Should you stumble your business blog?
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Using social network sites (SNS) to promote your business is all the rage. I did some reading on this topic. I decided I should give it a try. The next question was which SNS I should use. I decided on Stumbleupon.com (SU) because it has a travel category in which I could tag some of the pages on my website and blog and other users interested in travel would be reading these pages. Chris Gree has written a good post about the mechanics of SU. I joined SU on 16 May 2007.
There are 2 ways in which you can promote your blog on SU. You can become an active stumbler. You should be honest in your bio and say that you are there for business. You can add a link to your business website or blog. I gave the thumbs up to some of my own travel blog posts but in moderation. I also look for interesting articles about travel in Europe to “discover” and add to my SU pages. I stumble through the randomly generated travel sites and give the thumbs up to any pages that I like which have been flagged by other stumblers.
I have made a lot of interesting contacts through SU, it has been good on a personal level. I’ve also made business contacts and we’ve gone on to exchange blogroll links. I do receive traffic from SU to my travel website. The highest number so far was 2021 visits in the w/c 11 June 2007. However I don’t believe that many of these visitors clicked on my Google Adsense links for accommodation, car hire etc, as although the number of website visitors increased the absolute number of Adsense clicks remained fairly constant.
I’ve also given the thumbs up to some posts from this blog, Business Blog Boost. SU delivered 343 visitors to Business Blog Boost in the 4 days from Monday 25 - Thursday 27 2007. Not bad for a blog that I started a couple of weeks ago!
You can advertise on SU, it costs 5 cents to have a Stumbler view your blog. I spent $100 to a campaign, targetting Stumblers interested in travel of any age who live in the UK. I later changed that to living in any location. The campaign lasted for a 7 days at the end of May. Out of the 2000 Stumblers, 43 liked my site and 15 disliked it. I don’t know if that is a good result but I read a post The Stumbleupon Experiment that Dan Grossman didn’t get any feedback negative or positive with his campaign.
Overall I feel fairly positive about my 6 weeks using SU. I would recommend that you give stumbling a try. Again it’s not an easy, quick option, you have to spend time becoming an active stumbler and try to make your pages full of interesting links to make other stumblers want to subscribe to your pages. If you add a judicious sprinkling of links to high quality content on your own website and blog then you should remain credible to other stumblers. It’s a 2 way process, how much you get out of SU, on a business and personal level, depends on how much channeled effort put into it.
I’m just not sure if I would recommend using SU advertising as I started regularly stumbling myself at the same time, so it’s impossible for me to say how many visitors would have been generated by using solely personal stumbling or an ad campaign. However I did undertake the advertising campaign to kick start my SNS marketing campaign but perhaps it didn’t really need this kickstart.
[tags] Stumbleupon, business blogs[/tags]
on June 29th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Great summary of StumbleUpon. As you know I’m a fan too.
You make a great point about being honest. It is definitely the way to see the best results with SU.
I’ve not tried their paid campaigns so I’ll be interested to hear how that works for you if you choose to do more.
on June 29th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Yes I do think you have to be straight about how you present yourself in SU to build up and maintain some integrity. Not just in SU but in your blog and website too. I ‘m not thinking of doing any more paid campaigns in the near future. At the moment I’m sticking to being an active stumbler.
on October 4th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Thanks Karen for sharing your experience - I can learn a lot from this, especially the info re how to present on SU and linking to your business blog.
on October 4th, 2007 at 9:08 am
Glad you found the post useful. I was amazed to see that it’s more than 3 months since I wrote this post. I haven’t spend so much time stumbling recently to benefit from making contacts and still when I do receive visitors from Stumbleupon there is no immediate increase in revenue.
It is difficult in a small business as you can end up spreading yourself too thinly over a multitude of marketing activities and perhaps end up spending too much time of acitvities that bring no return and not enough time on strategies that do work.
However It’s not only about immediate sales you are also trying to build awareness which may lead to future sales.