Driving Traffic with StumbleUpon and Jumping Bunny Rabbits

Jill, our Director of Online Publishing (read: boss), left a comment on my blog while I was out on vacation. Specifically, she left a comment on my post that may or may not have featured competitive jumping bunny rabbits.

"Doesn't have much to do with web publishing."

Oh, but it does have something to do with web publishing! I promise! The show jumping rabbits with the 80's hair metal soundtrack is a perfect example of the type of content that is a short-term traffic driver. How much traffic? And from where? you ask...

While I was gone, out of the office, with no access to email or interwebs to promote my blog, that single piece of content -- roughly 50 original words and an embedded video that somebody else made -- doubled  the overall traffic to my blog (90% were new visitors) . What's more, the average pages per visit for these new visitors was actually higher and the bounce rate was lower than my previous record.  Sure, it's only been a week, so I can't tell what the long-term benefits of this traffic will be (and since I was gone I couldn't capitalize on this spike as well I as I would have liked) but if I had a site that ran advertising or promotions, I could have easily seen increased conversions/revenue.

Who brought me all of this quality traffic? StumbleUpon! Somebody liked the video so much, they clicked on the little link below it to Stumble It. Then someone with the StumbleUpon tool bar landed on my page.

I've tried to stick with the Friday Fun posts because they offer something different, something quick and enjoyable, and something that brings new users to my content who may or may not have been searching around for social media articles.

I should consider more vacations ... or more jumping bunnies ...

What's the point of short-term traffic?

Well, the site I pilfered my bunny video from, YouTube, relies solely on virally driven short term traffic to survive. Remember the SNL digital short, Lazy Sunday? Ever wonder how that may helped spur the growth of YouTube? Well, Joshua Porter did ...

Lazy Sunday, by itself, couldn't have driven traffic that high, but it did start the ball rolling with incremental short-term traffic explosions resulting in the $1.65 billion acquisition by Google. Just a little food for thought.

In all fairness, Jill did say she liked the video, so firing averted.