Tips on Thursday: Traffic

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Sorry this is so late. I'm on my church's communication team (because I know how to use social media) and the meeting went on forever last night. And then it was a super busy day at work. I mentioned a week or so ago that I joined a group of bloggers and authors who participate in a monthly event for self-pub/indie pub authors. We also support each other through out the month. The biggest way we do this is by sharing blog posts on our social media networks. We've been trying out several tools to help drive more traffic to our blogs. I thought I would do a quick overview of what is working for me.

Triberr - This is a free site that aggregates blog posts from the participating bloggers. You are part of a tribe (either you're invited to join one, ask to be invited to one, or create your own with friends). I know there are several author groups out there and I recommend you look into creating a tribe to support each others blogs. I belong to a tribe of around 50 people. You can choose which blogs are sent to your twitter feed and how often they are sent out. Most of the people in my tribe send out tweets every hour. There are also sharing buttons for facebook, StumbleUpon, and Google +. My monthly visitor count has now tripled since joining Triberr. You can belong to more than one tribe, but be careful if they are very active - you don't want your twitter followers thinking you are spamming them. While it has been a terrific site and easy to use, there is a CON - it is a free service and often "breaks" - either the feed doesn't update or the (more often) scheduled tweets do not go out.

StumbleUpon - Shortly after I joined the Triberr group they started a Stumble Wednesday. Now I had heard of StumbleUpon. I had briefly looked into it when a thread about it popped up at BookBlogs.ning.com, but the directions there seemed complicated. However, it is quite simple and is the number 1 referrer to my blog. While I know there are at least a few members of my tribe stumbling my post as well, I don't know if you necessarily need a group. I have a bookmarklet "Stumble This!" so I can stumble sites and blogs who don't have the social widget for it, but I highly recommend you add it with your other social media share buttons. Increased traffic to my blog on day 1.

Reddit - This tool can either be really good (it's the number 2 referrer for my blog) or really bad (they have a zero tolerance policy for spammers and it seems that it can be a bit arbitrary on who they ban). DO NOT POST MORE THAN ONE LINK A DAY. That seems to trigger an automatic ban. Another blogging friend was banned, couldn't figure out why from their TOS or get an explanation from Reddit. I recommend trying it out for your blog. Within a day or so of using it, I started seeing traffic come from Reddit.

Digg - This is the newest experiment. I haven't seen much in the way of traffic increase since starting to use it. We've just started this week, so I'm willing to continue to try it out. It's not difficult to do. I've added a "View on Dig" bookmarklet to my toolbar. I also have a Digg share button in the Sociable box on the sidebar of the blog.

There are my experiments with various traffic producing social media sites. What have you tried? What's working best for you?

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