A Trade A Day

If my blog doesn’t have traffic, I might as well be talking to myself. I’m still learning the nuances of web 2.0 and blogging. I thought it might prove useful to readers to document my attempts to gain more blog traffic. What I’m doing, how I did it, and how it works.

My first push for blog traffic came from adding sites to my blog role. All good web 2.0 bloggers know that blogging is a community and without the support of our fellow bloggers our success is limited.

My second push for more traffic centered around blogging directories. They’ve been useful to a degree. I’ve found more blogs that I like, but I’ll detail the impact to my traffic at another time.

The third push is blogrush which has generated many impressions, but hasn’t yet delivered in terms of actual click through’s. I do have high hopes for blogrush.

My fourth push for more traffic involves social networking and is the subject of today’s post. It involves StumbleUpon. If you don’t know what StumbleUpon is, then let my pull it right from their webpage to explain it to you: ‘StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web. It is a collaborative surfing tool for finding and sharing great sites. This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn’t think to search for.’

This is how it breaks down:
1. Go to Stumbleupon.com and sign up for an account. I downloaded the firefox extension. If you don’t have firefox, you should get it.

2. Once the extension is installed, The “Stumble!” button on my tool bar will send me to webpages based on my preference settings.. I then can rate a blog or website with the “I like it” or “No more like this” buttons. It seems the point is, the more I stumble and rate sites, the more the stumble results become customized based on my likes and dislikes.

3. Great, now can someone explain to me how it drives traffic to my blog? The first step is to submit your site by bringing it up in your browser and rating it. Make sure you rate it with the “I like it” button (I know what you’re thinking, but I have to say it.). That will put it into the StumbleUpon database for further submission. The higher my site gets rate, the more stumblers will be driven to my site. Here’s an article that raves about StumbleUpon’s ability to drive traffic.

Here another great article on how to maximize StumbleUpon Traffic.

Here’s another that details how to increase StumbleUpon Traffic.

I will post my results next week.

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