Comments on: Social Media: Where to Start?

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By: Social media as it was ment to be? « Social Overload

Social media as it was ment to be? « Social Overload — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:57:12 +0000

[...] Social Media: Where to Start? (becoming-a-writer-seriously.com) [...]

By: Tom Colvin

Tom Colvin — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:16:06 +0000

Dustin, I’ve watched the growth of your blog with a certain amount of envy. I was doing great until an unexplained crash of my blog back in October. My subscriptions dropped from almost 500 to about 180. Then Google took over Feedblitz and my subscribers dropped down to about 160. It’s up to 170 now.

I pause sometimes to wonder. Just how important are the subscription numbers? I still get about 5000 unique visitors a month, despite these fluctuations in subscriber numbers.

I must agree with you that StumbleUpon has been the best source of new subscribers for me. BUT those spikes come only after I myself spend time on StumbleUpon. That seems to be the key to all of this: active engagement across all of the social media.

Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of attention from Twitter — and Friendfeed. Those people don’t subscribe, but come in for specific posts that catch their attention. I do the same as I go through my Tweet list — I bounce over into recommended sites when the subject intrigues me.

Anyway, I’m glad to see that you are again active yourself on your blog. And I like the gravatar: so that’s what you look like!

By: Dustin

Dustin — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 19:13:56 +0000

Tom: I’ve gotten huge boosts from StumbleUpon, sometimes sending over 3,000 visitors in a couple of days. Those huge spikes of traffic are misleading, since few of the visitors read much of the site, and fewer still come back — but some do. Each spike has bumped up my overall traffic by a few percent, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be closing in on 1,000 RSS subscribers and an average of 500 daily visitors if it hadn’t been for those big bursts of traffic, especially early on.

I don’t actively use StumbleUpon — every once in a while, I’ll stumble a few sites, but not very often, and even less often will I stumble my own. What I do use actively is Twitter, where writerstechnology.com is listed in my bio, and I’ve not only gotten quite a few visitors from that, but have built up some significant relationships.

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