StumbleUpon

[Bee338]

Hi all. I'm very new to blogging and how to efficiently market yourself...and gain new readers who keep coming back. I've heard that StumbleUpon can be really valuable to this. I've been on the site and done some messing around with it, but am not sure how to really take advantage of all it has to offer. Have any of you used it to help make your blog more popular? How?

Thanks!!

[Melody]

Originally Posted by Bee338

Hi all. I'm very new to blogging and how to efficiently market yourself...and gain new readers who keep coming back. I've heard that StumbleUpon can be really valuable to this. I've been on the site and done some messing around with it, but am not sure how to really take advantage of all it has to offer. Have any of you used it to help make your blog more popular? How?

Thanks!!

I just signed up for StumbleUpon but it's not the intuitive to me. I'd love to hear if someone has got an answer to your questions above. Good questions!

[theeventof]

Stumble is (in my opinion) one of the easier sites to gain traffic. This is because you don't exactly NEED to be voted to the front page of the site to get stumbled.

Though I don't have proof I've heard rumors that if you stumble posts frequently it will increase the amount that your submissions get stumbled by other users.

Some warnings

Time on site, Bounce rate, Pages/Visit - These stats will take a nose dive if you see a huge percentage of your traffic coming from stumble. They are notoriously internet ADD. When you think about the purpose of the site it's not that surprising as often times people will stumble 10-15 pages before stopping to read something.

Ad CTR - If you advertise prepair for your CTR to go through the toilet. In fact if you advertise it might be best to not even use stumble. They are probably the most ad-blind referrer. Think about how many sites people are stumbling each minute, they've gotten so accustomed to seeing banner ads that they basically block them out. Plus many of them wont click an ad because it might take them away from their stumbling in the first place.

All in all if you just merely want to see your visitor stat rise than stumble is a good referrer and it will certainly do that. Just start submitting your good posts to stumble and place the stumble counter on your site. See what happens. I've had about 5500 visits from stumble in 3 months. Though since I've moved to wordpress my stumble visits died because most of them were linked to the old (now dead) links.

[Bee338]

Thanks for the response! I was trying to figure out how to find people with similar interests to follow and see if that somehow would gain me traffic, but I couldn't figure out how to search them out. I guess just stumbling a lot will help increase my own sites stumbles? Interesting. Appreciate you explaining!

[Nathan]

I don't like StumbleUpon because I want real readers for my sites. People who stumble tend to bounuce through sites very quickly and it is highly unlikely that they will actually stop and read. It might feel nice to have a large visitor count, but most likely very few of those people will have read what you have to say.

[theeventof]

Originally Posted by Nathan

I don't like StumbleUpon because I want real readers for my sites. People who stumble tend to bounuce through sites very quickly and it is highly unlikely that they will actually stop and read. It might feel nice to have a large visitor count, but most likely very few of those people will have read what you have to say.

Indeed this can be a problem. And while Stumble is typically a high bounce rate referrer. If you have an eye catching post or something with a catchy heading than you might get some of that traffic to stay.

I had a post of mine stumbled in September for nearly 1300 visits in 3 days. Which compared to my average daily traffic of 100 visits was huge! (of course still nothing compared to what stumble could potentially do)

The stumble stats from Google analytics for this post look like this

Pageviews - 1289
Unique - 836
The strange thing to note is that stumble seemed to referrer the same person more than once with 453 return visitors to the page.

However those stats are not the important stats to look at when deciding whether the traffic was worth it.

Time on Page - 1:27 (huge for stumbleupon which typically will be 10-30 seconds on page on average)
Bounce Rate - 45.9% (again huge for stumble which my site average for stumble is 70-80%)

Now the post that was stumbled was titled "A world without the Web!?" and was only about 500 words. In my experience stumbleupon users like catchy titles and short posts. I also had links to other related posts at the bottom of the page which could have helped the bounce rate.

This is the only instance of my site being stumbled for more than a few hundred visits in a short amount of time and one of the only times stumble has resulted in a relatively high time on site reading and a low bounce rate.

Also I'd like to note that I didn't receive a single ad click for any of the 1289 views so my CTR plummeted as a result. If you're trying to convert your traffic into ad revenue stumble is DEFINITELY not your best option.

[Melody]

@theeventof - What is the link to your Stumble Upon page? I'm brand new to SU. I haven't decided how much I will use it, or even if I like it, but I'll be glad to follow you.

[Chrisg]

Isn't it a bit like Digg? Correct me if I'm wrong.

[theeventof]

@melody here's my profile on stumble I'll return the follow!
theeventof's reviews - StumbleUpon

@Chrisg - It's kind of like digg in that it's a collection of submitted sites broken down into categories. The difference is digg has more of a targeted appeal because the user must physically click on the link to the site they wish to visit where as stumble they are clicking on a button that brings them randomly to a site within their selected choice of categories.

The problem with digg is you truly need to get people to digg your stories for you to receive meaningful traffic where as stumble's algorithm seems a bit more randomized as far as spreading the traffic out.

[Chrisg]

Interesting to know. I've never used either of them nor any social websites like Facebook or Twitter to get some traffic. Maybe I should.