Something I stumbled upon

Wow, first post of the day. I bet you thought I had been raptured or something.

So far in the short history of this blog, this page has received by far the highest number of page views — about five times that of any other post. Why is that?

Duh — I’m giving away a widget for WordPress to create a tag cloud.

1. Free software: scores big.
2. WordPress: the hottest blogging platform right now.
3. Sidebar widgets: a great, fairly new, customization feature of WordPress.
4. Tag clouds: uber cool and not supplied by WordPress out of the box.

Cue up the GEICO gecko: “It’s pie…wif chips…for free!” So where’s the mystery here?

I added this widget to the WordPress widgets page, which generated a fair number of hits (29 so far). I also see a lot of Google searches for “wordpress tag cloud” or some such. But the lion’s share of page views (124 out of 250 as of this writing) come from stumbleupon.com. Kien Pang found my widget, used it on his blog, liked it, and submitted it to stumbleupon. And apparently a lot of people have been stumbling over it ever since.

I had looked at stumbleupon briefly after a review by TDavid, but my alert level never rose above “ho hum” (yeah, I’ve got time to shave the Yeti)until this happened. Stumbleupon is sort of a combination of del.icio.us/digg/etc. and BlogExplosion. Like the former, you submit sites that interest you and tag them. Like the latter, the sites get queued up for semi-random viewing by people who have time on their hands. I guess I underestimated the magnitude of the latter.

Of course, that raises the question, “How well qualified are these page viewers? Is this something that they found interesting?” Stumbleupon enhances that somewhat by asking prospective stumblers what topics interest them. After trying it out for myself, I found that the pages it presents pretty neatly fit the categories I selected. I ended up tagging a few of them in del.icio.us (you feed subscribers will see these in my next “links” item). So perhaps stumbleupon helps my writing reach its target audience…?

Sometimes my brilliance exceeds my comprehension. That is to say, I made a lucky choice. Rather than posting the URL for the download, I posted the URL for my blog entry about it, with a link to the download page. Kien found and submitted the blog entry to stumbleupon. So, I can also see how many users clicked from the blog entry to the download page to get an idea of how interesting this page was to the stumbling viewer. That has occurred only 13 times, so somewhere between 0 and 10% of stumbleupon viewers proceeded to download. I suspect that the number is more towards 0, because the other page views were generated by people actively seeking WordPress widgets and/or tag clouds.

So, it seems that stumbleupon is great for getting your page viewed, but doesn’t necessarily bring viewers who are likely to act on what they see. That would depend, of course, on the breadth of appeal that your page offers. In my example, if the viewer does not use WordPress, on they go. For it to bring someone who thinks “that’s just what I need” would be serendipity indeed.