself since I rarely check the site stats for this blog and I just happened to look at them today.

7000 new visitors from StumbleUpon and most traffic was directed to a post I made about StumbleUpon. Now I know that 7000 new visitors may be chump change to some of you other bloggers but to me I was floored to get this many hits to my personal blog. The other sites I run get traffic close to this on a regular basis but I went from 40-50 visitors a day to a spike of 1500. My hosting company even shut down the site for about an hour because he thought I was being hacked.

All of this came about because I wrote a post called Super list of social media links and Chris Brogan was nice enough to write a tweet about it.

All of those posts came from sites I found using StumbleUpon and then I wrote a post called My favorite StumbleUpon links and I let the good times roll. While writing that post, I started getting more involved with the StumbleUpon community and started looking through other peoples profiles for great sites I had never come across. In the process I added as many interesting people to my friends list as I could so I could keep track of their stumbles on a regular basis. By seeing what other StumbleUpon people were giving the “thumbs up” to, I was exposed to some great articles on topics I was interested in like internet-tools.

How did they get from StumbleUpon to your website?

Many of the other stumblers have done a great job of filling out their profiles and leaving a link to their primary website. Once I got there, I made a point of reading some of the posts they had written and giving a thumbs up to the articles I liked. This also saves them for future reference through StumbleUpon.

I added a link to this site not really thinking that too many people would actually check it out but low and behold, I was blessed with new visitors.

Much love for the StumbleUpon community

Many people on StumbleUpon do not blog anywhere else and use StumbleUpon as their primary micro blog of sorts. But I found that there are #$^& great bloggers using the site as well like Ivan from MakeGenius.com Michael from Remarkablogger and even Tay from superbloggingtips.

Looks like they are using StumbleUpon in almost the same fashon to help find new topics to write about, build their social network and drive some traffic to their site.

Traffic is great but what I have really found interesting is the community dynamic around sites like StumbleUpon. Their are levels of trust that must be established before they will ‘endorse’ you with a thumbs up or even better a recommendation. Getting a recommendation on something you wrote by one of these super networkers seems to have a great effect on getting some new visitors. I’ll call this the StumbleUpon Effect.

Thank you StumbleUpon!!!

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