It’s been a while since I’ve been out-and-out impressed by a web service. When you’ve been immersed in this industry as long as I have, you get a bit jaded. Everything seems to fall in the ‘not again!’ category.
About a week ago, I found a phenomenal way of spreading your message virally. And no it isn’t with Twitter. Well, indirectly it does involve Twitter, I guess.
The service is su.pr. It’s Stumbleupon’s URL shortening service. Aside from the amazing benefits of tying into Stumbleupon, su.pr is a revolutionary product in it’s own right. It tracks the number of clickthroughs a link gets. It lets you shorten url’s on your own domain. It even puts your content in a frame that shows the user other related content. It’s awesome.
But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about 3 things you can do with Su.pr to get mega traffic.
- Testing post titles
We all know that post titles will make or break you. If you have a good title, you’ll get retweeted and dugg – even if your content is shit. Most people simply retweet if the story looks good or is from a reputable author. (Both are perceived characteristics)
Why not test post titles out and link to other good content? So if you’re going to write a post on productivity, test the title of the post in su.pr and see how many people click through the link!
- Determining what kind of followers and fans you have
Every once in a while, I go into su.pr and throw in a video game link or a link to a particularly beautiful picture. Then, I keep track for about the next twenty minutes to see what kind of followers I have.
Personally, I have a business oriented following who generally don’t care for my game/pic references. I do make them suffer through them here and there though. I know not to get too crazy with my Twitter/Facebook postings.
The other thing this does is help you understand what they do want to read. If you get 4 times as many click throughs for time management info, perhaps you should write about it on your own blog or make some cash by building a little information product.
- Su.pr shows you the best posting times
Perhaps my favorite su.pr feature is the posting times. The shortening service tells me exactly when to post to get the maximum response. It’s a bit like writing a controvesrial blog post and waiting until after your book comes out to through it on your blog (aka the Tim Ferriss method).
The beauty is that it doesn’t have to be a blog post at all. It can be an affiliate link, a link to a buddy’s site, or a picture of your dog lapping down your first cup of coffee for the day.
All I have to say is su.pr rocks. My hat’s off to the guys at Stumbleupon who came up with the concept. Bloggers and author’s – make use of it while you can. There are bound to be ‘me-toos’ in this space very quickly, but few have the power of Stumbleupon to leverage.
You know what – that's a good question! I would imagine that you do not get the unique visitor but I could be wrong. Now you've got me curious – I'll have to look into it more.