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I’ve been thinking about Plurk, and what could be done to improve the site.

One complaint that I have heard quite often is the steep drops in karma that can occur when you away for a while, even for something as simple as sleeping!

This had never really bothered me until recently, because I work from home so much.

This past weekend though I had to travel out of town, and was gone for nearly 24 hours.

The drop was quite significant, although in the context of the rest of my life, it hardly matters.

It could be something for the A - Team to consider though!

If enough people get disillusioned with the drop in karma when they are spending time with family, or working, or, heaven forbid, sleeping, they might just move on to the next big thing!

There’s enough competition out there now, and it’s increasing all the time.

I plurked earlier today asking friends what one thing they would like to see change about Plurk!

There have been some interesting answers.

1. being able to search for friends inside of threads

2. Start with the oldest plurk first, on both updates and responses.

3. Message threading and being able to ‘bookmark’ conversations.

4. Staff responding to “Contact Us” messages.

5. Being able to add a search and any posts that match would come in to my timeline.

Interesting responses from people who enjoy Plurk, and want to continue using it.

What one thing do you think would improve Plurk?

Allan Cockerill

I was the culprit, I’d read the page this morning and found it interesting. I had meant to add a review on StumbleUpon, but got sidetracked. It’s a list of the 50 strongest blog directories, which surprisingly are NOT the first 50 that show up when you do a Google search for “blog directory“.

While we were chatting, bloggeries mentioned that unfortunately the stickiness of stumble traffic is like teflon…it doesn’t stick.

Now, if you know me, you know there are three subjects I can’t keep quiet about. Social media, Plurk, and StumbleUpon. Plus, it’s Digg traffic that’s not sticky.

Stumble traffic can be sticky, if you remember a few things.

First, most Stumblers use Firefox. The vast majority of my traffic even now uses FF, but back when I was only writing about SU, 97% of my visitors were running Firefox.

Why does that matter? Because Firefox has a program called Adblock Plus. I first learned about it on StumbleUpon, but now it’s one of my very favorite FF programs. What it does is blocks any ads that I don’t want to see. I don’t see insta-ads especially, but I can also choose to blog other types. I wrote a blog post about it a while ago, after some friends were complaining that stumblers never clicked any of their ads. End result? If you’re wanting SUers to come to your site and click on your ads, I’d say fergit about it.

But what if you’re just wanting them to explore your site some? Before I started tracking analytics on my blog, I used to hear people fuss about how bad Stumblers were for visiting a page and leaving.

You know what? They’re right. Stumblers like to surf or they wouldn’t be using SU very much. BUT that doesn’t mean you have to let them go gracefully. Make it hard. Make them want to stay!

I’m not a huge fan of bounce rates. Sure, it gives you an idea of how many people visit more than one page on your site, but to me, measuring repeat visitors is a much better measurement. After all, especially if I’m a repeat visitor, I’m not likely to go surfing through your site unless I’m looking for something specific. Most likely, I’ll come read the new page and leave, then come back the next time you make a post.

But, if you are a fan of bounce rates, here’s something to think about. From September 20 (when I started sucomments.com), through June 3 (the day before I started using Plurk), my bounce rate was usually between 30-40% with around a third of my traffic coming from StumbleUpon (Plurk has raised my bounce rate - I think it’s time for some site revising).

My favorite thing about StumbleUpon traffic is that for the most part it is directed traffic. When you register on SU, you select topics that you’re interested in. If you click the stumble button and visit a new site, you are taken to a site that fits one of the topics you’ve chosen.

Occasionally there are sites that are mislabeled, though that’s almost always accidental. The bad thing is, a mislabeled page won’t bring the right visitors to your page, so it’s worth your while to make sure that your pages are listed in the right category.

If your page isn’t categorized correctly, fixing it is a simple matter. If you scroll down on the right you’ll see “Something wrong here?” with a dropdown box underneath it. Just choose the correct category from the options to have it changed. If you’re not the discoverer of the page, getting it changed might take a while, but SU is really good about correcting category errors. As a note, blogs are listed as weblogs if you’re trying to change to that category.

So now that you’re getting just the right traffic, how do you make them want to hang out on your site? Why by giving them something to look at, of course! And the nice thing is, you know what they’re interested in…what brought them to your site in the first place.

Remember, people like things to be easy. If it takes much time or is too hard to do, they’ll leave (and I’m talking to myself too, I’ve realized one of the reasons my bounce rate is up, and it has everything to do with a change on my site and nothing to do with Plurk).

So make it easy. Want people to visit a link? Put it where they can see it and click on it. Want them to read past articles about the same subject? Then post a list of similar articles.

I’m reminded of an article that Darren Rowse of Problogger wrote a while back about heat map tracking. What he discovered was that at pause points (where people have to decide what to do next), readers will click on links more than they will anywhere else.

Because SU traffic is targeted, you can guess that most will take the time to at least read over your page. By using pause points to supply relevant links to other pages on your site, you can make it easy for that stumbler (or anyone else) to explore your site instead of stumbling off to the next new thing.

By the way, if you haven’t tried Plurk yet and would like to, here is a link to join. If you’d like to know more about Plurk, here is the 10 Minute Guide and other Plurky stuff.