Lars-Christian.com|This is me at the intarwebs.

My previous post about the importance of connecting with your readers caught a little wind in the sails over at StumbleUpon, one of the most useful social sharing services, especially when it comes to promoting and sharing your own content. Since the blog hadn’t had any traffic from Stumble earlier this month, I thought that it would be a nice opportunity to take a look at the numbers and see how well the visitors that Stumble send you actually convert.

What I will be looking at here is the direct influences the influx of visitors through Stumble has had on my feed subscription numbers, so this little experiment is hardly scientific, and there is plenty room for erroneus conclusions. On the other side however, my subscription rate had been more or less stable for over a week before the Stumble influx, varying with no more than a couple of subscribers from day to day.

So what are the results? Well, I’ll start with the numbers. Since the article first got picked up by Stumble on Friday, it has sent 1540 visitors to this blog. Not too bad at all. By yesterday, the traffic slowed down and went back to normal, so it is fair to say that those that would be subscribing to my feed after finding the site through Stumble would have done so by the time Feedburner calculated the stats for Sunday. By then, the number of subscribers to my feed had increased with a whopping 10 subscribers! Yes, it’s true, out of 1540 visitors, 10 of them decided to subscribe. If we break it down, it means that it would take me 154 visitors from Stumble to gain one new subscriber.

Of course a wide variety of things will affect these numbers. The first impression of the blog counts of course, the quality of the article they are sent to will make a difference. If they like it, they are obviously more likely to subscribe, and vice versa. Another thing that can matter greatly is whether or not the actual article they are sent to matches their interests (which is where the importance of accurate tagging comes in).

Overall, the conversion numbers are a little disappointing, but around what I expected. The most important question however, is it worth trying to bring visitors in from social media sites like Stumble in order to boost a blog’s popularity? Absolutely, especially if you’re in the early stages of promotion. Just remember what I mentioned in my previous article about connecting with your readers to quickly build a following, and if you are persitent and do it right, you can be on your way to success within no time with the help of social media and some good old fashioned networking.

And just as a little PS at the very end for some extra motivation, remember that this little experiment does not take into consideration those people that don’t necessarily subscribe to the feed, but still return to read new articles. Of course this brings up another interesting question, which visitors are more valuable to you as a publisher and a blogger, those who subscribe to your feed, or those who visit your blog directly? Well that is something I will be discussing in my next post, so be check back for that.

Update: I just noticed an interesting article relating to this subject, how to capitalize on StumpleUpon traffic over at ProBlogger. Take a look, it’s well worth a read!

Most people will agree that the most crucial element of running any blog or website is reaching out to your target audience and potential readers and visitors. While gaining an extra visitor is all well and dandy, something that many seem to forget when it comes to building a following online is the value of loyal followers. That’s not very strange however, as it is easy to see how we get too obsessive about reaching the highest possible number of daily visitors by constantly monitoring our stats-trackers. This can lead us into a vicious circle where we are under the impression that as long as we are able to attract new visitors, we’re becoming more successful by the minute.

To get our hunger for increased visitor numbers satisfied many of us turn to social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and similar, that are easy enough to manipulate in a way that will make noticeable impacts on the visitor numbers of any small to medium sized blog or website. Of course, I’m not saying that utilizing social sharing sites to increase traffic is necessarily bad, but I would like to propose a different vision when it comes to numbers and the ways we measure success.

One of the first things you’ll learn as a traditional business owner, or in “business school” for that matter, is the value of satisfied, returning customers. According to Philip Kotler’s Principles of Marketing, recruiting a new customer is three times as expensive as retaining a pleased customer. This is something that is often ignored online, especially among publishers, because the size of your potential market (of readers) is so big, and it’s quite easy to recruit new readers. While I’m not saying these numbers are accurate when it comes to online marketing, I have no doubts in my mind that it is more cost-effective to keep your current readers and visitors pleased than it is to recruit new ones, even online.

Another interesting fact from Principles of Marketing is that a if a person is dissatisfied with a service, he or she is ten times more likely to tell someone about their dissatisfaction, as opposed to if the same customer is pleased about a service. You don’t have to be a mathematical whiz to calculate that this means that it could quickly become costly to have dissatisfied readers/visitors/customers.

I’m also sure most of you have heard that the most effective form of marketing is word to mouth marketing (or buzz marketing or viral marketing, whichever you prefer). That is of course to get people so fired up about your website that they simply can’t avoid telling their friends about it. It’s cheap and it works, because people are much more inclined to listen to what their friends have to say about a website, than what they see or read in an ad somewhere.

There are many ways you can make sure that those who visit your blog or website frequently continue to stay loyal visitors. Some will say the most effective way is to identify why most of the your visitors came to your site in the first place (quality article, groundbreaking news etc.), and keep delivering that to them. While that is certainly true for bigger sites, I have found that there are more effective ways to keep a hold of your readers if you run a smaller website or blog.

What’s the big secret? I have mentioned it before on my blog, but I don’t think I’ve emphasized it enough. Connect with your readers. I’ll say it once more, but this time in bold, connect with your readers. Yeah it’s true, that’s my miracle cure for building a steady following. It’s not easy, nor is it timesaving, but if you’re in it for the long run, it is the single most effective way of building a loyal audience for your blog or website.

There are many ways to connect with your readers, and I won’t claim to have any answers about which are the most effective ones. When it comes down to it, there are really no limits except your imagination and creativity. If you run a website, make it as interactive as possible. Make it easy for people to get in touch with you, value their opinions and listen carefully to their suggestions. If you’re a blogger, respond to comments, email those who comment frequently and let them know you appreciate that they spend time on your blog. Reach out to your audience, don’t just sit back and wait for them to give you feedback, let them know that you want their feedback.

Of course, these are just the most basic methods of connecting with your audience. I can assure you that if you are able to find an easy and effective way of connecting with your readers, you will be able to build a solid following in no time. Now tell me, what are your secrets when it comes to building relationships with your readers? I’m aching to know, because I know I can improve my own skills greatly in this particular area.

If I was to pick the single most important method for promoting a newly started website, I would without any shed of a doubt pick link building. For anyone with some experience in the field of promoting websites, this won’t come as a surprise, but I thought a post emphasizing the importance of bulding incoming links would still be of some use, if not for anything else than just to act as a reminder of its importance.

Since I opened Bloggst, I have focused heavily on building incoming links, among other things through the Featured Blog Campaign. The main reason I value link bulding so highly, is because it is extremely helpful when it comes to increasing your organically referred traffic, which is traffic through search engines. That means that the most important benefit of incoming links to your website isn’t actually the traffic you get through the link itself (which is of course great too), but rather that it helps you rank better in search engines.

To use Bloggst as an example, I’ll show you some of the numbers. Yahoo currently registers a little over thousand incoming links to Bloggst. Technorati reports of around 150 incoming links from almost 60 different blogs. This might not sound all that overwhelming, but keep in mind that the site is just over three weeks old. Couple that with the fact that I’m already seeing a very decent amount of relevant visitors referred from the search engines, and that the search engine spiders are more or less continuously spidering the site, and it should highlight the value of incoming links. If this growth rate keep up, I expect that within as little as a couple of months, our traffic will increase significantly due to search engine rankings, especially once Google gives a bit more value to the site (they lag a bit compared to for instance Yahoo in this field).

Bloggst.com already has almost 300 pages indexed in Google, and close to 200 in Yahoo. This is as good as every page, and like I said, once the site gains a bit more recognition in the search engines, I firmly believe that the organic traffic will increase drastically.

What’s the lesson in all this? Work on building your inbound links! It will result in giving you more of the most valuable traffic there is, which is the organic traffic you receive through search engines. There are several ways of bulding links, but that’s a completely different topic for a different day.