Mumdinger and BlogRush Update
So a week into using both, here’s a sampling of how things are going:
Mumdinger is showing itself to be tiny and slow. There is little new content and what is there is added and ranked at a snail’s pace. The stories I submitted didn’t receive many votes…but neither do their “top” stories so it seems to be of little consequence. Maybe this is a matter of “more time will tell”, which I’m willing to allow for. But they ought to come with some ways to drive some traffic their way; a site like that NEEDS the participation of many in order to succeed.
BlogRush….I have over 1700 impressions…to 2 click throughs. They say the click thru rate is artificially low due to some abuses of the system that should be cleared up shortly. Last week I had over a thousand “credits” but today I have a negative number….not sure I understand that, nor is a burning issue on my hot plate today.
The jury is still out on both traffic services.
Digg With a Feminine Touch: Mumdinger
Well BlogRush has brought me one success: easier surfing for similar sites within my category! Common advice for site growth is to find sites similar to yours and link to them but time has always been a factor me in hunting down sources. BlogRush brings them right to my site! So score one for “will work nicely” for this new service.
THIS post though, isn’t about BlogRush…it’s about Mumdinger, which is like Digg for Women. One of my hesitations with Digg is that some of my sites aren’t a good fit for it’s niches and “womens issues” and “mommy blog fodder” definitely fit into that category! One of my blogs is about *my* life, which includes children and a working-from-home-mother, and safety recalls, and headlice. It’s “global” in a whole ‘nuther way. Mumdinger looks like a fantastic service; I’ve registered and submitted a few posts. I’ll let ya know how it goes!
BlogRush: Will it work?
Darren on problogger has, what I believe to be quite honestly, presented a fairly new traffic-building tool called BlogRush.com. It’s getting some mixed press and today the founder sent out a thorough email detailing the ups, downs, and future plans of the service. I’m trying it out on all my sites….which is a daring step for me. Usually when I try something new I test-drive it on one site or two; not the whole lot of ‘em. But I’m on the optimistic side of cautious in expecting results so I went ahead and tried it full steam.
So far, I’m a little conflicted over the look of the widgit. It’s very appropriate on some sites; not so much on the other, and there is no flexibility in appearance. The stories in some of the categories vary widely in quality. For instance: my sixredheads.com was first listed under “lifestyle” but the stories linked in the widget were mostly gross and cheesy so I changed it to “parenting/family” because that is where the majority of my traffic resides, though my content really applies to more than just “mommy bloggers”. If I had to guess, the best content probably lies in the male-dominated categories because they are the predominant ones out there learning about new tech options at an uneven ratio.
We’ll see. Not unlike blogs themselves, I think traffic-generating sites MUST have great content and a lot of it. Highest on my list of priorities from services like Blog Rush is getting links with other *quality* sites; incoming traffic or not, I’ll pull the widgits if the linked stories detract from the environment I’ve worked hard to create. Only time is going to tell on that one and time is what I’m giving BlogRush.
Setting Work/Home Boundaries as a Work-At-Home-Mom
I took this weekend off. As there was a server/spam issue over the same amount of days, it seems this blog and parts of others took it off as well. And I resisted the urge to allow it (yet another tech problem) to consume what was able to become a most quintessential fall weekend: dry, cool weather, blue skies, a new flea market, lunch out with great Mexican food, laughing with my husband, snuggling in bed reading to my little boys, a big pancake breakfast, an afternoon working all together in the yard, a great morning at church, and great friends….
I needed the time off. I’ve worked nearly every single day for months. Early on I started unplugging on Sundays but I’ve only pulled that off a time or two. Most of the time it’s meant, “I unplug for most everyone…unless if something ‘important’ comes up”…which it nearly always did. But this Friday, tired and frazzled, I wrapped up my “to do” list, shut off the computer, and called the week “done”.
I work at home which is nothing new. I work at home *for money*, which is new to us, and my family is all working on adjusting. My “office”, until we decide if we are either moving or adding on, is half of my closet and has no door. If I had to guess what the most important boundary to set is while working from a home office, I’d guess a DOOR. My task load is getting more intense, which actually seems to be making it easier to fit within a M-F work week, though I appreciate the flex of being able to swap out a late night or Saturday if I have an event during the week that makes work impossible to get to that day. Today I blog with a little boy on my lap and sunshine streaming in from a nearby window, so indeed the environment has it’s touchy-feely moments!
Taking the weekend off was ironically highly productive! I feel refreshed and the jumble of tasks I had now seem easier to organize and tackle in a rational manner, which is ultimately going to help me accomplish a lot more than if I’d worked the weekend through.
As this is still relatively new to me, I often feel like I’m winging it, and I’d welcome suggestions from those who’ve been at it longer. If you have a suggestion, send me an email at Tia AT bloggingwithflair DOT com, along with your blog link, post, or strategy for setting work/home boundaries and I’ll compile a list of them here.
Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.
Size Matters: When the underdog threatens to surpass the Big Guns
It occurred to me that in my contest over the previous week I handled Stumble, Digg, Reddit, and Thoof as if they were equal peers. In fact, they are not the same in either age nor size, yet, in my mind, much as Ron paul is to the current political race, Thoof surpasses the rivals in value and quality. While this is my own perception and may not necessary be shared by everyone else, here today is something that is rather striking:
See that little blue line at the bottom? That’s Thoof’s traffic compared to the older, bigger guys out there in my contest. And yet, it placed second in the contest and nearly leads in overall traffic generation for my blog.
My thoughts right now are filled with “niche” marketing and all that I’ve read recently about how powerful it can be. I think, as a first reaction today anyway, that one reason why the bigger, older, more well-trafficked sites have little benefit to me currently is that they are simply too large and too broad to have a focused impact. I’m a new, small site seeing great benefit from a fellow new, and relatively-small site. Screams “niche” to me and many-is-the-niche that’s been hugely successful by not being too broad, dilute, and unwieldly. Certain resources for certain applications……food for thought.
Want more? Here’s the post that was the content of the contest. Here’s the introduction to the contest. And here are the results. Still want more? Subscribe to my feed!
Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.
Winning, Losing, and Analyzing the Outcome of The Submission Contest.
The results are in! The contest itself was a success from my point of view: this is a very young blog and I saw a nice spike in traffic, already exceeding my stats for the whole previous month in just the first week of this one. Can’t complain about that!
In breaking those pretty numbers down, I took a look at Google Analytics, which measures traffic a little differently than my server does, but offers a better look at each page, who’s coming, and how. I was pretty surprised at the outcome; at the halfway point, thoof.com was winning by a nice margin (60%). I didn’t look at it all over the weekend; my server tells me that on Friday, the site had over 3,000 visits on that ONE day. I do indeed wish I knew what accounted for the spike; by Monday, Stumble had overtaken the lead and by Tuesday was standing as the clear and obvious winner.
Technically speaking, the second place winner in this graph seems to be “direct” traffic. But for the purposes of the contest, I’m only measuring the sites I submitted to. Which means:
StumbleUpon won with a traffic rate for the single post “Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Feed?” of 83% of all traffic measured by Google Analytics for that page.
Thoof.com came in second, with 5.61%
Digg and Reddit each brought in less than 1%, which makes them dismal losers.
As a new company and a new company blog, I think it’s clear which sources have the most ROI for my effort. Stumble and Thoof are both extremely user friendly; I prefer Thoof of all of them because of a few things that make it unique over it’s rivaling winner; I probably under-use Stumble; won’t be from here on out I tell ya! And likewise, I probably will use Digg and Reddit very little now.
A few things that interest me: I chose a post that had a tech-angle for this experiment because tech is Digg’s slant. I was surprised to see it do so dismally there….and also not-so-surprised because the vibe I get over there is that it’s a pretty volatile popularity contest where lots of great material can be “buried” for odd reasons. Also, Thoof
is a better performer on the whole for me (and my clients) and I wonder why the post in this experiment seems to have gone against that norm. For instance, Thoof and Stumble are nearly tied right now for the total amount of traffic brought in (will continue to monitor this and report back at the end of the month); the difference being is that Stumble spiked a high on this ONE contest post, while Thoof seems to have a longer tail and brings in more value overall. We’ll see. It’s definitely fascinating to watch.
Images thanks to ScreenGrab; this project also gave me the impetus to learn something new!
Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.
Who’s winning the submission contest so far?
We’re at the halfway point in the Submission Contest….who’s winning?
The line up is: Thoof, Stumble, Digg, Reddit and the contrast is much more stark than I realized. I’ll the final tally and post numbers and graphed results on Tuesday (contest ends Monday).
The Submission Experiment: Which Service Brings the Most Traffic…Thoof, Digg, Stumble, or Reddit?
One service I do for my clients is to submit their posts to sites and aggregators in order to draw in more traffic. I use many but Thoof is definitely my favorite; it gets high marks from me for usability and clarity; I love that there is no comment feature leading to the snarkiness and distraction other sites can accumulate and their lay out doesn’t hurt my eyes like others. In addition, the people who run it have shown themselves to be a personable, friendly bunch who are aggressively working on their creation.
Still though, my business is traffic growth. The sites I use vary in age and size; thoof is probably the smallest and newest of the bunch. Last month when I did my month-end traffic reports I happily discovered that with thoof.com submissions, two of my sites tripled their monthly traffic! The same articles had been submitted to other sites and while they had indeed brought in traffic, thoof out performed them. This was not a very scientific process; rather a hindsight observation.
So I’ve decided to give a more controlled study a try. Yesterday I wrote a post on a fairly hot tech-topic: RSS Feeds. Near and Dear to Yours Truly is a concern over the persistence of many to cling to old-fashioned email while they rotely check blog after blog each day, fleeing from learning something new: RSS (which is increasingly not that new). All on it’s own I would expect this post to be a good traffic generator; it’s optimized well, draws the reader deeper into the blog, and also advertises my own feed. From there I submitted it to several services: Thoof.com, Digg.com, Reddit.com, and StumbleUpon.com. I was going to include Technorati but “Doh! They’ve lost the Technorati Monster Again”, a chronic condition they really oughtta do something about.
Over the next 7 days I will measure the incoming traffic from these sites and then at the end, post the results. Full disclosure: I don’t really expect to change my behavior with the results…..I’ve given all of them an ample test drive and I know the user-strengths and weaknesses of all of them. But from a traffic standpoint, I’m highly interested to see how it turns out.
Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Feed?
RSS Feed…what is it that scares so many away? You know who you are…you hear the term and maybe briefly recognize it as a “techie” word and then run in fear dismiss it, moving on through your list of blogs that you check every day. Once in awhile you notice that funny orange button with the white sound wave-looking things and maybe wonder what it all means, or maybe you think it’s just a neat design feature. Anyway… who has time to figure it out? You’re busy just trying to keep up with all the blogs you check every day and since trends on the internet come and go, you figure this one will “go” too.
But you know? There’s only so many hours in a day. Time Management matters. And there are a lot of quality sites out there…. wouldn’t it be nice to actually have a moment or two to go browse a few new ones? And if you discovered a new favorite, rather than add it to a cumbersome “favorites list”, what if new and updated material came to YOU rather than requiring you go and hunt around for it again?
When I first started asking this question, I turned first to Wiki…otherwise known, along with Google, as “the tool that keeps me from sounding stupid”. Don’t know something? It’s easy enough to go to Google and find the Wiki for an answer. And so, the day came when I typed in “RSS“.
This was only a partial solution. This particular Wiki is a bit cluttered. It made my eyes blur over the technobabble and history. But it answered a key question: “What do those letters stand for?” The answer? Real Simple Syndication. The persistent problem? This still didn’t make it feel relevant to my world. It did give me my next lead, the term, “feed reader”. Off to google I went.
Turns out there is a site for software called FeedReader. But I was still a neophyte who clung to the familiar. And oh-happy-day, google has a reader too. Not only do they have a reader, but they have a TOUR, in kind-to-beginners language and Real Simple Terms.
Baby steps. That’s what it felt like. My dark-and-stormy-night was now sans thunder and lightening and it looked like the rain was beginning to ease up a bit. I signed up, which gave me a reader home page.
Now I needed to go get some feeds!! This was FUN. I had about 25 blogs I already checked every day. True, true my internet connection is fast one but also true, true, it’s frustrating to visit sites every day that haven’t been updated. Now I clicked on the little orange button (or on the words RSS in their meta section) and it took me right to the google reader subscription page and signed me up.
I drug my reader page into my toolbar so it would be easy to one-click on it every day and then gushed about it (in Real Simple Terms) for a friend on my blog. Suddenly I had lots of extra time every morning because the updated blogs were highlighted and I didn’t waste time waiting for stagnant pages to load. This broadened my world because I devoted a little more time to reading and looking for new things. I could even argue that getting over Feed Fear was instrumental in starting my business. At any rate, a threshold had been broken…and it’s a whole new world.
Feeds are fantastic things. A subscribed reader will read ALL of your content. After they are hooked, your design may not matter much, where your ads are placed can be irrelevant, and your sidebar clutter becomes invisible. What matters most is that what you have to say is relevant and interesting. You’ve earned the most loyal kind of traffic there is but beware…it is not complicated to unsubscribe from a blog that no longer interests, compels, or posts. I would imagine this is kind of like Walmart though…once they have you in the store, they know you are most likely going to buy something. Unusual indeed is the shopper who leaves empty handed (ask me how I know).
And it’s wide world out there! Not only can posts be subscribed to but so can comments. You can offer email subscriptions to your feed. Feedburner has nifty ways to track your stats; as they put it, all the “izes”….publicize, optimize, analyze, and monetize. Yah, I know, new words and you aren’t quite sure how they work. Baby steps. But that scary storm is over and the sun is shining….. get going. 
Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.
Want more? Find out How To ToughenUp Online, Work Smarter, Not Harder, or subscribe to my feed!
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