StumbleUpon is My Biggest Traffic Source, Without Even Trying
August 12, 2008 - Written by Gyutae Park
If you have a site or blog that you’ve been trying to promote for a long time, you might be familiar with all of the different types of traffic sources – Google SEO, buying links, article marketing, blog comments, guest posts, etc.
All of these methods of generating traffic are great as they form a solid foundation for your blog and help you to establish a steady flow of visitors. However, you may be missing out on a HUGE opportunity to explode your traffic. This is essentially what happened to me with Winning the Web, until I recently dug into my analytics. Let me show you what I found.
The above screen shot shows that in the past few months, StumbleUpon is by far my best source of traffic with over 11,000 referrals. The funny thing is that I didn’t really focus on promoting my articles through SU. I bought paid reviews on JohnChow.com, Shoemoney.com, and other top Internet marketing blogs, ran some crazy contests, and optimized my pages to rank well in the search engines. However, none of these traffic sources even come close to the monster that is StumbleUpon.
Since SU is a social bookmarking tool, you may think that what happens there is out of your control. This is hardly the case. By working to build out your network and using the tool effectively, you can literally explode traffic to your blog with minimal effort and budget.
This is something that I’ve recently discovered and I plan on shifting a lot of my efforts to social media promotion. The potential reward is just too great to ignore. If you’ve been neglecting SU as a serious traffic builder, you’re making a big mistake. Be sure to sign up for StumbleUpon if you haven’t done so already and add me as a friend to get started.
Maki at DoshDosh has the best SU guide that I’ve seen so far. It’s a bit outdated but it’s probably your best bet if you’re starting from scratch.
Caroline Middlebrook, a budding ‘make money online’ blogger, is also offering a fantastic StumbleUpon course called Stumble Rush that I highly recommend you check out. The first 10 lessons are sent via email for free, but the entire advanced course costs $47. You will definitely make that back in a couple days if you learn to leverage the traffic potential of SU. Check it out.
Is StumbleUpon one of the top traffic sources for your blog? How much greater would it be if you actually spent some time learning the system?
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I know about stumbleupon, but still learn and still don’t know to maximal result…., help and tips? thanks
Hi.
It is a great source of traffic for bot h of my English blogs:
http://www.humus101.com/EN
and:
http://www.berlin101.com
(p.s: I just stumbled you
)
Tal.
Your current strategy may be the best one, which is to leave StumleUpon as it is, instead of working on it.
I would have to disagree with that. Things just don’t succeed by themselves – it takes hard work and determination. Sure, I may have gotten a lot of traffic through SU without real promotion, but think of how much greater it would be if I really focused my attention in that regard.
My sites been getting a lot of SU traffic for the past month. We’ve been pulling in 1-3k unique visitors a day around 85-90% of those from SU.
It was mostly for two articles that got extremely popular. Unfortunately SU traffic does slow down so you do need to have other methods of traffic.
Overall, social media traffic doesn’t convert as well but it makes up for it in sheer volume. Of course you need to have a solid traffic foundation in place, but social media is a great way to build that foundation and to get surges of traffic when you need them most.
Yeah, I’d agree. It definitely doesn’t ‘convert’ as well. It does help out the Alexa ranking and looks good for overall stats. But if you write one flaming hot / UNIQUE post and submit it to SU – you’ve hit the jackpot…
StumbleUpon is the best. I’m convinced that Digg is a cult.
I’m glad you recommended StumbleRush. I purchased it and it is a high quality course. Considering that you can get 10 lessons for free, there is no reason anyone should pass it up!
My experience with Stumbleupon was simply great. I did a test and got 4 thumb ups and received slightly less than 200 visitors! All for getting a few colleagues who liked my article to thumb it up!
Pretty cool and if a blog is optimized to collect subscribers, then there’s no reason why stumbleupon can’t be the best source of traffic and new visitors to your site.
Cheers!
Brad Spencer
Great insights, Brad. SU is my favorite social media tool, mainly because it levels the playing field for everyone. Sites like Digg are controlled by the “Digg mafia”, but SU has more potential for all webmasters.
Were there any learnings in StumbleRush that you found especially important for your success?
LOL, I just signed up for SU yesterday! Hopefully I get simular results. Great post.
I found the basics of what works and what doesn’t to be helpful. A lot of the lessons are intuitive to someone who’s had the toolbar for a while. However, the videos are nice and it’s a great combination of multimedia (you can stream or download the videos) and writing. To the point and action steps are the final icing on the cake.
Go to stumblerush.com and get it for free! If you like it, buy the advanced lessons! The first 10 for free are a great starting point for using Stumbleupon.
PS- this isn’t my site so I have no affiliation whatsoever except as a user and owner of advanced lessons myself.
Cheers,
Brad Spencer
Great blog….useful for newbies like myself looking to get some more traffic to the site. P.S. my blog is at http://www.e-blogazine.com
Thanks for links, I just started figuring out SU for my blog (took a hint after second traffic spike).
By the way people don’t talk much about SU advertising, is it effective?
I’m just inteested in promoting my own expertise trough my blog, so trffic is not the key so much as targeted qualified visitors. Do you think SU can stil work for me.
I kinda gave up on SU, because it converts awful. It’s true that it’s easier to get traffic than other social news sites, but at least Digg and Reddit send considerably larger amounts of traffic and a lot more exposure.
yes, stumbe upon can send a lot of traffic but that traffic is completely useless. they dont convert to a single dime and have high bounce rate
When I first dived into Stumble Upon yes it was great 950 visitors on the first day 0 the next 5 then back 350 then nothing.
I have been posting to Stumble upon for quite some time with no love been given from anything. What could I be doing wrong when my organic search is ok for niche that I write for.
Is all sex and rock and roll in Stumble upon that gets the traffic as there seems to be no 60’s loving being shared for travel discussions and post..
Open to any comments or feedback, but I really think its donkey
Cheers – James littlenomads.com
Thanks for your feedback. SU definitely varies from niche to niche but I think there are plenty of opportunities for the industries you mentioned.
With a lot of networking and a proper strategy, you can stabilize your social media traffic. It won’t be as constant or as targeted as search traffic but the huge influxes can get you a lot of good quality readers that stay on your site.
I think this is so true about stumbleupon. I however got into trouble and my account temporarily deactivated by them. Evidently it is against their Terms of Use to self submit. They track the number of times you promote a single site. They did reactivate after a little hand slap
Just a heads up.
What I have also found as mentioned by one of the comments above is that Stumbleupon is great for traffic, but I have had trouble keeping people. Not sure what that audience needs relative to that from other sources.
Cheers
Stephen
PS I just wrote a post on how to check who reviews you … you might find this useful.
http://www.stephenbaugh.com/blog/2008/09/how-to-see-who-reviewed-you-o n-stumbleupon/
I’ll give it a try as well. Hope it works.
This is very great and interesting information. But I do not really know whether it works like that.