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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.

Kwippy is a fun new service that allows you to post comments from Gtalk or Yahoo! It is very easy to get set up on kwippy, which is nice, and makes it a great site for introducing people to microblogging.

So, let’s get started!

Kwippy is in private beta right now. Beta means that the site is running, but might be taken down occasionally for upgrades, changes, etc. Of course, anymore, there’s not a lot of difference between a site that is ready for public use and one that’s in beta. Look at all the updates Microsoft sends out.

A private beta is one where you have to have an invite to join it. On kwippy, an invite has to be mailed to you, so either post a message on here and mention that you’d like an invite, or if you prefer, go to kwippy’s main page and ask for an invite to be sent to you.

Here are a few simple steps to give you a quick start to using kwippy:

1. Once you get your invite, click on the link and go register.
2. After you’ve registered, the next thing you should do is add kwippy to your IM.
   

   Click on Dashboard to bring up the IM instructions. Currently kwippy works with Gtalk and Yahoo! but there are plans for other IMs in the future.

   
3. After you have your IM set up, go back to your kwippy homepage and you’ll be asked if you want to integrate status changes with your kwippy page. Doing this will automatically post on kwippy whenever you make a status change on your IM.
   
   Note that you need to click the X, not the word here.
4. Now you’re ready to post! With kwippy, you have 2 choices. Either send a post to kwippy over your IM or go to your kwippy page and write a post.
   
5. Whenever someone responds to your kwips, you will be notified by IM. You can also choose to be notified by e-mail.
6. You can also respond to others kwips on the website. If you look at the picture above, you’ll see “go comment” underneath each. Clicking on that takes you to a kwip comment page. By the way, don’t worry if you have a lot to say, kwippy doesn’t have a text limit.
   

Now that everything’s set up, here are some other things to check out:

A social site is about friends, and kwippy is no exception. You have unlimited invites if you want to ask all your friends to come play and there are already a lot of great kwippers on the site.

Kwippy has a great search feature that allows you to either search for kwips or for people, so it’s easy to find friends from other sites. By the way, feel free to add me as a friend too.

To add or remove a friend, look to the right on the kwips board, directly underneath “everyone’s kwips” and click to follow or unfollow.

You can also click on change settings on a friend’s page and choose to subscribe to their kwips if you’d like to be notified over IM whenever they make one.

If you want to remember a kwip written either by you or someone else, you can mark it as a favorite. Simply click on the heart icon underneath the kwip.

To view kwips that you’ve marked as favorites, go to your page and look underneath your avatar. Click where it says the number of favorite kwips you have to go to your favorite kwips page. If someone marks one of your kwips as a favorite, you will receive a message letting you know.

You can also visit someone’s page and send a private kwip to them. You will get a notification when they respond to the message you sent, or when someone sends you a private kwip. If you are trying to reach a friend who hasn’t been on lately, you can also send them a Buzz, which is a kwip sent to the person and shows up in their inbox and as an IM message.

Just a couple more items to mention. Just like plurks and tweets, kwips are searchable on Google. They’re not showing up yet, but that’s because kwippy is a new site and likely still getting indexed.

Each page on kwippy can be subscribed to via RSS feed, so you can subscribe to your posts, friends’ posts, or even a single kwip that you want to keep up with the comments on.

In addition to kwippy’s search features, you can also find posts by using the url. Kwippy has one of most unique url set ups that I’ve ever seen, with the goal of making them “human readable”. So, if you know who wrote a kwip and when they wrote it, you can go right where you need to go to find the kwip.

Finally, if you are a fan of ping.fm, you’ll be happy to know that kwippy is there too! If you’re not on ping.fm and want to be, the most current code is “thispingsforyou”.