Three months ago I had a discovery that changed this blog’s traffic in an unexpected way: I dicovered StumbleUpon, I signed in, and then I submitted some of my best pages there, to see what happens. I was amazed to see how many people visited my pages, how many friends I’ve got in a very short time, and how many things I learned from other people’s pages.
Briefly, StumbleUpon is a social network which now has more than 1 million members, and which is different than other social sites I had met so far. You download and install a toolbar, then, when surfing the net, if you like a page and you want to share it with the community, you press a button (you stumble the page), and the page goes into the StumbleUpon circuit. On the toolbar, you also have the Stumble button, which, once pressed, shows you pages stumbled by other members.
I signed in with StumbleUpon in the beginning of September. Look at my statistics for September: almost 71% of my traffic came from StumbleUpon! It is true that one of my posts made it to the Buzz! Section (a sort of Digg’s front page) and this generated a significant amount of traffic, not only in the few days when it was in the Buzz!, but even three months after that, I still see a lot of traffic coming to that page.
In October, one of my posts got farked (some of you may know what this means for the traffic; I got about 20000 visitors in the first 10 hours or so, and there could have been more if the server had not crashed for a while). Although Fark accounted for 67% of October’s traffic, yet StumbleUpon had an honorable share of almost 18%.
November was a normal month, as I did not have so much time to write new content for my blog, so I put here these figures for comparison: you can see that StumbleUpon almost equals Google in the amount of traffic sent to the site (I get about 150-200 daily uniques from Google, the site being only 4 months old).
But most important of all, I made a few good friends on StumbleUpon, and I even found one of my former colleagues I did not hear from since 12 years ago.
Did anybody of you have similar experiences with StumbleUpon or with other social places? Please let us know, so we can all benefit from your learnings.
4 Comments
The tips and tricks suggested by you are amazing and trustworthy. I will adopt them to promote my blog on the net. My dream is to reach as many people as possible and interact with them in as many ways as possible. Thanks for all the info.
Thank you, Zen Rao, for your trust. I hope you’ll get the great results you want. You are welcome back here any time.
Hi,
Great article with good details. Please keep posting these articles!
- William
Hello. Look at http://socialposter.com/blog/social-bookmarks-submitter/ - this will be interesting to you, it is a program that lets you submit Links to social bookmarking websites automatically! Over 20 popular social bookmarking sites.
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[...] Year 2006 is almost gone, and this blog celebrates its first 5 months of existence. It started on blogger, then moved to its own domain after a couple of weeks and some tens of posts. It survived one Fark, three StumbleUpon Buzz entries, and two Netscape front page entries. After the experience of a cheap webhosting, on poor servers, warned every week that it takes too much of the server’s resources, All Tips and Tricks moved from that small, local webhosting company to Dreamhost, a great place to host your sites. Besides, I got a promo code which gave me a good discount. For those of you who are interested in getting a hosting plan with Dreamhost, you can use the code ATT2007 to get a 50$ discount for one year plans, or 20$ discount for monthly plans. [...]
[...] Connect with people. Make friends. Go social. Choose the social networks that fit you best. You can find a comprehensive list of such sites on Wikipedia. If you want an example of the power of social networking, you can read about my experience with StumbleUpon. [...]
[...] - After discovering Problogger, a great resource for new bloggers and not only, I realized that I can turn everything into a business and I started to learn, to read as much as I could. I found lots of excellent marketing advice at Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki, copywriting advice at Copyblogger, good humour and advertising tips at GapingVoid, lots of SEO tools and tips at SEOmoz, internet marketing advice at Digital Point Forums, and the best social networking service at StumbleUpon (which can bring your articles into the attention of lots of readers). [...]
[...] is given over to the traffic spikes it is worth remembering that social media traffic can be surprisingly long lasting, due to the repeated discovery of your content and the subsequent links that are produced as a [...]