Appealing to a Wider StumbleUpon Audience
My Traffic Rush course launches tomorrow, sign up now to get your 10 free lessons and in the meantime I hope you like this little snippet of advice…
Lets assume you have a blog that you wish to get traffic for. If you are doing well as a blogger you probably have a good idea of what your readers like and you can consistently deliver content that meets their needs and they will stay subscribed. However, your StumbleUpon audience is not the same as your regular blog audience - it is potentialy much wider and more diverse.
StumbleUpon categorises and tags all of the entries in its database and people select topics that interest them. Anybody who has selected an interest that your page is submitted to has the potential to be served your page, and if you look through the list of interests, they are quite broad.
For example, lets say that you have a blog about Karate. The nearest interest that matches that is the rather more generic “martial arts”. People interested in Judo, Kung Fu, Tai Chi and all manner of other martial arts will probably have that interest selected even if they have no specific interest in Karate.
What does this mean? Well you can totally forget about that and just continue to write about Karate or you can try to write in such a way that the wider audience may still enjoy your work and potentially give it a thumbs up. Taking the Karate example a stage further, say you were going to write a post about correct etiquette for the dojo, you may find that with a little research and careful wording you can make that post applicable to other martial arts too.
You might be wondering if it is worth the effort to appeal to the wider audience if those people are not directly targeted towards your site. After all if a Judo student found your post about etiquette and thumbed it up he is unlikely to actually subscribe to your Karate blog as the rest of it wont apply to him. Here is the key point to remember - every thumbs up vote allows your post to reach more and more people and whilst some may not be directly targeted, some will. If that vote from the Judo guy brought in another 50 visitors, 5 or 10 of those may be Karate students and turn into subscribers.
Also, lets not forget that all kinds of traffic is beneficial, even untargeted traffic.
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Dante Explorer
July 9, 2008
Good stuff. I also believe you need to tread a fine line between expanding your audience and targeting readers who are clearly outside your blogs subject. Some stumblers will thumb you down if you do that just to market your site. I’ve found a lot of stumblers to be pretty savvy when they feel their being marketed. Keep up the great posts! Dave