Bill Belew

This guest post is by David Alford Griffin   

It’s hardly surprising that new bloggers are not having much idea about what is the social value of your blog. It’s a complex equation, with a two-way street between every blog post and the social accounts, and the question of which social networks you want to focus on.

It might surprise you to know that the social network which sends the most traffic to blogs is not Facebook, but StumbleUpon.

According to Statcounter, StumbleUpon all by itself accounts for 50.27% of all referrals to blogs from the top 10 social sites.

Facebook is a distant second with 38.9% of the traffic, and Twitter, Youtube and Reddit each send less than 4%.

So, now you know which social networks will send you more traffic. But the how part is a bit more complex. Adding social value to your blog is a bit of a bootstrap operation, where visitors Like, Tweet and Stumble your blog posts while social networks in return sends traffic to your blog.

If your blog already has significant value on the social networks, then every post goes viral on the networks as soon as it is published. An example of this can be TechCrunch or Mashable posts, each of which gets hundreds of tweets, re-tweets and likes. These blogs have made it easy for visitors to do this by adding social media sharing buttons on the blog template.

Those who do have the value will need to work for it. Write posts with the potential to go viral, and promote it aggressively using your own social media accounts and prominent sharing buttons on the blog, such as Sharethis or Sociable.

But networks like StumbleUpon and Digg are different creatures. The bulk of the traffic comes from networking on StumbleUpon and building a large network who will give your posts the initial push needed. Even so, StumbleUpon users tend to promote a specific type of post, such as top 10 lists with large pictures for each item on the list. They like record breaking stuff, like fast cars or tall buildings and bridges.

Since this is where the bulk of social media traffic is going to come from, you cannot afford to ignore it. Join StumbleUpon and start stumbling pages and making friends. You can send people in your StumbleUpon network links, and ask them to stumble these pages. It’s not easy, but even one post that goes viral on StumbleUpon will be enough to make your traffic stats jump through the roof.