I’ve been running into something of a crisis lately. I have all this “social media pull” where I can drive thousands of users without a problem, and it turns out that this ability may only be minorly useful to any of my blogs. Why? Well, I run a few blogs and none of them really lend themselves well to exploiting social media. What I need is to get hits from people interested in SEO, SEM, or blogging.
I read an article on ProBlogger a few days ago recommending StumbleUpon as a cheap source of traffic. The cool thing about StumbleUpon is that users come right to your page, so you don’t have to worry about an advertisement or anything. They’re actually there! The bad thing about StumbleUpon is the keyword system. Being poor and cautious, I put $5 into my StumbleUpon ad account, and I signed one of my posts up for the SEO category. After 12 hours or so, I had 3 hits. Too slow, I thought to myself. Maybe I should sign the same post up for the “blog” category. After getting my campaign approved, it took around 2 minutes for me to think to myself, “Wait, maybe people in the blog category aren’t interested in the content of that post.” That was an epiphany that would have been slightly more useful a few minutes prior because by that point, the entirety of my $5 was used up with seemingly no payoff.
So the moral of the story is: advertising can be relatively cheap traffic, but make sure you’re marketing to the right audience. I think many of us newbies have a gut feeling to target the maximum number of people as possible when we should really be striving for relevance with respect to visitors. Apparently I should have stayed within the SEO category.
Live and learn.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
What I really want to know is how you have the time to both blog and research all of this SEO/SEM stuff. I find this stuff fascinating, but barely have enough time to write blog posts. Don’t know where I would find the time to work on SEO. I’m hoping that if I keep following this blog you will do all the work for me ;)
Haha, well, thanks for the compliment. Don’t forget to mix in doing my daily social media duties (includes reviewing/upvoting/digging my friends’ submissions so that they don’t kick me off their friends list). It can definitely be time consuming.
Aggregators definitely make my life easier. Once I went and found what I considered the useful SEO / blogging blogs, I just run through them once a day before I go to bed and comment on them if appropriate.
I keep a log of things I think of or learn, and I try to make all my posts for the week on Sunday and then schedule them to publish once per day. The scheduling definitely makes thing easier on my work day since I don’t have to use my lunch hour up to post on all my blogs.