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Wednesday, December 03, 2008
SmokeLong and Social Networking
While compiling the top ten list for November, I got curious about where some of the page views were coming from, particularly for older pieces that cracked the top ten again after a long absence. One thing jumped out at me: a lot of hits for Holly Selph's The Color of Moths were coming from StumbleUpon. Well, that was the second time I'd seen an older story gain a lot of new audience from StumbleUpon, so I figured it was finally time to do a little research on it. And perhaps to take a look at other social networking sites that drive traffic, like Digg, Delcious, etc.While looking around, I found a very cool application called ShareThis. It gathers together links to a ton of different social networking sites and makes it easy to click through and recommend the page a reader is on. Since our copyright notice is in one file that's linked on every story page, it was easy to add the code there and instantly have ShareThis on every story's page.
The results are phenomenal. I quickly Stumbled each of our six Pushcart Prize nominees. Today alone, each of them has generated about 40% of the total page views that the top flash usually gets in a month! What an incredible tool to promote the incredible writers we're publishing.
So... if you read a story and you just absolutely love it, click on the little green icon and recommend the story using whatever service you might already be using. Our writers will thank you for the additional readers exposed to their work.
Also, if you want to keep abreast of the latest news, you can either subscribe to our RSS Feed and/or join our Facebook group (in which you can find over 80 of the writers previously published here).
Welcome to the 21st century, eh?
Labels: Facebook, Pushcart Prize, SmokeLong Quarterly, StumbleUpon
posted by Dave Clapper at 3:29 PM 2 comments
2 Comments:
I've been successful at driving a fair bit of traffic to my online stories using SU. Just be careful - sometimes SU will ban a user who only stumbles from one site.
Ah, I wondered about that. Thanks for the heads up!
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