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

Technorati Tags: traffic exchange, sitehoppin, traffic, blog, hop, stumbleupon

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Do Your Blog a Favour, Get it Some Traffic

As many of you probably already did, I noticed that traffic tends to drop during weekends, which got me thinking whether it was smart to post articles during those days. And if so, should a blogger post articles consistent with the usual, weekday, content or make them special in some way (see par. 2 below).

To Blog or Not to Blog… on Weekends

After a little bit of contemplation I came to the following conclusions:

1. First of all, if your posting schedule doesn’t include weekends to begin with, it is perfectly fine, as readers get used to it, and just wouldn’t expect any posts on a weekend. (Read more in my Most Important Tip for Building a Readership article)

   New visitors, on the other hand, would have plenty of content from the previous week to browse through.

 

2. Although less people are visiting, those who do will (probably) tend to be more relaxed, given the free time of the weekend, and take the time to leave a meaningful comment on the weekend post.
   So, this is nice, since you have an opportunity of meaningful discussion during the weekend. Darren Rowse is describing this further it in his post, My Weekend Blog Strategy.

   This is to be tested on any blog. I will try to use Google Analytics to perform weekend analysis somewhere down the road and post an article about it.

 

3. Although it is a weekend, and you probably have interests other than the blog, i.e. family, friends, studies, etc., it is crucial not to let your post quality deteriorate.
   I believe it is ok to change your style on a weekend, as many post the so-called link festivals, consisting of useful or otherwise interesting links. But, don’t forget to have your personality injected into the post. Write a paragraph or two or add your opinion on the linked sites. Don’t just slap those links and consider it done. Same goes with videos and photo weekend galleries.

 

4. If you still feel that you’re posting without real feedback, keep in mind that the weekday visitor will go through all of you new posts, especially if it is a subscriber, so your weekend post will not go unnoticed.

Summary

• If you are not posting on weekends, don’t start now (see par.1)
• If you are already posting on weekends, keep doing that with par. 2,3,4 in mind.

Enjoy your weekend!

- Alex

Technorati Tags: weekend traffic drop, traffic, blog, rowse, blog strategy

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Reasons (Not) to Blog on Weekends

Everyone hates having a high percentage of those annoying hit-n-run visits. You invested your soul in your blog, picking and tweaking with your theme, gathering all the popular plugins to make everything ready, writing those first dozen of articles to get things going, but, behold! You check your site stats and you go, “Hey, this can’t be right?!”, 60 visitors stayed for 5 seconds and went bye bye…

What did you do wrong? Probably a mix of things, but that doesn’t matter. Those 60 visitors will not come back in the near future anyway.

What you can do is to plan ahead, and make those hit-n-runners stay long enough to get interested, and maybe even subscribe to your RSS.

1st Kind – Referrer Specific Bad Traffic

Use your stats to identify the source of the “bad” traffic. Look for traffic sources and analyze each traffic source separately. This way you would be able to see if it is a certain referrer that is sending you that “bad” traffic. (e.g. Entrecard Chain Droppers). Depending on the outcome of your analysis, you may be in luck. Knowing that it is one or two referrers that are sending you those bad guys, there are a few tricks to grab their attention:

• Example 1:

  Welcome, StumbleUpon visitor! Please consider giving this article thumbs up if you find it useful or interesting

• Example 2:

  If you came here through Entrecard, receive a free *whatever* for subscribing to Net-Entrepreneur.com via email

*whatever* can be short review, a blogroll link (for a month), 125×125 ad (for a month), etc.

2nd Kind – General Bad Traffic

If your problem is not referrer specific, and assuming your content is readable, I have the following suggestions:

• If your articles are long or you want the reader to click to view your article (i.e. advertising concerns), use the more tag instead of the_excerpt tag. It is way more flexible and friendly (Find more on WordPress)

• Link your articles to your previous, related, articles.

• Use one of the available Popular Posts and Related Posts plugins.

• Use the above the fold space of your blog to grab readers’ attention:

  • Create a custom header for your blog, if you still have the standard one that came with your theme

  • Incorporate pictures and graphics into your articles

• Use your available ad space to advertise yourself:

  • Offer giveaways to new subscribers

  • Offer weekly/monthly giveaways to randomly chosen commentators (could be ebooks, reviews, ads, links, etc.), use a banner with a pitch like “this week’s winner commentator is..”, “this week’s prize is…”

Good luck people!

- Alex

Technorati Tags: bad, traffic, fight, plugins, visitors, stumbleupon, entrecard, referrer

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

The 2 Kinds of Bad Traffic and Ways to Fight It

There were a few reasons I didn’t sign-up before, but the main one being that people were saying Entrecard traffic is a widget-searching, drop-and-run, don’t-care-about-who-you-are, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, 10-second-visits, kind of traffic.

After a day of being a member I have no choice but confirm this statement.

I’m using Google Analytics for my site tracking, which is a great free toolbox of ….emmm…. tools (yea, I know, but it’s 1am already). So, I chose Jan 24th as the timeframe, and sorted the data by traffic sources => referring sites => entrecard.com

We are looking at two parameters:

Bounce Rate – Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page) (Google).
My Bounce Rate for Entrecard.com visitors is 89.66%. This means that practically 90% of Entrecard visitors left my site without clicking on any article, category, static page – anything.

What makes this even more interesting is the next parameter:

Avg. Time on Site – Avg. Time on Site is the average duration of a visit to your site. (Google)
My Avg. Time on Site for entrecard.com visitors is 00:00:05.

Should I say more?

- Alex

Disclaimer: This article is based on 12 hours of being a member. I will track the statistics and make sure to update this article, if needed.

Technorati Tags: truth, entrecard, traffic, visitors, bounce, site, rate

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

The Truth About Entrecard Traffic Revealed

I have a laughable amount of unique visitors, same with RSS subscribers. It’s been 15 days since launch and I haven’t made one cent. The Little Alex on my left shoulder (the one with the hooves and horns) laughs and says “I told you so”. I hate being told that. It is time to quit prettying up the blog and get into some serious promotion. 0 Traffic = 0 Money.

 I made the following steps to promote my blog:

1. Signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, and configured it to do its magic

2. Submitted my blog to BlogEngage.com (about a week ago), and started to submit posts

3. Submitted my blog to Technorati.com (a couple of days ago)

4. Submitted my blog to BlogCatalog.com (today, still pending approval – notice the cool widget in the sidebar)

5. Participated (and still am) in discussions, commenting (meaningful) comments on related blogs

WHOOPS, it is late, and M (the wife) is threatening to halt her services if I don’t shut down my “mistress” immediately. So, fearing the worst, I will have to bring you up to date next time.

- Alex

Technorati Tags: business, routine, publishing, unique, visitors, traffic, money, promote

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Why Does My Business Suck?