In what could be described as perhaps the Murphy’s Law of Blogging…if it can go wrong it will, last week was the craziest lot of bad luck ever. I had hoped for great numbers for visits to the site, but came up very short of the mark. The Month in Review post, chronicling the first full month of recorded stats was the most viewed post of the week bringing in 195 page views over the week. Some might think that’s an impressive number, but it wasn’t even the best content on the site last week.

I dug deep and came up with a fantastic tutorial to throw the Photoshop tutorial world on its head; only to be served a nice cold dish of reality. I’m not sure what lead to the tutorial’s downfall, it could’ve been a number of things. Maybe making the tutorial a two-parter killed it? was it too detailed or not detailed enough? It could be either of those things that lead to it not taking off, but I know one thing for sure didn’t help it any. Somehow, someway when the first part of the tutorial was discovered it was placed in the wrong category. I’m not entirely displeased as I’m hoping the tutorials will get picked up by either Pixel2Life, Tutorialized or get Dugg and build up sustained traffic. If you wouldn’t mind giving it a digg, I would greatly appreciate it.

1000 Entrecard Credit Winner

Well, the contest for the 1000 EntreCard Credits ended on Saturday, and through the magic of the BuzzMyBlog Contest Winner Picker I am proud to announce that John from Matsubonsai.com has been chosen as the winner! John, I will be sending an email over momentarily with your passcode for the 1000 ECs. Congratulations!

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I am a firm believer in using all types of social networking sites to bring traffic to GrandmasterB.com, and I try to spread the love around so I don’t put all of my eggs into one basket. Unfortunately, yesterday I counted on StumbleUpon to bring in some major traffic for my latest tutorials and it killed my stats:

How To Create Killer Metallic Text - Part One
How To Create Killer Metallic Text - Part Two

I say unfortunately, because I had planned on submitting the tutorials to Pixel2Life and Tutorialized once published. What I didn’t take into account was that after 24-hours of submitting each part of the tutorial they are still in PENDING limbo. I know that is must be difficult to get all of the submitted tutorials approved within a relatively quick amount of time, but I guess I was just looking forward to the quick boost in traffic.

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A few weeks ago Forest (TheRandomForest.com) had posted about getting together a small group that would stumble each others posts to build up traffic. I’m not sure what happened to the post as I was the only person willing to jump in the mix. Since then Forest, Jeff (BuzzMyBlog.com), Cuzzy (Cuzoogle.com) and myself have all gathered together and formed the base of the StumbleUpon Crusade group to help each other out. Basically, if you want us to check out your site post a comment and we’ll put you on the radar. Apparently, StumbleUpon frowns upon soliciting stumbles so we can’t have you asking us to stumble. But if you would like us to browse your latest posts we can do that…you get the picture.

If you’re interested in joining us in our “StumbleUpon Crusade”, simply comment here that you want in. Our only goal is helping each other by forming a small network of bloggers to make getting your blog noticed easier. We are not asking you to commit to anything just browse around and if you like what you see stumble it…if not no big deal. What do you think? If you’re interested comment here and we will do what we can to help each other out.

~ GrandmasterB

(I’ve just edited this post as to not break the TOS of StumbleUpon. I guess we cannot ask you to stumble a post, but we can point you in the direction of reading our posts and if you like them you can stumble them. Symantics)

The week in review is a day late this week, I apologize. I have been working to get some things done at the office before the big Memorial Day weekend so I don’t come back to a ton of work after five days off. This past weekend was the two month anniversary of the site and I managed to get an insane amount of traffic to the site over the past week (mainly because of that silly Miley Cyrus post…hehe).

Back on April 16th I surpassed my goal of 200 visits in a day (according to Analytics) , so I raised the bar to 300 visits for my next goal. The stats dipped a little bit and got back over 200 on May 3rd (Economic Stimulus and Another Year Older), then on May 14th that little post I mentioned earlier got noticed and blew up. That day I broke the 300 visit mark for the first time tallying 359 visits. The site has maintained a fair amount of traffic every day since averaging just over 150 visits/day. The extremely cool thing about that is the aforementioned post was noticed by Google and was listed sixth for the search term “Miley Cyrus Got Milk Ad”. Now is not the time to rest on my laurels though…onto bigger and better posts. There’s always room for improvement, so until that next monumental post here’s the Week In Review.

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Yesterday, I posted my Month in Review a few days early because I had some great news to share with my readers. I decided it was time to put the test the full power of this battle station…err blog. In order to maximize my viewers I tested really hammered the StumbleUpon crowd. With the help of the EntreCard Forums (Daily Stumble…check it out) and my blogging buddies the site saw it’s biggest traffic day ever! When I wrote the Economic Stimulus and Another Year Older I ran a small StumbleUpon campaign asking friends and the EntreCard crowd to Stumble the post, but I’ve never really focused much on StumbleUpon before that. After reviewing the numbers for the past 24-hours I will definitely be using it more.

Alright GrandmasterB Get On With It…Let’s See Some Numbers

Yesterday’s post (Miley Cyrus’ Got Milk Advertisement Gets Hugh Hefner Excited) was the ultimate in boosting my numbers; I completely blew my previous record out of the water. Prior to yesterday, my record number of visits was 259 for a single day…just 41 visits shy of my goal of 300 that I set for myself back on April 17 (One Month Already?). Within a few hours of publishing the post yesterday (2:45pm MDT) the site had racked up 245 views and by the time I’m writing this post (within 24 hours) the site has received a whopping 551 views. Yesterday’s post alone has received 459 views…holy crap! These numbers are from the Wordpress Stats plug-in, which tracks based on GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). I chose to use these numbers simply because it gave me the ability to track within a 24-hour time period.

To give you an idea of how much of yesterday’s traffic can be attributed to StumbleUpon and the viral (in my case not quite viral) effect it can have on a post you have to look deeper in the stats. The total number of referrals (top10) was 397 for the day; StumbleUpon accounted for 382 of the total referrals. That is some Freakin’ Amazing, Fantastical Power! Forest of The Random Forest was looking to start a StumbleUpon Network of buddies, but it didn’t take. Perhaps now we can get something rolling with numbers behind it.

So what do you guys think of StumbleUpon? Have you had any success with getting posts stumbled in the past? Do you have any secrets you’d like to share with the masses? I’d love to hear what you guys/gals have to say…light it up!