Jun 12th, 2007 by admin 7,089 Views
Stumbleupon has turned into a big traffic resource for this blog because of it’s interesting content.
How does StumbleUpon work?
StumbleUpon uses “thumb up”/”thumb down” ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn’t find using a search engine.
Basically all you have to do to join StumbleUpon is to register an account and install a toolbar to start “stumbling upon” pages that you find interesting and that you want to share with your “friends”. If a stumbler comes to your website and finds some interesting content, he will probably start to stumble some of your pages. Once a page is stumbled, it will be shown to whole friend network of the stumbler. If you got stumbled by a new user, you won’t receive much traffic because of his small “friend network”, but what about if you get stumbled by some “big stumblers”?
This is what happens (click the image to enlarge it)
Hundreds of visitors reached Linkrain within a few hours. If you have read the ” Blog Updates ” post I wrote 2 days ago, you should know that I’ve installed a “view counter” near the “comment counter” to let my readers know how many times a certain article has been viewed.
As you can see from the image above, this was the stumbled article: ” How and where to promote a Wordpress theme - Wordpress Theme Promotion “. After only 2 hours the view counter changed from “5″ (the article was visited only 5 times because I wrote it a while ago and I installed the view counter only 2 days ago) to:
Yes that’s right. The article has been visited 170 times within 2 hours and while I’m writing this article, the traffic has not stopped yet.
If a “Big Stumbler” comes across your website and he finds something interesting like it happened for me today (it’s not the first time this happens) you can get an incredible traffic boost. Just imagine that only 1 stumbler referred by the “Big Stumbler” starts to browse your website and finds an interesting article. He will probably stumble it and sent it to his network. Now it could be that a friend of the referred stumbler also finds some interesting content on your website and starts stumbling it.
Checkout this Stumbleupon scheme I’ve made:
Theoretically you could receive unlimited traffic thanks to StumbleUpon. Anyway, even one page stumbled by a “Big Stumbler” can bring you hundreds of new visitors, so remember to update your blog and to write original and uinque content.
It really is amazing what can happen to your traffic if the right Stumbler stumbles it. I’ll always remember just after I first joined StumbleUpon, someone must have stumbled my “Attack of the Killer Tortoise” post. My traffic went from a very modest 50 or 60 visitors per day to over 6000! Incredible…..
I have to say that Stumble Upon has been good for a good number of visitors the last two months.
Not conversions though. I have noticed a decent increase in “Stumbled ” traffic, but also my length of visit time is down with it.
A little more people but less time on the site.
You can’t have it all , huh?
Stumble Upon is a great way to show off your site to other people. Especially if you just have started a new one. I was just wondering. If you have lots of ‘friends’ on Stumble Upon, do they show your article to more people? Or do they look more at how many sites you have rated?
I agree with you. It’s a major contributor to my blog’s traffic.
I see guys do exchange in DO forums, I was curious what it is
Viewers from stumbleupon so far have given me the most traffic. I experienced the same thing as you did. From 10 views to 200 views in one hour is truly possible, thanks to the viewers from stumbleupon. And the role of big stumbler is equally important, as I’ve explained in my post on how stumbleupon hugely increased my traffic.
@steve: 6.000 visitors in one day only from Stumbleupon is really incredible, I know that I wrote that theoretically it is possible to get an unlimited amount of traffic thanks to it, but I never thought it’s possible to get 6.000 visitors in 1 day!
@eborg9: I have noticed this to. Yesterday when I received this quick StumbleUpon traffic boost, the “visit length” of my visitors went down. Probably most of the people coming from stumbleupon are only interested in the stumbled article.
@Sandra: If if you have a lot of friends, you can stumble your own articles and show them to your friend network. Maybe some of them will show it to even more people by stumbling it again. Actually I think there is a “friend number limit” of 200 friends for each user. Can someone confirm this?
@Adi Azar: A “Stumbleupon exchange” in forums is nothing else than “I stumble one of your pages if you stumble one of mine”. This is usually not working because it is done by very small stumblers. I tried some stumbleupon exchanges and I never got more than 2-3 visitors from each one.
[…] Linkrain on catching the Big Stumbler: […]
Although I agree StumbleUpon does indeed provide large amounts of traffic if you’re post title is catchy enough to attract people’s attention but would does this convert to long term traffic?
Maybe some of the people that reach your site because their friend stumbled it, are going to subscribe to you feed. When I had this big traffic boost thanks to Stumbleupon a few days ago, the number of RSS readers increased.
[…] StumbleUpon Drives Hundreds of Visitors to Your Blog A look at how the stumbling system works with some nice […]
I never realized stubmleupon could create such great traffic. I’ll have to look a lot more into it.
Damn good info mate but i did not understood the working of stumble yet for that i have to stumble sround i think lol :)!!!
Anyways thanks for such a wonderful info !!!
Regards,
Sam.
Stumble is great if your just looking for visitors; maybe if you have a adsense optimized website.. But REAL bad for conversions..
I am a new user of StumbleUpon and in 8 weeks have experienced sustained traffic to my SU blog:
http://inspirationforch.stumbleupon.com/
I highly recommend StumbleUpon.