I have been experimenting with ways to bring web traffic to my blog recently. Although computer engineering trained, I am no expert in traffic optimization but it does not take an expert to see that making money with blogs is basically a game of statistics, good contents and a myriad of other factors.
I wanted to have fun with these experiments. The first experiment was with StumbleUpon (or SU). I came across SU from a blog community where people are into exchanging stumbles. Considering the facts that I do not write very often (being a weekend blogger), do not have much interesting contents and not a focused theme in my blog, I wondered if SU is useful to bring people to my site.
Of course, those numbers are very pathetic in comparison with popular blogs but it was interesting to have these three spikes that occurred after I stumbled my own page. Those three entries were deliberately chosen, first is purely a single funny picture, second a record of my culinary experience (pictures and words) and finally an entry with most words.
There is no rule in SU’s TOS that states that you can’t like you own blog entries (I may be wrong, please read their Terms of Services). It seems that stumbling own entry can drive the initial wave of visitors.
Considering it is almost effortless to just click “I like it!” SU button on a page. It is really a cheap way to bring people to a page. In fact, the concurrent page view was too high for my server that had default settings (oops…) 
However, a general observation of SU visitors is that they come and they go, only a handful stay around to read more. After a wave of traffic, how then to measure retention?
Before one can observe retention, it is a must to have some form of web analytics tool that monitors the site. Feeds are also another good way to monitor recurring readers. Feedburner can be considered one of the most popular tool for this purpose and best of all, the pro features are free!
Correlate the number of feeds subscribers from this feedburner stats graph with the earlier graph, we can see that the peaks matches around the same time.
From the feed subscription stats, it is safe to conclude that the feeds subscription is quite dynamic, it seems subscribers constantly prune their feeds, removing stale feeds (like mine since I do not write daily). It makes sense, after all a RSS feed was meant to inform the readers of new entries, so if your site does not have frequent updates, why keep your feed? Simply put it, people like fresh new entries and news.
As you can see so far, this is one of the strategies of getting web traffic. Obviously one must have reasonably attractive contents and a server that can support the incoming traffic. So it begins with ways to trigger the initial wave of visitors, after which, some of these visitors may become your feed subscribers.
However, this approach of “initial wave then hope for subscription” is what I considered as an “uni-level” approach. What do I mean by that?
As you can see, between the tools and users, there is only one-level. Because of that single level, a writer has to constantly write, publish and publicized as part of the whole cycle. Of course, there are cases where the readers are bloggers too, and in some cases they hyperlink to your entry thus creating residual referrals.
Whether or not that happens, really depends on your contents and readers. On the whole, this activity is a direct exchange of one’s time for readership, no constant writing and publicizing usually equals to no readers. There is little leverage that brings in traffic after the initial wave or effort.
Having some background of Network Marketing as a developer who had previously done some projects to represent direct marketing networks and to compute their earnings, this trend of blog marketing is interesting.
What many bloggers are doing, in hope of making $ from advertisements, are basically trying very hard to sustain or grow readership with this uni-level approach. There are other similar systems, like Pay-per-post, Hittail (it has residual properties if one writes according to suggestion) and alike but basically they are still doing the same thing, uni-level.
Are there systems out there that are NOT uni-level? Will such systems help grow readership exponentially but not in big waves that will smash your server’s bandwidth to a grinding halt? Will such a system leverage on other blogger’s time?
Today, I stumbled upon Blogrush. It supposedly is a system that syndicates RSS and has a multi-level effect. It is still in beta. I just signed up as part of my continuing experiment… Let’ see if it really brings in traffic.
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