Do Your Blog a Favour, Get it Some Traffic

Early February I briefly reviewed SiteHoppin.com as a way to efficiently drop Entrecards. I would like to revert to that service, since there have been some very important developments most of you would want to hear.

SiteHoppin.com is a browser within a browser that offers stumble functionality without you installing any software. Apparently it does a good job, as StubmleUpon has banned Sitehoppin.com and Sitehoppin.com/blog from its premises.

While it was previously appealing mainly to Entrecard users, as this service allowed to hop from one Entrecard participating site to another with a click of a button, now it sports a somewhat broader reach.

SiteHoppin.com has gone beyond its niche

Lately, Sitehoppin.com added a functionality that would allow users to exchange credits for traffic. This would appeal to every webmaster / blogger out there on their quest to drive more traffic to their sites. With this functionality, currently in beta testing, Sitehoppin.com has become quite an efficient traffic exchange service.

This is what is it about:

1. The registered user will receive 1 Beer Credit (BC) for one hop from site to site and 5 BC for rating a site, which would accumulate on his account.
2. At an appropriate timing, e.g. while promoting a new article or service, the user can turn on the traffic exchange functionality. When turned on, each 10 BC that has been accumulated on the account would be exchanged for 1 visit from another randomly selected user to a predetermined page.

My Opinion

I’ve been testing this new functionality during the last couple of days and I see great potential in its future. Not only I’ve seen incoming traffic to the selected page on my blog, it’s not been that hit-and-run traffic you’d expect:

• 1.86 pages per visit
• 57.14% Bounce Rate
• 00:08:12 Avg. Time on Site

This means that people were clicking through and reading my content, and that means good traffic.

The Chief Engineer, Mr. Max Lee, did a terrific job despite the humorous, drunken video posts on his blog, which are good entertainment. Trying to read between the lines, I’d say Max has got some big ideas, and he’s not going to let anything like StumbleUpon ban to stop him. Mark my words, in one month I will be reviewing a brand new feature on his site! (In one year I’ll hold 20% of shares in SiteHoppin Inc.)

Things I’d like to see:

• A limit functionality – the ability to set how much BC to spend at each time. I’ve lost almost all of mine during one peak hour.

• One exchanged visit per user – while testing I noticed that one user could be directed to a promoted site several times, resulting in debiting of BC’s but no impact on the site stats. And, obviously that user would just browse through your site since he’s been there before.

• No self-visits – while testing I noticed that a user could be redirected to his own site, resulting in debiting of his BC’s for his own visit.

• Several pages as destination – the ability to distribute incoming traffic to 1-3 of my pages.

And maybe a bit later down the road:

• Some Geo- functionality – the ability to decide from where to receive the traffic.

• Timer functionality – combined with the Geo, it would be a great idea to receive US traffic while they are awake… just kidding, that would make promotion campaigns much more efficient.

Ok, I guess that’s it. I will post updates if my testing will pop any more issues.

- Alex

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