Blogging About Blogging

The Submission Experiment: Which Service Brings the Most Traffic…Thoof, Digg, Stumble, or Reddit?

• Author: The Blogsultant
• September 3, 2007
• Category: Opinions and Reviews, Tools

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.

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