How To Get Traffic From StumbleUpon
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This post is a teaming-up proposition for traffic junkies. If you're part of the admirable group that doesn't get a kick from tracking your stats, this might not be for you. Otherwise, keep reading :-)
SUMMARY:
- You can get a ton of traffic to your homepage from StumbleUpon ("SU")
- There are some ways to try get it to happen
- I'm proposing those interested team up to attempt
- This is different from last time in that it's a) one page only and b) that page is your homepage, not a special post
BACKGROUND:
About a year ago, a group of us on the Elbo.ws forum teamed up to promote our sites on StumbleUpon. We would thumb-up and review 2 posts each per week. Unfortunately, the impact was minimal and the group eventually died. I believe this is partly because we stumbled individual reviews, not homepages.
Then out of the blue, 2.5 months ago my site got raped by StumbleUpon. I received somewhere around 10k visits in just a day, 98% of them new visitors. The SU channel being stumbled was "Indie-rock," and the landing page was my homepage. It has since died down to 1k-2k a day, with occasional spikes. Still, the exposure gleaned was amazing -- tallying close to 200k visits now.
PSYCHOLOGY OF A STUMBLER:
- Stumblers are bored and have A.D.D.
- They like to look at pages that are interactive / dynamic / full of content. Most sites don't have this. Similarly, most single posts don't. But blog homepages do.
THE STUMBLEUPON FORMULA:
This is pure conjecture, but I think there are a couple factors that keep SU sending visitors to your site:
- How long a user stays on your site
- How many subsequent pages they view
- Whether they thumb-up
- Whether they review
- Whether they Tweet
A combination of these sends SU the signal that its users like the page and it should thus continue being served.
PROPOSITION:
We form a team to 1) thumb-up, 2) review and 3) Tweet each others' websites.
Their are no guarantees, but this might get you a chunk of traffic.
For those 1-5 of you who are interested, I propose that we start up an email chain. My email is jason@indieshuffle.com. Email me, and I'll add you to the thread. Why email? Well I want to ensure that every participant covers everyone else's page. I think this forum might make it harder for early posters to remember to help out those who join the discussion a bit later. With email, it'll be right up in your inbox grill ;-)
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I'll be happy to help out with this and see if it works, sent you an email.
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I'm in too mate, sounds like a good idea..you scratch my back, I scratch yours eh! :D
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Well, there was a little experiment before. few people isn't enough. But just point me the web you want me to vote. (I don't care about the return vote, I just want to know if somebody else knows how to do it...)
now if I can remember what my old accounts were.
I'd say, just tell me what page you are targetting. and I'll try to shout it on a blog post too and yell to every reader who has an account to up vote. )I figure this will reduce the chance getting filtered by stumble upon server.
another good site to promote if you have a long, complicated post is reddit. lots of traffic there. and also fark.com
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Squashed! Don't tell them about Fark! If I am never going to be on HypeM, I need to keep my golden traffic nugget a secret to counteract the disadvantage.
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Fark? Never heard of it. Looks confusing and mainly focused on news, how do you use it Jess?
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Hey, thought I'd check in with an update. Within days of starting this experiment, I had a huge spike in traffic. Not nearly as high as what Jason saw recently (original post), but pretty big relative to my blog's normal traffic. That lasted for about a week, and now seems to have died off. I'm curious to see if it comes back, though. Did other people see the same thing, or was your traffic bump more sustained?
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I emailed you too jason but I fear it's too late for me.
Indie shuffle is a phenomenal little beast!
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Gonna survey the ~8 or so who participated to see if any of them got more traffic. Mine actually went down :-(
Will ask them to update this thread.
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I think they're smarter than that. I conjecture that they likely cancel out mutual thumb-ups, thus rendering all of our work void.
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I got about 300 visits from StumbleUpon in about a week's time, after which it dropped off pretty quickly. So, nothing like the 1k-2k you're getting, but definitely something positive happened.
I also started thumbing-up other blogs as soon as I was added to the list, likely before people knew to thumb-up my blog, which makes me think those thumb-ups couldn't have canceled each other out (or I'd have never seen the traffic increase at all...if that line of logic makes sense).
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I've tried something like this before with minimal results, I reckon their algorithm only really boosts your traffic if you get thumbs up from people who have reached to your site via the Stumble button.
Haven't looked at my stats though for this one so ill report back soon
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We didn't get any big increase in traffic at all!
But literally in the last 5 minutes our most recent page racked up close to 5k pageviews through Stumbleupon which is probably the biggest and most intense traffic spike we have had for some time.
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Nice APFOS! Looks like there were some latent effects for people. I'm actually seeing a bit of a boost again.
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Hey Jason,I have currently been working of my blog for a year now, and have spent much time making reviews for an assortment of artists and bands, from many different genres. I have seen a moderate rise in my page views over the past year. I have tried used many different social outlets, in search of reaching new readers. One of those being, StumbleUpon. However, I have hardly even seen a hint of traffic through StumbleUpon. In effect, I came across this forum, and thought that your idea this is a prime method in using SU to my favour. After seeing that the forum was created by you, the creator of indieshuffle, (a site I regularly visit), I thought it best to jump on the bandwagon, and hopefully reach those 10k views a day.So before I ramble on some more, I thought I'd just let you know I sent you and email in hopes of joining this group as well recieve some feedback from some fellow bloggers.Thanks,Matt
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Guys, I'm going to discontinue this. The results were mixed, so I'm not going to push it any further. I don't think SU likes mutual thumb-ups, and I assume they're fairly easy to track.
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Yeah I realized I might be a bit late to this discussion but thanks again. Btw Jason I love IndieShuffle, before even viewing this discussion I have been a follower. Keep up the good work, and awesome job with the mediaplayer!
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Mine is steadily rising. I think some Stumblers have more influence than others. i've been using StumbleUpon for a few years now and have "discovered" a few pages which got a some traction (yeah im kind of a big deal). Any how everytime I "discover" each new blog post I do I usually get 100-200 visits even if no one else gives it the thumbs up, if it does get a thumb or 2 then it usually peaks at about 1000 but the sky's the limit. Most i've had in one day was 5k visits and they all came in 5 minutes.
Also there are people who I know personally who tell me they have found the blog through stumbleupon a fair few times so maybe it's linked to facebook or stumble friends as well.
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I had a huge week of Stumblers last week (about 1500 people a day) for no apparent reason. I wasn't part of this group and I just think its relatively random to be honest - we are too few to game the system effectively and without being noticed.
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