Alex Bowyer (@alexbfree) is a research analyst at Bitcurrent in Montreal, where he blogs about emerging technologies and their social impacts, and co-organizes events such as Bitnorth and Enterprise Cloud Summit. He is passionate about using computers to solve human problems in new ways, and all the things that encompasses – user-centric design, productivity, human-computer interfaces and exploring social trends. Before that he worked at IBM UK, specializing in Voice systems, Java and information management.

In this post, Alex shows us that sometimes, attracting pageviews isn’t rocket science, which you might be forgiven for thinking if you follow this blog regularly:

Unlike my colleagues Alistair and Sean, I’m no analytics expert. But like all bloggers and social media enthusiasts I have an interest in sharing ideas about technology and society, and getting those ideas out to as many  people as possible.

I’ve been exploring ways to get more traffic to my personal blog, and yesterday stumbled upon something quite remarkable. In one day I was able to achieve 2,579 new pageviews, a 1,176% increase in traffic. And all it took was about 30 minutes of effort.

I’ve been using StumbleUpon’s su.pr as my preferred link shortener for some time, because as well as shortening the URL it allows me to contribute those links to my existing StumbleUpon social bookmark feed while also generating some useful stats. I noticed recently that it makes it very easy for you to “thumb up” and review your shortened links, adding them into the StumbleUpon ecosystem:

[For those who are unfamiliar, StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking service that differs from Digg, Reddit or Delicious in that allows you to click a toolbar button and "Stumble" to randomly selected pages, bookmarked by others, from across all the topics you specify an interest in.]

I also noticed that those links I had submitted to StumbleUpon had gained significantly higher amounts of traffic than those that hadn’t. So as an experiment, I went through every single blog post on my blog and “thumbed-up” the site, assigned it to some appropriate tags and stored it in the best fitting topic. (This last step is vital to maximize the chance of interested eyes landing on your page.)

I waited a day, and I think the results speak for themselves:

What was even more satisfying was to see that these were not just new visitors, but they engaged. Most of the new visitors went on to read other content on my blog, as you can see from the reduced bounce rate,

as well as 1,084 new goal conversions (albeit fairly simple goals such as the amount of time spent on the site):

I think that the reason this experiment was so successful is that people clicking that Stumble button are actively seeking “something interesting” – and are very open to new content and ideas, more so than the average web user. This coupled with the fact that StumbleUpon only directs people to pages for topics they have said they are interested in, results in not just more eyeballs, but the right sort of eyeballs.

I would be fascinated to see this approach used on a site with more measurable goals such as product sign-up or purchases*.

* Disclaimer: Stumblers can rate you “thumbs down” as well as up. Your site reputation may be at risk if you don’t keep providing value to those who rely on it.