One of the earliest web 2.0 companies, StumbleUpon, which offers users to stumble new websites, and to site owners to get lots of traffic, has announced that it has surpassed 10 million users. StumbleUpon hit the 5 million users mark two years ago, and was acquired eBay in 2007. However, last year, StumbleUpon broke free of eBay and became an independent company again.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Having posted 3 Ways To Make Your Blog Fail, I felt it only appropriate to share three things that will make your blog succeed.

Rhythm

Lots of blogging guru’s will tell you how many times a day or week you should blog. I prefer to see bloggers set their own pace. As long as you find a natural, consistent rhythm that works for you and that you feel provides enough for your readers to keep returning to your blog then that is the right frequency for your blog.

Social Media

You must invest in spending time with Social Media platforms, whether it’s promoting your blog on Facebook, telling people about your latest post on Twitter, creating a series of bookmarks that relate to your blog topic on delicious or promoting other peoples blogs on stumbleupon. Social Media is a great way to market your blog.

Have Fun

Blogging is work, there is no doubt about that, but unlike a regular job, its usually something we choose to do. So why not make sure its fun. It should be, it should be something you look forward to. If it isn’t your full-time job, then it should become the highlight of your day. By making it fun for you, you will make it fun for your readers and that will bring them back.

What do you do to make your blog succeed?

Popularity: 5% [?]

Ever wondered about using the social media platforms like Digg or Stumbleupon to promote your own content? It is, for most people a black or white issue. Some say “Its fine to do” others say “no way”. One solution to this is in fact very Social in its nature.

Get your friends involved, especially if they are bloggers themselves.  Wait until you write a really good post, yes I know all your posts are really nice, but lets be honest here, as writers we, like everyone else have good days and not so good days. So wait until you have something you know adds value, then ask a group of your friends to submit it to digg, stumbleupon,reddit etc. in return you will do the same for them the next time they need some extra promotion.

Getting your posts into the mix at these sites is guaranteed to increase the amount of traffic your site gets, and the great thing about it is that once you start appearing on these sites the traffic will continue to come to you from them.

So be social and ask a friend if they can digg it.

Popularity: 6% [?]

This post applies specifically to Wordpress bloggers. Though I am sure there are tools like this for other platforms.

How often do you ask your readers to actually promote your content for you?  There are several ways you can achieve this, using things like “Share This” or any of the plugins that give your readers to submit the article to “digg”, “Stumbleupon”, or other ranking sites.

While these are all good and well and will certainly get you traffic, will they build your readership?

One of the best ways to build new readers is to have existing readers recommend your site to them.  There are two Wordpress plugins that do this in slightly different ways but essentially achieve the same thing.

The first is WP-Email:

As you can see it creates a very nice form for your reader to fill out complete with Captcha protection. This will email the post to the readers friend. Thats a great recommendation.  The second plugin does the same thing but instead of opening in a new page it simply uses a popup. That plugin is email2friend. The popup looks like this:

Choosing either of these is certainly going to give your readers more choice about how they share your posts and after all its all about choice.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Here’s a quick and fun WordPress tip for bloggers who own a WordPress blog. If you ever wanted to randomly go through your blog posts in a StumbleUpon-like fashion, then check out the Random Redirect plugin. It allows you create a link to yourblog.com/?random which will then randomly redirect to a random post on your blog. 

To see it in action, click the link below.

Click Me To Visit a Random Post!

Popularity: 11% [?]

About a couple months ago, I posted up a poll asking you and other readers what your site’s leading source of traffic is. The poll has been running for a while now, but I forgot to put it up on the sidebar for a few weeks. 101 votes should be enough to get significant numbers and results. So here it is below.

Out of this 101, 36% of you said that your main source of traffic came from search engines and I would guess that it was mostly from Google. Meanwhile, referral traffic came in second with 29% of all votes. Just to reiterate, this category of refferal traffic is composed of traffic you get from other sites that include other blogs, StumbleUpon, social media, forums, etc. Oh, and as you can see, nobody that participated in this poll uses PPC marketing to promote their blog (or other type of sites). Then there are those who polled “Other”. Not exactly sure what that would be, but I guess that’s my mistake for putting it up as an option.

What Some Of You Said

Here’s what a few of you said from the original post.

Wayne Liew -

Since I enjoyed bloghopping, my traffic will be largely from other blogs resulting from the links of my comments and also my MyBlogLog avatar.

Blacksky -

I really try to have the more sources possible… from search engine to social bookmarking but google search engine seems the one that give me the highest conversion . and yahoo search engine is almost at 100% of conversion… pretty sad that nobody use it. Mybloglog is good to spread the word.

Doctorfox -

I get a few from Google and Stumble upon, but the most comes from the Software industry where people want to download my software for free. Also I think there should be a difference between regular traffic and targeted traffic.

So What Can This Poll Teach Us?

Well, here’s the thing. I did expect the search engine category to top other sources of traffic in this survey, but it’s not the one I wanted to see. Instead, I would have loved to see the referral category to top all the rest. Why? Well, if you were one of those people who polled for referral traffic, I would like to let you know that you are a very good internet marketer. Being a good internet marketer shows that your site can live without Google and other search engines. To those that did poll for search engines as their leading source of traffic, I’m afraid to say that you will have a hard time having a successful online business whether it’s your blog or any other type of site. Just imagine that Google never existed. You’re site’s income would never exist too.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Still got nothing to do about after reading my 10 things to do when you have nothing to blog about? Well, here are 10 more time-saving things you can do to increase your productivity online.

1. Participate in forums. A perfect way to expose your site for traffic.
2. Check out new blogs that you have never visited before.
3. Use StumbleUpon and discover new sites and pages.
4. Make a podcast (audio or video) and post it on your blog.
5. Comment on as many blogs as you can.
6. Tweak your blog for any changes. Clean up your sidebar for example if it has too much clutter.
7. Email other bloggers and ask if you can guest post on their blog.
8. Join others bloggers’ MyBlogLog communities and BlogCatalog neighborhoods.
9. Take a break from blogging. Yes, that means get off the computer and go outside or something. This will increase your clarity.
10. Make a social networking account (MySpace, FaceBook, etc.) for your blog and add as much friends as you can.

Popularity: 10% [?]