Guest Blogger Prize Winners

Before I prattle on about the contest let me just announce the winners:

Most Page Views — $250
Lillie Ammann, author of Get Rid of Ugly Wordiness: How to Cut Your Novel Down to Size

Random Drawing — $50
David Jace, author of Writing as a God

As many of you know, June was guest blogging month. As part of guest blogging month, I offered a $250 prize to the author of the blog entry that gathered the most direct page views. The direct page view, of course, is only one way that articles get read. Some people read articles through a newsreader. Other people read articles as they appear on the home page of the site or through a category page if they are interested in a particular topic. There is no sure way to tell exactly how many people read a particular article. Direct page views can only measure the number of times people load a page. Even if a person loads the page, they don’t necessarily read the article.

With all that said, we had a very clear winner for the contest. The average article received about 500 direct page views in the seven days that followed publication. Almost every article stayed within 100 hits of that figure, one way or the other. Lillie Ammann’s article, however, received almost 14,000 hits the first week. That same article went on to rack up 29,000 hits after 30 days.

How did that happen? StumbleUpon. The article was well-reviewed by the people on StumbleUpon, and good reviews translate into page views. That is the power of social media. Now, did every person who loaded the page read the article? I doubt it. StumbleUpon works by feeding new pages to members. The members of StumbleUpon don’t know what page is coming up next. They don’t specifically request the page, so they don’t know before they see the page if it will interest them. StumbleUpon readers generally look at the headline, and if they like it they read the article. If they don’t, they move on.

I want to thank all of my guest bloggers again. It was great to see so many different voices and ideas gathered together. I plan to revisit the topic of guest bloggers again in a few days, just to give my thoughts on the experience and perhaps propose a new policy for having more people write for the site.