Blogging About Blogging

Winning, Losing, and Analyzing the Outcome of The Submission Contest.

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• Author: The Blogsultant
• September 12, 2007
• Category: Do'in It, Opinions and Reviews, Tools

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.

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