In my most recent article I posed the question of whether it was a sin to Sphinn your own blog article. It turns out it’s not. The overwhelming response via this blog and Sphinn was positive. It also turned out to be a pretty popular topic. It went hot within Sphinn and has been on the front page for over 24 hours. Go me!

Naturally… I was pretty excited with the outcome. It’s just the sixth article I’d published, and only the second I’d distributed via Sphinn. I was eagerly awaiting the spike of traffic to my new blog. After all, both Alexa and Compete rank Sphinn within the top 6,000 sites on the web in terms of traffic. And Compete estimates Sphinn receives over 325,000 unique US visitors a month (let alone the rest of the world).

So it was with some disappointment that I reviewed my stats to find that I received just 45 visitors in the 24 hours after the article hit the front page. I suspect the fact that it hit the front page on a weekend didn’t help my cause. But unfortunately, that’s when I have the most time to write my articles. This was just 15% of the traffic I had attracted to an earlier article courtesy of a handful of StumbleUpon votes.

But after the initial disappointment died down I got to thinking… which set of visitors was more valuable to me. What was ultimately more important – quantity or quality…? It’s a point that Seth Godin touched on in a recent post regarding mass marketing. Here’s what Seth had to say…

‘Many bloggers seem to be on a perpetual hunt for the front page of Digg. Sure, it brings you hordes of eyeballs, but then they turn around and leave… Doesn’t it make more sense to incrementally earn the attention of a smaller, less glitzy but far more valuable group of people who actually engage with you?’

Touche. I’m not saying that StumbleUpon is poor quality traffic. Indeed, the people who Stumbled my site had indicated an interest in online marketing. But the fact is that Sphinn is a mecca for opinion leaders in the field of online marketing. There was a far higher likelihood that my article reached the eyeballs of those who really matter in the industry. Indeed, I was happy to see feedback from industry experts including Jill Whalen & SlightlyShadySEO on Sphinn.

Now… unfortunately, my own procrastination has cost me the opportunity to run a meaningful analysis of the Stumble visitors against the Sphinn visitors. I haven’t yet got around to installing Google analytics on this blog. D’oh! Ideally I’d assess the bounce rate, pages visited & time on the site for both sets of visitors. But that’s simply not possible. Here’s what I do know though:

1. So far 37 people have cared enough to vote for the article on Sphinn.
2. 19 left comments about the article on Sphinn.
3. 5 have left comments on my blog.

Let’s consider the engagement rates of the two groups of visitors:

StumbleUpon -300 people visited my site. One person left a comment. The engagement rate is 0.03%.

Sphinn - 45 people visited my site. Five people left a comment. The engagement rate is 11.1%.

I think we’re on to something here. Now the true test will be to see whether the Sphinn audience is indeed engaged enough to return to my blog to read my new articles. I certainly won’t be submitting this article to Sphinn. If it is submitted by a fellow Sphinner I will consider the whole adventure a great success… (in the words of Borat).

The experiment continues…