Our experience with Stumbling for traffic was met with moderate failure.
Our initial stumble and efforts to get a group to stumble the website into the rotation was met with a spike in traffic. However, the way stumbling works is pretty similar to how drunks stumble into various things. Even though they stumble into your door, sometimes you wonder if you really want them there.
The web browsers that stumbled to the website was untargeted. We received on average close to 100% bounce rate as well as a session time of 1-3 seconds. Whoop-dee-do.
Subsequent stumbling of the website have failed to spark additional traffic even though technically we should be seeing more as a result - I’m not really sure how their algorithms work but it definitely does not seem to be working correctly.
Overall - I would recommend focusing your efforts elsewhere for qualified traffic as stumblers aren’t up to par. The service seems to be great for bots or marketers who are looking to promote something. Usually if I’m browsing something on the web, I’m surfing with a purpose. Even for people with way too much time on their hands, I fail to see why they would stumble from site to site just to be disappointed.
On a separate note, as a webmaster who installed the StumbleUpon toolbar, I have noticed I would occasionally tap on the Stumble button by accident - which leads to confusion, anger, and then me clicking the back button. I would hate to think users who I worked hard to get are coming to my website by accident, and then leaving before ever trying to figure out what’s actually on the page.
Social bookmarking sites are known to generate short bursts of traffic. Whether these referrals are qualified or not, the debate is still up in the air. For my third test, I will try to get our website seen by the crowd at StumbleUpon. Once we get some data, I will report back on the results.
Most of the companies I’ve consulted for had sick budgets that allowed them to buy traffic. While these techniques are great for them to build an audience and establish a barrier to entry, they don’t do so well for bootstrap startups and/or startups that do not have extensive experience with interactive marketing.
Since KillerStartups was a major fail, and this past week was green week, I’ve decided to run our second test on building organic traffic. (See what I did there?)
In the world of SEO, in addition white hat, black hat techniques; good neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods, and tons of other duals, there’s the school of broad and generic terms vs. specific and long tail terms. While the phrase used cars is the most generic and most popular search term in the automotive industry, chances are a new site no matter how great will not be able to get the top spots for that phrase without some leg work.
Since that phrase will ultimately be one of the primary traffic drivers for organic search - we are setting that as the long term goal. For the short term, we are focusing on building long tail terms and allowing search stragglers to find us that way.
To do this test, I went to Compete.com to see how users are searching in the automotive space and adopted some pretty broad search rules to be applied to our pages. Users on the web for the most part are either searching for used cars or they’re searching for specific models close to their area (e.g. nissan pathfinder 98057) To adapt to the search patterns, we changed our URLs, title tags, meta keyword and description tags to match these broad search patterns.
The upgrades were done this past week so I will check back with this in about 2-3 weeks after the engines come back to see if our website gets indexed more. Right now, we have about 1430 pages indexed on Google which is good but not great. More to come…
First marketing test with KillerStartups bombed - majorly. The entry was submitted over a week ago along with a clean copy of our logo (on white background w/o the beta text) and it finally received approval just short of 8-9 days. We received an email (one that’s broken in Gmail) stating their team had reviewed our website and that it was kept in the site-reviews section. (So I guess this means we didn’t make front page news.)
So not only was the submitted logo not used, a good chunk of the submitted text was also missing from the submission. Upon trying to modify the entry, many items were reset to the default value instead of being pulled from the DB - which was extremely hard and frustrating to use. Not only that, we were crammed between Fuddruckers and Head and Shoulders. Seriously?
Overall, I’m not expecting to get more than 10 referrals from this effort and I am also shocked how this experience completely differs from the one we had with YouNoodle.com. For those out there who are trying to get on this site, I would probably recommend you get someone to nominate your site instead of submitting it directly. Like the Webby awards - you seem to only win if you are nominated.
We are co-founders of a new and used cars autos startup called EasyAutoSales.com. This blog chronicles our journey from conception to launch. Along the way, we will be sharing resources for startups as well as lessons learned.
If you are starting your own business or are interested in our service, we welcome you to join us on our journey.
