The Raw Power of StumbleUpon

I Stumble article more often than Digg them because it's very easy, with the StumbleUpon toolbar installed. Just click the "I like it!" button and it's done -- no searching on the blog for a link or button.

I was not aware of the difference being that big... will have a look again at StumbleUpon!

I really want to start using StumbleUpon but I am so far confused. Every time I try to say I like it from the tool bar, it just sends me to an empty page. I write the kind of content that I feel would do well in that environment. In fact, on my first week live (two weeks ago) I had one really high traffic day that I was able to trace back to someone recommending a post on StumbleUpon. I acknowledge its value. Perhaps I should spend some time there this weekend.

StumbleUpon is one of the best kept secrets on the web IMHO. Where else can you post and share your content to an audience of ppl looking/stumbling for that type of content.

I stopped promoting at all in the social media scene and have instead stuck to stumbling and pay stumbling my posts. I would think the audience type would lead to better traction / readership. Far better traffic then what I've experienced on Twitter.

StumbleUpon delivers thousands more to my articles than digg or delicious. The best part about stumbleupon is that the traffic lasts for much longer than a day or two.

Wow, that's pretty impressive. However, while I won't dispute the fact that StumbleUpon can generate massive traffic, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a poorer source of QUALITY traffic in the known universe. That's why I'm reluctant to invest much time in it. What Stumble-traffic leaves behind just disappoints me anyway. :(

I'd like to add that that's just how I personally see it, though, and what is also critical is obviously the TYPE of site you're running. Many people love StumbleUpon. I'm just not impressed with it myself. And that might be due to my own inadequacies. :)

I totally agree - SU brings my blog a ton of traffic, especially compared to the other venues.

Chris, I'd be interested to hear what you think about the *quality* of visitors. I'd heard that stumblers are quick visitors - bouncing in and out at a rapid pace. I suspect this is the case for me as well. I convert a far lower percentage to subscribers and they don't click around the site much at all.

Not that I stop asking for people to stumble my posts, of course... I always include a text link asking for a stumble right under all of my posts. I stopped including digg (not my target audience anyway) and am thinking about nixing mixx.com too.

Would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for this post!

But I've yet to find the referrer that leaves me great traffic. The other day was my best traffic day ever. BoingBoing drove that. I had 3 TIMES the traffic I've ever received. Only 100 new RSS subscribers. I'm not complaining overall and yes, some people don't have a hundred right now. But that made for less than a fraction of 1% of the traffic.

But, when talking with Christopher S. Penn yesterday at lunch, we both agree that my site's attempts at subscription conversion need improving.

Chris, This is a great reminder to put an easy "share this" button with the posts on my blog. Like Debra Dalgeish, I have the Stumble toolbar installed. But I have to remember that not everyone does.

Terry Starbucker advised me during Blogger Social NYC in April, that Stumble is important but is is also very helpful to be stumbled by a highly visible stumbler. Shaun McClane first stumbled your ebook post. Then Liz Strauss did.

I have been praying (and hinting) that Liz Strauss stumble my August 1 Welcome Prosperity Celebration 888 post. She commented on it and even later acknowledged what a lovely poem my 81 year old father managed to leave in a comment for my husband Ray's August 8th birthday there. But no Stumble. Sigh.

Your post could definitely be my true aha moment. Put an easy Share button on your blog bozo!

It's very interesting to see how powerful delicious is. I will use that more often.

I recently started thinking twice about Digging posts of importance to me (my own/clients) when it was mentioned in a July BlogHer session that DIGG's with that have only been dugg 3-4 times have a reverse effect on Gooogle. So unless you are ready to rally something to popularity, don't DIGG it. This is either SEO myth or reality.

Twitter sent me to this post so Twitter remains important too.

This has been my experience as well Chris. I've found on average that Stumbleupon gives me 60% more traffic than Digg, newsvine, Mixx combined.

I'd love to know why! Have theories, just not sure.

Thanks for sharing. Look forward to the book.

The same happened to me with StumbleUpon and a recent top-ten list I did. StumbleUpon has given me almost 10 times as much traffic as the other services. I'm very pleased with the results!

I actually totally forgot about stumble upon. I will actually start using right after i press the submit button for this comment.

Chris, you have a created a very important post (as you often do) because we are all about to learn a lot more about Stumble. There are some mysteries to it.

Does Stumble provide a how to guide? I've never found one from them.

One mystery is how to get Stumble to choose a decent thumbnail image when it takes my Stumble. I asked several people about this and they didn't have a clue.

If I am not mistaken, there is no permalink to a Stumble so if you want to share it with a client, they only way is to send them to your profile.

It's easy to check to see amongst your friends on Stumble, who is Stumbling what. With the Stumble tool bar, you can just hit "friends" and check.

What has not been easy, for me, is to find my Twitter friends' Stumble handle nor to check in advance if they are active Stumblers. If I fan them and they never friend me back, what does that mean? It appears usually just that they are not active. I put my Stumble handle "lindasherman" on my Facebook profile (OMG I just went there to check and they just changed the profile lay-out). And on the "link" tab of my blog. Not everyone is consistent everywhere. I use "itsdifferent4girls" as a handle in some places, "lindasherman" elsewhere.

I'm a big fan of stumbleupon, but as some people have pointed out, it's kind of the flash flood of traffic. You'll get hundreds or thousands of visits with about an avg time of 30 seconds on site. Other people in social media posts have commented that the one thing about the digg crowd is that people generally tend to read the content (ie pageview times above 2 minutes). However, it is nice that you'll get flashes of stumbleupon traffic over time once you get lots of content stumbled, as people will discover things later on down the road.

I think the biggest difference you'll find with StumbleUpon traffic is that you get a lot less trackbacks. Seems like many Stumblers are not bloggers

I'm kind of with Harold on this. I've seen lots of sites, big and small, that I have worked on get traffic bumps from StumbleUpon, but that traffic generally seems to be a bit more, err, "dubious" than from something like Digg or del.icio.us.

If you're running a site that is of broad appeal and/or is monetizing traffic through ads and such, SU might have value, but my sense is that better quality traffic is probably coming from other sources.

I get a LOT of eyeballs from SU, too. They also seem to spend more time on the site than people coming from elsewhere.

ok, i had to leave one more comment. I added stumble upon 4 minutes ago, and my hits are already crackin. i was really slippin on not using this before. Thanks Chris!

I notice a pretty nice increase in traffic from StumbleUpon too. I actually don't use SU as much as I should (and anytime I get any Stumble traffic it is because someone else submitted the link), but it really is an effective way of linkbuilding.

Nice post!

Interesting discussion. I'm taking a SU course from Caroline Middlebrook and I didn't know there was so much to using SU effectively. There are right ways and wrong ways to stumble. Reading Chris' results confirms I am on the right track and encourages me to keep at it.

@Colbie - well cool! Love it when something is useful to others. In fact, that's really the only reason I write here. : )

I signed up for SU today. Let's see what happens ...

I discovered a lot of interesting websites through StumbleUpon... and I think that S.U. is easier to use than digg.

Chris, with regards to your earlier comment on the traffic from Boing Boing : would you say your only measure of traffic success is conversion to subscription? Do you look at other factors such as time spent or pages viewed? Just curious, as these tend to be the factors that I'd argue most sites use.

Also, I hope you know that most folks would _kill_ for a conversation to subscription rate of 1% -- the fact that you got 100 new subscribers primarily from one source in one day actually sounds quite impressive, at least to me.

My blog is only up since May so it's a bit new. However, I am generating 50% of my traffic through stumbleupon. I've noticed however, that I get a huge boost immediately following the post and then it falls off dramaticallly. In addition, I don't get many repeats or multiple page views. However, it's a great volume driver and I will continue to use it.

fact..i am so confused with stumbleupon

Chris, i have noticed as well that STumble upon brings me about 10% of my overall traffic, which is nice!

I think maybe if you made your rss feed more prominent and make your "free ebook" much more prominent. If you need a graphic, i'm not the best at it, but I could be something together, that is done well enough to spark action.

Or I could write a great headline. Just thoughts.

P.S- your RSS is blue which is not a very passionate color. well it's like teal which is worse than blue. Make it red, orange, something exciting. This does make a difference.

Rock on though!

I wish i had 7,000 subs!

@Jay - maybe my expectations are too high?

Stumble brings some of the worse traffic on the web unless you're selling page views, in which case it's great (except for your advertisers).

Which means it (eventually) sucks then too. :-)

@Chris: Maybe. :-)

I think about it like this -- you said "BoingBoing drove... 3 TIMES the traffic I’ve ever received. Only 100 new RSS subscribers." I'd want to evaluate the success looking at a few things:

1) How much traffic vs. how many new subscribers do you usually get on an average traffic day? This would be your benchmark to compare to traffic from new sources. (Is it much more than 33? If not, based on what you said here I'd say BoingBoing did a pretty good job.)

2) What have other traffic bumps done for your subscriber numbers in terms of proportionate numbers of visitors, relative to your benchmark? This to me is the relative measure of success, assuming your sole aim is to raise your immediate subscriber numbers. (Did a site that drove half the traffic of BoingBoing drive more than 50 new subscribers? If yes, I'd call that a higher quality traffic driver.)

3) Based on what you know about comparable sites with comparable goals, how well do you think they would convert on similar traffic? This would be, for lack of a better term, your rough competitive benchmark, and could inform things like your need to optimize better, as you mentioned. (Since you mentioned Penn, I think his blog would be a good example of one to compare to immediately. How would his blog convert on similar traffic?)

4) Do you have other goals for your site? (Maybe average time on site, pageviews, whatever?) What are are your benchmarks for THOSE, and how have particular traffic bumps move the needle on them?

See kids, this is what happens when you work as a marketing strategist -- you stay up nights posting lists in the comments on the blogs of strange men. This is why friends don't let friends work at agencies. :-P ;-)

Chris - I think there's an argument to be made on where your particular 'fans' hang out. I find my referrers vary on any given day but I think the most important reference on the graphic is the Google feed sharing, and somewhat surprised that Friendfeed isn't there at all.

Chris,

I totally agree with you about StumbleUpon. I have been using it since 2004. The traffic from SU is constant, unlike Digg where it is active for 24 hours and then ends.

But, there are good and bad ways of using it, as in any website. I have been picky as to which sites I Stumble, so my followers know that they can trust my choices.

Hi Chris.

That is great traffic. Stumble Upon seems to do great in spikes for me.

There is one thing that you stats cannot show you that you might find interesting.

I found you from GREAT word of mouth. I was on the phone talking to Phil Gerbyshak http://makeitgreat.typepad.com/ and he told me he thinks every word you write is law.

He spoke so highly of your blog that I checked it out and have been coming back time and again.

If Google Analytics could track phone, email and personal recommendations, I do not know if it would be the #1 source but I bet it would be some of your most frequent readers.

I found that StumbleUpon gave me loads of free traffic, at first, but then died down to a whimper after a few good months.

SU relies on the efforts of third parties to stumble you and blog you well. You have no control over SU to deliver you good, targeted traffic.

I'm getting better results with the EntreCard community now. How much traffic you get depends more on how much effort I put in.

I wrote a blog post about this.

Just over the past two days I had a record-breaking traffic spike thanks to StumbleUpon. More than 20,000 hits over 2 days so far. I've never been an avid Stumbler, but I gotta respect the power of the system.

I have just started using stumble upon. However I am a bit confused about how it works. Can anyone please clarify. Does anyone know why i get a huge spike right after i submit it to Stumble Upon and then it seems like it disappears off the face of the earth? I just dont understand their system

@Sonja: This is the common experience with SU. You join up, you have fun stumbling your own posts. You get a huge instant hit of traffic, and then nothing.

Then after a while SU refuses to allow you, or anyone who frequently stumbles your site to stumble you anymore. So now, neither you nor friends of yours can stumble your site, and you become totally reliant on random individuals to stumble you.

And the nature of traffic is always a sudden big rush and then nothing. Plus no comments from the SU community, plus high bounce rate. SU fans are mostly there for pretty artwork. If they don't see eye candy, they hit that stumble button to get the next site up.

Despite people claiming to know how to get SU to deliver consistent reliable traffic for their site, none of their methods work.

The best methods for generating traffic revolve around taking positive action yourself. If you have to rely on third parties to promote you, you will never get what you desire.

I've never worked for a site that DIDN'T get massive amounts of SU traffic. For some of the people above me, I think it's important to realize that you will never be successful at ANY kind of social media if all you do is sign up and promote yourself. You have to bring a lot more to the table than that, specifically your willingness to listen to what people around you are saying.

I've long been a fan of StumbleUpon. I hear what Brian Clark says above about it oftentimes being "low quality" content.

The thing is that SU is interest driven, unlike other sites which just look at general popularity. By filling out your own profile accurately (and, um, honestly) and connecting with other folks with similar interests you join a pool of like minded people.

I've found that a wide variety of niche sites can attract quality traffic via SU by simply staying true to their network's interest. Tagging accurately & adding a review of the stumbled site really go a long way towards filtering out the junk traffic.

This new news? LoL oh i didnt read all that ,stop!!

Stumbleupon is the greatest way to explore the internet. I've made some great friends too. I find things I would never find on my own, and my friends recommend pages they think I would like.

great blog. thanks for sharing. i just referenced your blog in my own case study: http://jeffgoins.myadventures.org/?filename=why...

I have been trying hard to use stumbleupon to increase my blog traffic but so far the results are not too encouraging. However, I shall adopt your strategy and let Let's hope it works. Thanks

Great post. I also get a high percentage of referrals from Stumbleupon. Compared to other social bookmarking sites.