Garaphernalia 7.5

I’ve decided to remove the Entrecard widget off all of my websites. It no longer serves any purpose.

Here is a graph of my traffic from Entrecard over the last year.

The big spikes are when I bothered to drop cards. At its peak, I got 94 visits in one day. Lately I’ve been averaging about 4 or 5.

It takes up a lot of screen real estate for a dribble of traffic, the quality of which isn’t very good. Their forum sucks. I’ve tried to submit a blog post on their blog, but the owner, Graham, never replied to my email. I can say that I tried, but honestly, it serves no use whatsoever at this point.

I have one blog network widget on my site at this point, BlogCatalog, and that is probably going to go soon too.

These widgets just don’t work.

Something has happened to my StumblUpon traffic. Something good.

I was drilling down into the inner bowels of Google Analytics and I looked at my bounce rate for StumbleUpon. The StumbleUpon bounce rate is notoriously bad, as it is from other social media sites like Digg or Reddit. The last time I checked, I remember the bounce rate being somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% (meaning 90% of the visitors to the site didn’t bother to go to another page).

October 2008 was my biggest month for traffic from StumbleUpon. I didn’t have one giant spike, rather it was spread across multiple articles. (I guess that is a good thing). My bounce rate for October was an astonishing 44%. 1.85 pages per visit and over 1 minute spent on the site. This is over 4,000 visits for the month.

I dug a little deeper. Some time between July 4 and July 8, my bounce rate for SumbleUpon dropped from the 90% range to the 40-45% range, and it has stayed there ever since. (the orange line in the chart is my bounce rate. Blue is pages per visit)

I have no idea why.

I didn’t make any major changes to the website that I can remember. I changed the theme of the site in August.

I should also note that in October, StumbleUpon seems to have hit a point where it is on autopilot. Things are getting stumbled without any doing on my part, and what is getting stumbled is all over the map. I have no rhyme or reason why it is happening, but I’m going to enjoy the ride.

Reddit can still drive more traffic, but the quality is still very poor. Bounce rates close to 100%.

I’ve entered my travel around the world blog (aka Everything-Everywhere.com) into the Blogging Idol 2.0 contest.

I was in the first version of the contest last summer as well and came in 3rd. The first contest was just increasing the raw number of RSS subscribers. The lack of rules sort of lent itself to people gaming the system. The nature of the contest is such that even if you don’t win, you can still win.

This time the contest is only 1 part RSS increase, 3 parts voting by the community and 3 parts voting by judges. I think I have a much better chance of winning outright this time for several reasons:

1) I have more RSS subscribers. On Nov 1 my subscribers showed 825. My peak was 850 about a week earlier. There is natural fluctuation in the number of subscribers Feedburner shows. A variation of about 5% from the peak number is very normal, and a 10% swing is possible on holidays. That means I got a free 25 subscribers which will show up at some point. Getting 25 subscribers is easier for a site with over 800 than a site starting at zero. I managed to get over 200 subscribers in the last contest. I’d be very happy if I were to do that again. Of the 114 sites in the contest, I’m #12 in terms of number of subscribers starting the contest.

2) I have the “that is so cool” factor working for me. If you look at the list of other sites competing, what I’m doing really sort of sticks out. Moreover, my contest really sticks out as different. If I can shoot a few more videos this month, that should draw even more attention. Most of the other sites are your tech, celebrity, and make money online blogs. If they do contests, they will probably give away the same old stuff.

3) This might drive me to start a newsletter this month. It is something I’ll probably eventually do, it is just a matter of when. The contest would be a good incentive to get it done. I just need to get my head around what it would be and how it would work. I’d be more comfortable with it when I get my site redesign done. A newsletter is something I never would have thought of myself, but the positive feedback I’ve seen from those who use them have me thinking.

Time.

It is really that simple. You know what the #1 factor which correlates highest with the reputation of a college? How long ago it was founded. Older colleges have more prestige.

Can you ever imagine a 20 year old getting elected president (assuming it was legal)? Of course not. Not enough time.

There are a few exceptions, but most big blogs were around for several years before they became big.

More time = more posts = more long tail Google searches.
More time = more reputation and authority
More time = more likelihood of getting lucky with a big post

Too many people want traffic NOW and it just isn’t going to happen.

My blog is about my travels around the world. Saying “I’ve been to 45 countries” has a lot more clout than saying “I plan on going to 45 countries” which is where I was 18 months ago.

Most bloggers just don’t have the patience to stick it out.