Managing Time While Promoting Traffic

The last month I’ve been experimenting with lots of different ways to increase traffic. I’ve had success with some, not so much with others, and some work well when you join, then sort of peter out after a while.

I have only a limited amount of time, so I’d like to efficiently spend my time so I can maximize my traffic.

This is my analysis of how efficient these various services are with respect to the amount of time you have to work on site promotion.

MyBlogLog

This was the first big blog networking site. You put a widget on your site and it shows the last n number of users. (you can define it from 5 to 50 I think). The idea is you can join networks of other sites and add other bloggers as contacts. You can work the system by adding a lot of friends and joining a lot of networks (you are limited to joining 15 networks a day). If you visit a site x number of times, you will automatically join the neighborhood (the minimum number of visits is 10).

You can get join the limit of other networks every day, but there is on guarantee that anyone else will join you, or that if they did join you, they will actually go to your website.

I received 66 visits between December 8 to January 7 from MyBlogLog.com. About two per day.

BlogCatalog

BlogCatalog is designed and organized much better than MyBlogLog. Unlike MyBlogLog, it has forums and groups. It also has a ranking system. The more people visit your site and join your neighborhood, the higher your rank. There are no limits to joining other sites like MyBlogLog. You still have to work other sites to get people to visit. I was listed as one of the most popular blogs on the site for several weeks which may have helped my traffic.

Between December 8 and January 7, i received 284 visits from BlogCatalog. Almost 9.5 visits per day.

EntreCard

I get two types of traffic from Entrecard. One are visitors from other blogs who see the ads I place. I got 1,068 visits from those readers during the above time period. The other group are other members of Entrecard. They stay for very brief periods. I got 740 visits of this type.

Entrecard takes the most time to work. You have to visit other sites one at a time to earn credits to spend and to make the value of your own site worth more. It can easily take two hours a day if you want to maximize the system.

Over time, the members who visit are almost all repeat visitors and the traffic can almost totally be discounted.

It is worth joining Entrecard, but it isn’t worth spending a lot of time on it after you’ve been in the system for about a week or two. Some people have gone crazy with Entrecard and have devoted their entire sites to it. Others have gotten pissed off at the lack of quality traffic and quit.

The truth is in between. It is worth joining, especially if you are a new site. It is worth working once you join. But it isn’t worth working the longer you are in the network. At the same time, it also isn’t worth leaving because you still get a stream of traffic bigger than the above two networks.

Stumble Upon

I had 2,158 visits from SumbleUpon during the same time period.

This dominates my traffic and I spend the least amount of time working it. I think if I spent more time in the SU community, I’d get more stumbles for my deep pages and not just the front page. The main reason SU is so successful at generating traffic compared to the above networks is that it doesn’t rely on other bloggers. You don’t need a website to take part in SU so the audience is much larger.

I think this is where I’m going to be putting most of my energy in the next month. It seems like you get the biggest bang for the buck.

Even small percentage changes in my SU traffic will be larger than doubling the traffic from other networks.

I think I could get my daily average from SU over 100 if I just spend more time working SU and less time on the other sites.