I had my first SURGE of stumbleupon traffic and managed to capture the event on Camtasia!

I think I only got the tail end of it but it lasted for a nice while, it even came back the next day although at a reduced rate, stats and geekery below the video.

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I’m guilty of giving some of my own posts a thumbs up now and then to start a trickle of Stumbleupon traffic to an article I have written or seen elsewhere such as the Hide a rar file in a jpeg. I saw it on a blog completely obliterated with adsense blocks so I decided to reprint it here in a cleaner-easier-to-read way. It got some traffic and upped my feed subscriber count but, the traffic wasn’t huge, just a few hits each hour, but still nice to have some new readers to my new blog

Then, I saw a small side article in a daily newspaper (yes, there is news available outside the internet!) about how Tussauds in London was due to show it’s first ever computer game character, it looked like a great story and I did a bit of research on Google for “Tussauds” ,”London” and “master chief”.

There were plenty of articles but none that mentioned London. Great!, there was one page that I found about Master Chief being in the Las Vegas version of Tussauds, it had some good information and some really great pics so I thought I would snag the pics, do some Photoshopping on it to give them a London edge and “make me an article” for here.

I was quite pleased with the Master chief is coming to London and gave it a thumbs up on my work browser and finished off for the day and went home content with writing a new article that didn’t suck and wasn’t a copy and paste of some content found elsewhere.

When I got back home, I went to my Live page (a plugin [link] that displays hits to your site in realtime) in my WordPress dashboard to see what was going on at FiddyP and I was amazed!, the video above is the tail end of what I saw.

These are the load times in the middle of the spike..

So, even with 141 at a time coming in, the server was still able to send the page in less than 5 seconds to most of the world.

I think the difference with this self stumble was that it was for a unique article and a few people gave it a thumbs up one after the other, I think that if you can get a few thumbs up as soon as the submitted page goes into circulation then you get a sort of exponential increase which could lead to another one and so on. As long as you keep getting thumbs up, the traffic will keep coming.

The hits started again the next day..

Some google stats..
One of the (many) good things about Google analytics is the way you can refine the stats so you can see all the individual stats for a particular referrer or page, here’s what was found just for the stumbleupon visitors

Not bad, average of 2 pages per visit means a lot of them took the time to see what else was on the site. 33% is a pretty good bounce rate for a social networking happening.

Encouragingly, nearly 90% of the people coming in were using Firefox. Sensible people use Stumbleupon

The vast majority of visitors had bigger than a 1024×768 screen, most had widescreens which surprised me, there must be a lot more widescreens out there than I thought.

I’ve seen a lot of advice about being a top Stumbler or increasing your ‘juice’ at places like StumbleGods that say you should add as many friends as you like and be a social junkie with comments and reviews of peoples profile pages. I think they’re right but for someone as busy as me, it’s hard to dedicate time to spend all my day trying to make contacts, the upside is, the contacts I do make are because they have recommended particularly good pages or I’ve ‘met’ them through this blog.

I was trying to think how I could repeat the event with a new post and spent a little while thinking what “they” want but, I don’t want to try and predict what people that come here will like, that’s not why I started this blog.

The best thing that I can do is, not worry about what Stumblers want and carry on making my blog for me for fun and writing about things that I find interesting without re-hashing stuff that’s already been done, if people like a post they will stumble it and if it’s good enough then sure as eggs is eggs, other people will and so on.

Overall, it was a good experience being bathed in hits for a short while. At least my server didn’t crash and it has given me some encouragement to carry on doing the things I like to do anyway and that’s plenty of geekery with a sprinkle of humour and a drop or two of nice pictures.

Thanks Stumbleupon! (and users) it was fun while it lasted!

There’s a few bloggers commenting on a new widget called Blogrush, it’s a service that is supposed to increase your traffic by sharing links to relevant stories on other Blogrush users blogs and your posts being displayed on theirs and so on.

It’s a great idea and I expect it will work for a while with all the buzz happening but, here are 7 reasons why I wont be using it…

1. The rich get richer…

The person with the most traffic and established blog will benefit most, sure if you refer them and they get the 10,000 views a day on their pages to give you your credits and all the other people referred by you and them get you credits (10 levels they say) then surely there’s going to be the situation where there’s more credits than available blogs? I thought about this and it seems they can just rotate the links to be shown enough times on high traffic blogs so it uses the credits up.

If you have 1000 credits and your link is on five or six high traffic sites, it will only be seen for a very short time before it gets pushed out by another site. 5 blogs getting 200-300 hits a day means your link will only be shown for part of a day.
If you already have lots of traffic, you will get even more! but, if you only have a few hits (credits earned) a day then your links will be gone in no time at all.

2. You lose credibility

What I don’t like the most’est is the referral nature of it, people will be referring others, not because it’s a great site or service but only for the traffic they can harvest from it. They wont care if your blog is good or not, they just want the credits! Not to mention the inevitable, someone creating an extremely high traffic spammed page with a widget it on it so they can rack up credits by displaying links to yours and other peoples sites, showing your blog link on a spam site is bound to affect your credibility with the search engines. Showing a link to your blog on a spam site will lower your value to surfers

3. You’re working for someone else

It’s MLM for nothing, now MLM and word of mouth are great tools for promotion but only if you get something valuable enough for it, like money! (I worked very hard with elottery and make a bundle from it, I plan on doing the same with uVme). If you’re going to promote someone else’s product then you should get paid for it with money, not promises of ‘exponential’ traffic. I feel that Blogrush is benefiting only Blogrush, they are getting everyone else to build their list for them, they’ll have thousands if not tens of thousands of peoples email address and topics of interest, powerful stuff when you want to market to targeted people!.

4. You will be sold stuff by email

I would expect to receive marketing emails from Blogrush after registering with them, maybe not straight away but definitely in the future. Their privacy policy states

If you are a registered user of an Income.com website and have supplied your email address, Income.com may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Income.com and our products.

Their main site is due to launch soon and it’s targeted at entrepreneurs, so you can be certain they’ll be hocking a “make money with this” product real soon.

5. Where is the luv?

If you’re gonna put links to posts that are on other peoples blogs, why not do it for your loyal readership? Send traffic to your readers blogs, proper linkluv!

6. You could be promoting your competition

They say it only links to similar sites and articles but, if you’re in business as an affiliate or you like to promote your own stock then the last thing you want to do is send someone to another site where they can get the same thing!

7. No control on the quality of external links

I’d prefer to link to posts and blogs that I have personally found to be useful, that way the reader knows I’ve approved that site and my credibility isn’t damaged by sending someone to a high traffic splog that just happens to have some of the same things I write about! Why tell your readers, go read this on another blog, I haven’t visited it yet or endorse it but go there anyway!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t smell anything ‘evil’ about the service, in fact, I think it’s an extremely clever way to create a buzz (not to mention create a massive list of people and their likes and dislikes), it’s just not for me, I think I’ll stick with writing good content and only linking to sites that I have found or are for the people that participate in the discussion here.

It’s a clever tool but, I think blogrush and income.com will benefit the most from it. You don’t get something for nothing when you download a tool from someone that makes money from marketing! It’s one of the first rules listed on marketers ebooks, build a list and market to it, or, provide a tool for free and then ‘upsell’ to the takers.