Stumbleupon Social Bookmarking Case Study Update

After going off the results from the Stumbleupon experiment that I started yesterday I was very surprised at the results. I only submitted 2 of my blog posts and the traffic nearly tripled, I plan on doing a few everyday to keep it steady for the next week. The bounce rate was actually lower then the days before. This leads me to believe that it may actually work with blogs, in the past I have used it with forums, proxies, and web hosting. Proxies worked great and got me thousands of uniques just from one time. As expected it did nothing for the forum in terms of registrations and view time. The amount of time that visitors stayed on the site only decreased by about 40 seconds, which means that the users are actually reading my posts. I even noticed a few people blogged about the post after reading about it on Stumbleupon. That means that I also increased the backlinks.  Take a look at some of the results below and let me know your experience by making a comment!

Bounce Rate Lower

 Unique Visitors 3x Higher!

 Sources Stayed the Same!
United States, United Kingdom, Canada are Top 3

Posted in: Case Studies, Increase Traffic, Make Money Online, Social Networking | Date: November 21st, 2007 | Posted by: Derek | No Comments »

Stumbleupon: Internet Marketing That Works!

Since starting the blog I had been contemplating actually doing anything with Stumbleupon or not because the results had been terrible when I tried it become. In terms of traffic, it works wonders, and you can get thousands of uniques per day using it. The question is does this traffic convert into sales/clicks? In my study I will try and figure that out and if tagging and categories really make that much of a difference.

Here is the results so far in about three hours. Not surprising but I am anticipating a crazy bounce rate.

Posted in: Case Studies, Increase Traffic, Search Engine Marketing | Date: November 20th, 2007 | Posted by: Derek | 1 Comment »

Gaining Traffic and Subscribers With My Squidoo Lens

Well I decided to see what all the buzz was about and join Squidoo. I had read some good reviews about the program in the past and found some interesting information on peoples lenses before. I have also found that they rank well in Google if the titles are relevant. I am going to update my lense just one time per day, most likely with a list since that does not take very long to do. Then chat the results and see if this site is helpful or just overhyped.

It is a platform designed to make it easy for anyone, for free, to set up a single page on a topic he or she knows or cares a lot about.

Squidoo is a network of user-generated pages called lenses. These are single pages that highlight one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lens’s can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren’t primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and then pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning.

Here is a better explanation taken from their FAQ. I added a bit to some parts for my thoughts.

1. WHY SHOULD I BUILD A LENS? Great question! Here are just a few reasons to get you creative muses flowing:
   • Share knowledge: Not everyone knows what you do, share your area of expertise with the world.

   • Increase your profile: A popular lens gives credibility to the Lensmaster. A popular lens reinforces your role as an “everyday expert.” And a popular lens makes you the go-to authority for those looking for help.• Increase your traffic: Your lens points (if you want it to) to your blog and to your website. Lenses have huge credibility with search engines, so your lens can help your other sites rise to the top of Google searches.

   • Earn a royalty for you, your organization, or your favorite charity. A single lens might not earn a lot, but if you imagine hundreds of lenses working to your favor, or fundraising for a charity, it can really start to add up. The lenses take less then five minutes to create you can have this many in notime at all.

In order to get my lens popular I am going to have to be part of the network it looks and peek around to see what others that have been successful are doing that makes it good. I like the fact that they are giving me 50% of the revenue that the lens makes. I doubt that even with a bunch of traffic that would be very high which is why I am going to make one lens per day. Please checkout my Squidoo page and let me know what you think of it by making a comment.

Posted in: Blog, Case Studies, Make Money Online | Date: November 13th, 2007 | Posted by: Derek | 1 Comment »

Building Natural Search Engine Traffic: A SEO Case Study

In order to keep focused on Blogging I decided to make a challenge that will run until the end of November. If any other blogger would like to do a similar challenge let me know and I will update them with your results as well. Obviously if I do this right there are no drawbacks to it and everything that comes about it will be positive. I want to increase traffic and most importantly build a loyal following. If people find me naturally they are that much more likely to stay at the blog, which is why I believe the SEO factors are so important.

Goals

Backlinks: 250
Alexa Rank: 65,000

Authority: 100
Rank: Top 75,000

People Count: 5,000

Tools Used

DomainPop Backlink Checker

Why is domain popularity important?

You need backlinks to improve your search engine ranking. Having them from different domain names is more valuable for your ranking
We Build Pages Indexed Pages Checker

This tool is to check whether URL(s) have been cached by Google and what date that were cached. This is the best tool that I found they have a nice backlink checker tool which shows the anchor text each URL is using.

How can I help you achieve these goals?

I would appreciate any help, and will strongly consider returning the favor if your site is high quality. Just add me to your blogroll, include a link to one of my other posts in your website, or any other creative way you can think of.

The easiest way to help me is to subscribe to my RSS Feed and Add Me At Technorati.

Posted in: Blog, Case Studies, Make Money Online, SEO | Date: November 12th, 2007 | Posted by: Derek | No Comments »