Yesterday, I created a Financial Slacker on Tumblr site. You can visit it here – FinancialSlacker.tumblr.com.
My intention with Tumblr is to primarily post excerpts from featured FinancialSlacker.com articles. I haven’t spent much time on Tumblr, so I’m not familar with the readers. But one of the great things about running this site is using it as a platform to explore other venues.
Don’t expect much. It only has a single post at the moment. I’ll probably go back and post other past featured articles at some point.
Is More Exposure Better?
In addition to the Tumblr site, Financial Slacker featured articles also appear on Medium and StumbleUpon.
I really like both of these sites. They do a good job bringing together different content and making it easy to read.
From a branding perspective, I think the more places I can get content posted the better. It creates more opportunities for more people to see the material. And if I’m going to be on those sites anyway, it seems to make sense that I would want Financial Slacker material posted there as well.
While this strategy appears logical, the actual traffic coming from these sites is hit or miss. Over the summer, I had some really strong months from StumbleUpon referrals. But it tends to fluctuate month to month. And as great as it is to get the pageviews, not many of those views converted into email subscribers.
Maybe it doesn’t make sense to have complementary sites on other platforms. I’m curious what others think.
Financial Slacker Traffic Sources
I generally try not to focus too much on traffic. It’s not something I can directly control. Plus, it can lead to bad decisions – making you feel like you’re doing something right when traffic is up and the opposite when traffic is down. And that’s not always the case. Instead, I prefer to focus on writing content and connecting with readers.
But out of curiosity, I did pull the Google Analytics data. Here’s the breakdown of Financial Slacker traffic by referral source over the past year:
- Direct – 37%
- Social media – 20%
- Site referrals – 14%
- StumbleUpon – 10%
- Other (feeds, email, organic) – 19%
As best as I could, I tried to filter out traffic from bots, spammers, and myself.
I do question the accuracy somewhat as traffic from email subscribers is a little difficult to track and seems low. I send out each post with the full content included in the email. This means the reader can simply open the message, read it, and not do anything else. These won’t show up anywhere. I could send just the excerpt, but as a reader, I prefer to get the whole article.
It’s interesting to look at. We’ll see what impact the new Tumblr site has (if any).
Readers, in what ways do you promote your site? Where have you found the greatest success? Do you think it’s a good idea or a bad idea to have complementary sites on other platforms such as Tumblr?
