Recently I took a break from blogging, mostly to get some priorities in my life in order. After coming back, I couldn't stay away, it was interesting to see how traffic to my blogs didn't really drop all that much.
For illustration of this point I will talk about my Jokes Blog as it has the highest traffic of the three.
Currently, according to Google Analytics, the blog is averaging 1230 unique visitors a day. If you check out the Project Wonderful links on my Jokes Blog you can see similar information.
However this doesn't reflect the true readership of that blog. The majority of traffic was being directed from Sumble Upon directly through to pages that have been "favourited" by Stumble Upon users. Of visitors from Stumble, 90% are new visitors and they visit 3.3 pages. Which is great, but doesn't count as having a regular readership. Considering that Stumble accounts for about 70% of the traffic to that blog it speaks volumes for the power of Stumble.
Also, every time there is a new page that recieves a surge in Stumble traffic there is also a similar increase in the number of subscribers, mostly by e-mail.
The next highest referrer is Google. Between Google America, England, Canada, Germany and Australia Google Image search accounts for another 10% of the traffic to my Jokes Blog. Every day a new Joke and Funny picture is published there on a Scheduled Post system and each post is correctly labeled and tagged. Every time a post goes live, Feedburner will ping all of the search engines to come and spider the new post. It seems that people love searching for funny pictures on the internet.
Lastly, just for fun, lets talk about EntreCard. If Stumble Upon accounts for 70% of my traffic, then EntreCard accounts for 0.005% of the traffic on my Jokes Blog. Lately I haven't been promoting any sites using EntreCard as the effort of vetting sites to advertise on wasn't worth the return of traffic generated, so anything that has come from EntreCard has been passive traffic. Passive Traffic rocks.
Now for this comparison it's not fair to say that EntreCard only generates 0.005% of the traffic to my Jokes Blog, it only accounts for 0.005% of the referral traffic. This figure doesn't account for people who visit the site from personal bookmarks. Over all EntreCard justifies the space it takes up on the sidebar for the purpose of encouraging repeat visitors, drawing passive traffic and letting me earn credits to advertise elsewhere.
What should you take away from this?
1. Stumble Upon will drive traffic to your blog if you have something quick and enjoyable for SU users. SU users are curious and will check out other pages as well as subscribe to your feed.
2. Correctly labeling and tagging your posts will cause love to fall upon you from Google.
3. EntreCard is nice but hardly world shattering. I wouldn't put a lot of time into it, but you would be mad to pass up free traffic.
How about you? Do you get Stumble, Google or EntreCard traffic? Are your experiences similar or different to mine? Regardless, if you liked (or hated) this post PLEASE leave a quick comment. I really appreciate them, thank you.