This week has showed me the power of social media sites like StumbleUpon. Sure I knew my site could receive tremendous exposure through stumbling, but I didn’t realize how quickly it could happen, and just how quickly it could dissipate. My recent article Ten Reasons to Write Well Not Good received a lot of exposure on StumbleUpon in a short amount of time. It was like one of those summer rains — soaking the site, then soon the sun was back out drying up the traffic.

I’m not complaining about StumbleUpon traffic. I received quality stats during that flash flood. My bouncerate was extremely low. I’m happy with the overall effect. I want to know how to sustain it. Does StumbleUpon traffic stop by a thumbs down? Does anyone have an article?

Happenings this Week

This week I wrote the previously mentioned article, which received the most hits of the week. I also wrote the two part series on How to Podcast with Audacity and Wordpress. I tried to name this article with a more SEO friendly title to see if it brought more organic traffic. So far its brought three visitors, who stayed over ten minutes a piece on the site. I’d say it pays to target your titles with specific keywords.

New Milestone! I’m not a RSS jockey, but I’ve been riding a fairly strong horse upward these past few weeks. I’ve surpassed 70 subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed, now’s your chance. It’s free.

Site Tweaks: I did add an ad above the Spottt widget. I think this ad relates to what a lot of my surfers have interest — making money with their blog. It’s Darren Rowse’s Six Figure Blogging course. You might want to check it out.

I’ve also added a Digg This button to each individual post page, below the article itself. I hope this encourages everyone to Digg their favorite Jason Boom posts from the past and in the future.

Guest Post I have been writing a guest post for a neighboring blog. I’ll update everyone next week when I’ve finished that post. It’s taking longer than expected.

Upcoming Explosions

This week should see the second episode of the Boombox podcast early in the week. I’ll also be writing about site traffic, nurturing killer ideas, and another top ten list. I’ll have a Powder Keg review thrown in there too, for those who enjoy the series.

Other’s Explosions

I’m really enjoying Stephan Miller’s blog of the same name. He discusses his adventures in making money online, his blog, and other ideas for productivity. He has a clear, distinct voice that carries his articles along swiftly. His recent article entitled Spread Your Feed details some finer details of an RSS feed, which I hadn’t even considered. This is why I love his blog. It’s taking things I know, and showing me them from a different angle. Good work, Stephan.

Andrew Pavelski is back this week with a new successful blogging article. His look at John Chow seems like a natural step for this new series. I can’t wait to see what next week brings. Andrew also had extremely well thought out posts during this week. Everyone should be reading his blog.

I also enjoyed The Blog Entrepeneur’s posts this week. His writing has definitely made me want to elevate my own posting style. Just take a look at this rant on Make Money Online blogs or this one about developing blogs that stand apart from the masses.

I think this post title sums up my feelings from this morning. I woke up to find my Feedburner count had dropped by 11 subscribers. I quickly felt the pang of defeat. I wanted to know what could cause such a sudden drop in readership. I had written good content, right?

 I did a quick blog search through Google. I think this is the quickest way to find out what’s happening in the blogosphere. I found a number of articles talking about Feedburner counts dropping yet again. The first search I found took me to the Feedburner blog, which had a post from yesterday.

Google Integrating Feedburner
It sounds like the big G will be swallowing fire. The Feedburner crew has been hard at work behind the scenes making their service more Googley. It wasn’t until I read the comments on the post that I found the culprit for my lost subscribers.

Google Reader numbers were not counted yesterday. Oh, the irony.

So while integrating the service to be architecturally similar to Google’s backend architecture (i.e. putting/removing the junk in the trunk), they somehow lost touch with their very own service. I guess those are growing pains. Or is that indigestion? I don’t know for sure.

Living by Numbers
Needless to say, it’s rough losing 20% of my subscribers overnight. Someone on the comments of the Feedburner blog said their blog went from 500 to 150 overnight. I must say that’s a lot of Google Reader readers. I might have fallen out of my chair had I seen that much of a drop. As it was, my drop had me re-reading my past posts, looking for offending material. I’m glad it was just a glitch. You’re all still here, right?

Do you know how Feedburner counts subscribers? Curious? Mr Javo put up a nice discussion on the topic last week. You might check that out. In the meantime, I’m off to russle up some subscribers.