A Big Fan Of Stumble
- Thu Aug 16, 2007
- By Susan
- Filed under: The Net, Traffic
- 8 Comments
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I’m a big fan of Stumble? Why? This blog has received over 2300 visits referred by StumbleUpon during its first 6 weeks ‘live’ and I’m increasingly getting more visitors from Stumble over time.
While these numbers are not altogether large numbers, the pattern of impressions over the past month seem to show that traffic is altogether well-targeted and are a great start for the new site. Stumblers tend to have multiple bookmarking accounts, including the most popular Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us.
On Tuesday, Gregg Hawkins asked me about SU and how to encourage people to “stumble” on a post/site and share it with the community. Not too many users are familiar with SU but as mentioned earlier, a lot of people who do use bookmarking services use Stumble…which will benefit your site. Writing a great post with useful content will give you thumbs up from active users, thus giving you more traffic. The more thumbs up, the more traffic you’ll receive.
It also doesn’t hurt to add some fun to your site, something funny like a video or a joke. I’ve maxed out my friend circle on Stumble but honestly I could do a better job about communicating with the SU community and SU groups. I can only imagine what type of change that would do to my traffic.
When using SU, expect a lot of stumblers to not stay on your site for very long. Usually during articles that cause spikes in traffic, you may get a lot of visitors who will only stay 5-10 seconds and leave your site. Don’t lose hope. I left a similar comment on a fellow site, Random Jabber regarding Social Networking. I’ve experienced huge spikes in traffic off of one of my other new blogs (2-3 months old) that brought in over 25,000 visitors last month. Even though a good handful of them left the site quickly, I did experience increased link backs from forums and other sites to a popular article. I also received an increase in comments. You may not always get many readers within your niche but there will be a good number of those that will find your site and will enjoy it enough to give it a thumbs up.
I think it’s worth be an active stumbler. I always try to be an active stumbler and use the toolbar to find new sites I wouldn’t have found otherwise. It’s relaxing and fun. I like to think along the lines: What goes around, comes around. Spread the love.
6:23 am on August 16th, 2007
Yeah, the more I use SU, the more I like it. In my article about networking traffic sucking, I hadn’t used SU much and most of what I was saying was based on a small scale. I think SU visitors are more likely to subscribe to your site over a digg user.
BTW: Thanks for the link love! :)
7:22 am on August 16th, 2007
There’s a few things I’d like to highlight.
“What goes around, comes around. Spread the love.”
I think that is a very key point in blogging. Want people to link to you? Stumble you? Digg you? Etc? Then do it to them! The blogging community will be a much better place if we all look out for each other.
As for people leaving your site after 5-10 sec, I must say, I almost did. I’m sorry to say it, but this site isn’t that aesthetically pleasing. You might want to consider a custom theme, an image that jumps out at people, or making the Google Ad in the header not so prominent.
But I must say, those who leave because of that are missing out - you have great content and I’m glad I’m one of your RSS subscribers.
And there was one other thing I was going to say - but I forgot what it was…
It’ll probably hit me at 3:00 AM…
8:14 am on August 16th, 2007
Thanks Brian for coming by. You really don’t like the theme? Actually I was referring to my other site: Got2BeGreen.com, in regards to the 5-10 second comment. The retention on this site, is MUCH higher. I can only guess because of the subject. People like to read about the environment, but it’s more for a quick read, etc.
And this morning, I actually was in the works to removing that google adsense from the top line as it hasn’t produced results as well as some other tests, on other sites. So, expect to see that removed by the end of the day. It’s bye bye, going. :)
10:24 am on August 16th, 2007
haha great article just stumbled it ;). Since the begining of August I have recieved almost 1000 visitors from SU :). The visitors from SU stay much longer than 5-10 seconds though, according to google analytics they stay for a minute and 50 seconds on avarage, with a 1.81 pages/visit. I think I gain valuable readers from SU. See you around soon!
11:12 pm on August 19th, 2007
I’ve found more interesting sites in the short time I’ve used stumble, then I’ve found in the previous few years.
7:00 am on August 20th, 2007
I love stumble too. It’s awesome for traffic although my traffic is slowly dwindling. :D
11:10 am on August 20th, 2007
Dam I registered and did nothing with the account and got loads of visitors shits unbelievable O_O and the funny thing is I never knew about it until I visited this blog thx xD
5:49 pm on September 6th, 2007
Sometimes I feel like I’m doing too many of these types of sites. I’m going to throw in the towel with technorati and focus on SU. I can’t seem to get anywhere with technorati but mybloglog has been really great.