a1-fan-fun

Do you remember my previous post? Have you actually read it? Although this blog has received several unique visitors since I posted it, only one person cared to leave a comment. Mariam hasn’t explicitly requested a stumble, but I never said it was required (unless a blogger wanted to have a specific post reviewed). What matters to me is the fact that she took the time to comment on that post. As a result, all my stumble love goes to her!

I chose to stumble the first part of a very helpful series she published on her blog. In fact I planned to stumble all five parts, but I was afraid that too many thumbs up in a row could harm her blog, instead of helping it. What if StumbleUpon’s algorithms interpreted it as spam?

As several days have gone by since my first stumble, I’ve just given thumbs up to the second part of her series. The remaining parts will be stumbled in the future. Meanwhile, I’ll post all the links here, so you can appreciate Mariam’s good job:

* Interest, dividends, capital gains - an all-in-one investment strategy, Part 1

* Interest, dividends, capital gains - an all-in-one investment strategy, Part 2

* Interest, dividends, capital gains - an all-in-one investment strategy, Part 3

* Interest, dividends, capital gains - an all-in-one investment strategy, Part 4

* Interest, dividends, capital gains - an all-in-one investment strategy, Part 5

Analysing my own offer — Suppositions and conclusions

The post where I offered stumbles as Christmas gifts remained at the top of my blog’s homepage until today. And as I said above, several unique visitors came here in the meantime (10 days), not to mention my dear subscribers. So I suppose my offer has had enough exposure.

I considered promoting that post in a few forums, but I didn’t want to do that because I hoped for spontaneous reactions from readers. Besides, I wasn’t convinced that such kind of promotion would really attract more bloggers.

If you read that post you know that I didn’t ask anything complicated; just a comment. So what happened? What should I conclude from this experience?

Possibility 1: Readers were somehow intimidated by my rules and/or gave up reading the whole post when they realised there were rules to follow.

If that was the case, I might assume that I haven’t expressed myself in a friendly enough manner. I could also conclude that most readers don’t like rules. Well, sorry folks, but I do like them. Not all of them, of course, but they are necessary anyway.

Possibility 2: Since I’m not a famous blogger, readers may have thought that my stumbles wouldn’t bring them any benefit.

Being a obscure blogger isn’t a sin and doesn’t make you “inferior” to well-known fellows. Besides, my lack of fame in the blogosphere doesn’t matter for StumbleUpon. I’ve sent some decent SU traffic to various articles. How do I know this? Their authors let me know.

Possibility 3: Bloggers just don’t need and/or aren’t interested in StumbleUpon traffic.

Really? Well, I’m still very interested in it. And from what I read in many blogs, sites and forums, I’m definitely not the only one. Perhaps my offer only reached those who don’t care much. It could have been an unfortunate coincidence… although I don’t believe in coincidences.

Possibility 4: Bloggers do want to have their articles stumbled, but some are a bit too shy — or proud — to ask.

Jane Smith reads the post, likes the idea but doesn’t leave any comments because she fears that she’d sound like a begger if she did. She won’t let anyone suppose she’s the desperate owner of a blog without visitors. John Brown also reads about the Christmas offer, but he thinks he doesn’t need social media votes to help him achieve blogging success. “Gaming Google is so much better,” he says to himself.

What am I going to do about it all?

Nothing.

I wrote this post more for (self-) entertainment purposes than for anything else. People are free to take or reject my offers; I can live with this. I don’t plan to find a way to control blog readers’ behaviour.

(Granted, I’d love to be able to do that. I know some bloggers who do it very successfully. So I’m going to study their dirty tricks and apply them all here, ohohohoho! <— You didn’t read that paragraph.)