Best Social Media Source of Traffic

[Derek Semmler]

Last week I experienced my first digg and had over 18,000 visitors to my blog as a result. However, that has been a one-time experience thus far and my most consistent source of traffic still seems to be StumbleUpon.

I've briefly experimented with Netscape but the same post that made it on digg didn't get any votes at Netscape.

On your blog, what has been your most consistent or best source of traffic from the popular social media services? Do you do anything specific to leverage that traffic?

[Matt Jones]

18,000! That's pretty impressive. Much like you Stumbleupon is my most consistent traffic source (even over Google). I haven't fully experienced the Digg effect, about a week ago a post of mine made it to page1 for about 10 minutes, and still managed to grab over 1000 unique visitors. It's pretty hard to convert diggers into loyal readers and they are notoriously bad at clicking on ads. If your site gets Dugg several times in quick succession the diggers can become familiar with it and treat it differently. (That’s how John Chow got big)

This post on Problogger about building a digg culture has some good points.

[Dee]

For me it's been Stumble Upon. I don't get as much as 18,000 hits from it but it's long-term traffic. I haven't experienced Digg's frontpage yet but it does get me a little traffic as well.

[Derek Semmler]

I've found this to be quite common that many bloggers receive quality traffic from StumbleUpon. While it isn't quite the same levels as digg, SU sends a nice amount of traffic and it seems like more of the users convert into actual readers.

Thanks for the feedback!

[Swtrose]

Most of my traffic comes from StumbleUpon too.

[Mark Williamson]

So far my single biggest traffic builder has been digg. Its only been 1 month and 1 week since I officially launched CEOSMACK, and I have made it to the digg front page twice. Those two fortunate events have led to 40,000 of my almost 70,000 visitors over that time period. My advice to those looking to get dugg is to be sure to only submit your best posts...and make sure that your submissions deal with subject matter that people are passionate about.

The majority of the people who get stories dugg manipulate the system in some way. They either get their friends, family, and co-workers to digg their articles for them or they create multiple email addresses themselves and register multiple digg accounts so that they can digg their articles themselves.

That's where the BlogLight.ning Network can be of value to its members. Here you can reach out to other community members when you have an article that you feel is worthy of being dugg to have them digg the article for you. All it takes is a quick email and the link to your digg submission. It usually takes between 80-100 diggs to get an article to the front page...this usually results in around 20,000 plus digg visitors to your site within a 24 hour period.

Also do anything you can to keep the visitors engaged once you see that an article has a shot at becoming popular. I added a poll to my last article that made the front page of digg. Amazingly of about 19,000 visitors who came to the site over a 24 hour period, Almost 3,000 of them voted in my poll. The poll also incited additional comments and dialogue amongst the digg visitors as well.

[Jeremy Hobbs]

Stumble has helped me most for consistent traffic (besides Google). I do nothing special, just stumble the article and maybe have a friend give it the thumbs up also.Never experienced a big Digg day, I was banned the very first day I signed up :-\ I've tried emailing support, explaining I was new and unexperienced with the system, apologized for my mistakes, but I've gotten no response.

Oh well.

[Megan]

I've found that the social sites perform very differently, depending upon the content of the site. Stumbleupon consistently sends large numbers that disappear in a flash but, for me at least, netscape is amazing.

My stories on netscape get a moderate number of visitors but my positioning in the SERPS tends to rocket upwards afterwards due to netscape readers adding backlinks on their sites :)

[marc eilbeck]

SU is defo my best traffic from a social network

[Vaibhav Gadodia]

All of you seem to big time bloggers (compared to me)... My traffic comes from all over the place, with Google responsible for quite a lot o it. I wrote a quick post about what I do to get traffic at: http://blog.gadodia.net/index.php/archives/9-surefire-tips-to-get-t...

Also, in case someone is desperate to get onto the front page of Digg. Try http://subvertandprofit.com/user/signup?referrer=whoisvaibhav

(Or go directly to the site, if you don't want to refer me).

[Malathy Badri]

Hi Vaibhav,
I read your blog post on blog promotion. It is well written. I beg to differ with you only blog carnival. I was terribly disappointed with the result of my carnival. I hosted a carnival on 'Paid to blog' topic and ran it for three issues. I got only a handful of submissions related to the topic but the rest of the submissions were way off the topic.

[Vaibhav Gadodia]

Hmm... well off-topic submissions are a problem yes, but it's still a fun exercise. But yes, what you say is true as well..

[Malathy Badri]

I vote for Mybloglog. I get more number of visitors from then. Of course I should be grateful for Blog Catalog too.