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Monday, January 05, 2009
Top Ten Page Views for December 2008
Well, that's a really interesting shakeup, huh? In looking at specific referrals, a ton of the traffic that propelled several of these into the top ten in page views was from StumbleUpon. Most of those were added to Stumble when we announced our Pushcart Prize nominees. One was an experiment on how to use StumbleUpon when I first set up the ShareThis links on stories. The pieces just outside the top ten had enough traffic than in any other month, they'd have fairly easily made the top ten. They're still getting the same page views, but pages that are Stumbled are getting that much more. In fact, without StumbleUpon, the top ten would have been largely comprised of stories from the December issue (which is what usually happens when a new issue is released).All of which is to say: authors, if you want to vastly increase your number of readers, join StumbleUpon and start Stumbling your stories (and if you're published here, it's even easier—you can find a link at the end of your story that opens up abilities to share your story on several different sites). And readers, if you absolutely love a story, whether it's here or anywhere else, help spread the word about its greatness to tons of folks you've never met. The more this kind of technology evolves, the more readers will be able to control which authors are gaining the most notice (and, eventually, publishing deals). It's an exciting new world.
1. (NR) How 9) Strange by Laird Hunt (12/15/07)
2. (NR) Taco Foot by Jack Pendarvis (12/15/07)
3. (NR) Beautiful by Antonios Maltezos (10/2/08)
4. (6) Tenderoni by Kathy Fish (10/2/08)
5. (NR) Ants by David Aichenbaum (12/15/08)
6. (NR) Fatback by Jeff Landon (10/2/08)
7. (NR) Trestle by Matt Briggs (3/15/08)
8. (8) Asian Girl by W.P. Kinsella (10/2/08)
9. (3) Innocence, Briefly by Jenny Arnold (10/2/08)
10. (NR) Earthrise by Christopher Bundy (12/15/08)
All told, our page views for the month were 121,084, our highest ever, breaking the previous high of 111,740, set in October.
Labels: Antonios Maltezos, Christopher Bundy, David Aichenbaum, Jack Pendarvis, Jeff Landon, Jenny Arnold, Kathy Fish, Laird Hunt, Matt Briggs, SmokeLong Quarterly, StumbleUpon, Top Ten, W.P. Kinsella
posted by Dave Clapper at 12:53 PM 0 commentsWednesday, December 03, 2008
SmokeLong and Social Networking
While compiling the top ten list for November, I got curious about where some of the page views were coming from, particularly for older pieces that cracked the top ten again after a long absence. One thing jumped out at me: a lot of hits for Holly Selph's The Color of Moths were coming from StumbleUpon. Well, that was the second time I'd seen an older story gain a lot of new audience from StumbleUpon, so I figured it was finally time to do a little research on it. And perhaps to take a look at other social networking sites that drive traffic, like Digg, Delcious, etc.While looking around, I found a very cool application called ShareThis. It gathers together links to a ton of different social networking sites and makes it easy to click through and recommend the page a reader is on. Since our copyright notice is in one file that's linked on every story page, it was easy to add the code there and instantly have ShareThis on every story's page.
The results are phenomenal. I quickly Stumbled each of our six Pushcart Prize nominees. Today alone, each of them has generated about 40% of the total page views that the top flash usually gets in a month! What an incredible tool to promote the incredible writers we're publishing.
So... if you read a story and you just absolutely love it, click on the little green icon and recommend the story using whatever service you might already be using. Our writers will thank you for the additional readers exposed to their work.
Also, if you want to keep abreast of the latest news, you can either subscribe to our RSS Feed and/or join our Facebook group (in which you can find over 80 of the writers previously published here).
Welcome to the 21st century, eh?
Labels: Facebook, Pushcart Prize, SmokeLong Quarterly, StumbleUpon
posted by Dave Clapper at 3:29 PM 2 commentsJanuary 2005, February 2005, March 2005, June 2005, August 2005, September 2005, October 2005, November 2005, December 2005, March 2006, April 2006, May 2006, June 2006, July 2006, August 2006, September 2006, October 2006, November 2006, December 2006, January 2007, February 2007, March 2007, April 2007, May 2007, June 2007, July 2007, August 2007, September 2007, October 2007, November 2007, December 2007, January 2008, February 2008, March 2008, April 2008, May 2008, June 2008, July 2008, August 2008, September 2008, October 2008, November 2008, December 2008, January 2009, February 2009, March 2009, April 2009, May 2009, June 2009, September 2009, Current Posts
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