Traffic makes the world go round. And after getting Stumbled and Dugg this last week for the first time on this blog, social media is a great way to score big traffic numbers in mere moments. But you guys already knew all of that, right?

What I’m going to be talking about today is which social media site should you focus on. This is, by no means, a scientific study, but simply a survey of which social media site works best for individual blogs and the blogosphere as a whole.

Let’s start with StumbleUpon. It covers a huge array of subjects, so you’re bound to find one that your blog or website fits into nicely. Furthermore, if you’ve got money to burn and you want to send some new visitors your way, they offer a fairly cheap advertising program for just pennies per visitor. However, the problem with all of this stumbling is that very few people stick around. A lot of stumblers, myself included, keep their fingers on the Stumble! button just ready to hammer it the moment they lose interest. The ease of stumbling to a new site makes your bounce rate suffer.

On the other hand, we have Digg. It’s arguably better known, and has a huge user base, but lacks the massive depth of categories found on StumbleUpon. This makes it best for niches like technology, current events, and even celebrity gossip, but all but useless to make money online bloggers, photography bloggers, and other niches that don’t fit squarely into Digg’s mold. Maybe one post here or there will apply to Digg’s topic guidelines–but don’t expect every one of your great posts to.

Now that we’ve covered the sites themselves, let’s talk traffic. That’s what you’re all here for anyway, right? With StumbleUpon, you have unlimited time to get your site from no stumbles, no reviews, to tens of thousands of stumbles and many reviews. You post something, people find it, they like it, their friends find it, and so on. Traffic from StumbleUpon may start slow, but eventually it will reach a breaking point.

Digg, however, operates in a much more peculiar way. You submit a site, blog post, photo, video, whatever to Digg with a catchy headline and a quick summary that draws visitors in. They click your link, visit your site, go back to Digg and vote it up if they like it. Simple. Except you don’t get much traffic until you actually hit the Digg front page. For as long as you’re in the upcoming section, you’ll see your Diggs go up–but your traffic stays pretty much the same. For the post in question, the story ended up with 108 Diggs, but according to analytics only about 35 people actually came from Digg to read the post. That’s a whole lot of blind Digging going on.

StumbleUpon is the clear winner, though the high bounce rate is a bit disconcerting. Your stumbled posts generate traffic for weeks or months to come, there’s more niches to squeeze into than with Digg, and the system has an air of fairness to it.

Obviously, if you can get your post both Stumbled and on the Digg Front Page, you’re in a win-win situation.

Have you ever thought about just giving up on a blog?

Some of you will certainly disagree, but there comes a time, especially in some niches more than others, where you may feel compelled to completely give up on your blog. Now, this is a post to gear you up for the demise of Contented Niche. Far from it. Instead, consider this post as an open question. Would you ever give up on a blog? At what point are you spending far too much time and energy on something that isn’t giving you anything back?

There are some bloggers out there who feel that no matter your niche, no matter your post rate, as long as you provide good content to the blogosphere, your blog will eventually attain success. But what if it doesn’t? What if your blog features such an obscure niche that nobody cares? What if your traffic rarely climbs no matter how much effort you put into networking, link building, social media, and other such popularity searching tools?

Personally, I’d give up on a blog that, after three months, has experienced no growth in stats (traffic, income, and subscribers)–despite regular posting and various free or paid-for advertising. If I’m throwing everything I can into my blog and still nobody cares, I’ll move on to something new–unless it’s a personal blog or I’m writing about something I’m truly passionate about.

But what about you? What’s your cutoff–if you have one?

There are tons of places to see how much traffic you and your competition are receiving. From Alexa to Compete, these tools are numerous and plentiful. You could spend days sitting at your computer, analyzing your competitions’ traffic patterns.

But what about the number of RSS subscribers? Surely that’s a valid stat to compare with competition blogs and websites? But for years, there haven’t been any decent tools to do so. Anyone who was curious about subscribers would have to visit each blog manually and hope that the site displayed the number of subscribers as reported by FeedBurner.

Now, there’s a new tool called Feed Compare which is surprisingly similar (in function and ease of use) to Compete. Enter in a few feed addresses, click the compare button, and you’re all set to go. You get a full chart comparing the subscriber number for your site and your competition. Easy as that.

The service works well. It’s free. It’s flashy. It can track back to two years. The only real problem is that you can only track feeds that use FeedBurner. Luckily enough, any site that’s worth its weight in text is going to use FeedBurner anyway–so no big deal.

Via BlogPerfume.