Do You Use Stumbleupon?

Debra Hamel
#1. July 11th, 2007, at 7:01 PM.

Hey, Adam, thanks for the mention! And I love the new placement of the RSS feeds….

I’ve been quite surprised at the numbers that StumbleUpon can bring in. I don’t know, like you, how high quality the traffic is. Presumably the percentage of visitors who stick around for any length of time is pretty small. On the other hand, there’s got to be some benefit, and as you said, that’s how I found you

Aaron M. Potts
#2. July 11th, 2007, at 7:58 PM.

I use Stumbleupon and I love it! There have been times when I have seen well over 1,000 page views in a day from Stumbleupon alone when enough people Stumble one of my posts.

As far as the best system for making the most of Stumbleupon, they are much like the search engines in that no one seems to know EXACTLY how it all works, but there are some basic guidelines that seem to work for everyone:

1) Stumble pages that you find OFTEN
2) Add Stumbleupon friends who write about things that YOU want to be found for (i.e. – kids all playing in the same sandbox are bound to run into each other eventually)
3) When using the STUMBLE! button on the toolbar, rate the pages that you come across, as that is the same thing that you want other people to be doing. It is definitely part of the success of any given page that has been Stumbled.
4) Keep your “magnetic” items on your pages above the fold. Since Stumbleupon traffic is not as sticky as search engine traffic, you have very little time to try and convert them from a random stumbler to someone who stays around for awhile.

Those are just some ideas that I have seen floating around. I’d love to hear what others have to say as well. My S/U username is aaron114 if you want to check out my page and add me as a friend.

Pixelhead
#3. July 11th, 2007, at 10:56 PM.

Thanks for stumbling into me Debra. I am looking forward to finding out more about BAFAB and your other projects.

Aaron, thanks for the great comment. The guidelines look some pretty smart tips for using Stumbleupon . When you say stumble pages you are on frequently, you don’t mean to stumble a page more than once do you?

Great advice about keeping the “Magnetic items” above the fold.

Thanks, and I will stumble you.

Snoskred
#4. July 12th, 2007, at 3:05 AM.

I stumble also.. it’s getting into the habit of doing it which isn’t too easy.. I stumbled my whole links lists last week, which was over 200 sites. Many of them had not been stumbled before so I wrote review after review..

I’m reading you via No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community at Bumpzee, on the RSS feed. I don’t think I’ve been here before, I think I’d remember that spinning head.. which is totally cool!

Snoskred
http://snoskred.blogspot.com/

Pixelhead
#5. July 12th, 2007, at 11:55 AM.

Thanks for stopping by Snoskred…200 sites, thats quite a lot of Stumbling.
Thanks for stopping in and commenting, hope to see you again.
Adam

Debra Hamel
#6. July 12th, 2007, at 12:15 PM.

Here’s a question, because I still don’t find StumbleUpon intuitive to navigate.

Is there some way, once you’ve stumbled a page, to see how many people have liked it? I know you can see reviews, but what about thumbs up?

Pixelhead
#7. July 13th, 2007, at 3:08 AM.

Good questions Debra. I have no idea, but I if I find out or if any other visitors can answer Debra’s questions, please leave a comment.

Aaron M. Potts
#8. July 14th, 2007, at 9:55 PM.

Adam,

Sorry about the delayed response. I must have missed a notification about updated comments on this post.

To answer your question, no I was not talking about Stumbling the same page more than once. The Stumbleupon toolbar will not let you do that even if you wanted to. You can Stumble different individual URL’s from the same domain, but you can’t Stumble the exact same page more than once.

Debra – yes, there is a way to see how many other people have given a thumbs up to any post that you Stumble. When you log in to your own Stumbleupon account, you will see a list of pages that you have recently Stumbled. Next to the title of each Stumbled post is text that identifies the domain that the post originated at. When you click the text link, it will take you to the actual Stumbleupon voting page, where you will see a “People who like this website” section which shows all of the other people who gave it a thumbs up.

Pixelhead
#9. July 15th, 2007, at 3:00 AM.

Aaron, thanks for answering Debra’s question.
I have another one if you or anyone else cares to answer.
Is it possible to stumble too much to the point of spamming?

Debra Hamel
#10. July 15th, 2007, at 3:02 AM.

That’s a good question, Adam.

Aaron, yes, thanks for the response. StumbleUpon doesn’t seem to make things very intuitive. I’m also a little alarmed now that no one seems to like my stumbles very much!

Pixelhead
#11. July 15th, 2007, at 3:12 AM.

I personally have never used the thumbs down, and not sure I know when I would or should use it.

Aaron M. Potts
#12. July 15th, 2007, at 11:49 AM.

Adam – I don’t think it is possible to stumble to the point of spamming, but I do think that there is a point of diminishing returns. The whole point behind stumbling is to point out web pages that have exceptional value – pages that would be worth other people in your network to click on.

Yes, you COULD stumble all day every day and would probably see some traffic from the effort, but in the end, it wouldn’t be quality traffic. I would advise sticking to only stumbling the higher quality stuff, and to also leave a comment whenever you stumble. That GREATLY increases the chances that someone else will read it and also give it a “thumbs up,” which in turn builds your credibility as a stumbler.

Also, you mentioned when to use the “thumbs down”. That is a tool that the community has for getting rid of crap stumbles. People realized a long time ago that Stumbleupon can be a great source of traffic, so they have started groups that just run around stumbling everything, even if it isn’t quality material. Although Stumbleupon has ways to circumvent some of that, the “thumbs down” allows the users to basically say “This stumble was low quality”. If the same stumbler gets too many down votes, his/her pages won’t show up as often when people click the Stumble! button in the toolbar.

Debra – I don’t know what you’ve been stumbling, but 2 basic guidelines that might help are:

1) Be patient. Just like building up website traffic, the Stumbleupon community needs to get to know you and see what type of sites you are stumbling.

2) I don’t have any hard facts to back this up, but it makes sense that you want to normally stumble the same “genre” of posts. If you are going from celebrity smut to philosophy to Nascar to knitting, people are going to get confused about what to expect from your stumbles!

Debra Hamel
#13. July 15th, 2007, at 1:18 PM.

“…from celebrity smut to philosophy to Nascar to knitting”

How did you know?!!

Just kidding. Thanks again for the insightful response.

Brown Baron
#14. July 16th, 2007, at 4:57 AM.

I like the crowd from SU. Much better than Digg.

Steven
#15. July 21st, 2007, at 7:05 PM.

Stumble Upon has been my #1 source of traffic. It’s brought traffic to a number of different pages, so it definitely should be used by any blogger who’s trying to build some traffic.

Pixelhead
#16. July 21st, 2007, at 9:54 PM.

Steven over the past couple of weeks, I have been making a conscious effort to stumble more frequently. I was particularly impressed with the amount of stumbles I had with my last article about creating content with Peopleized. But even though I had a lot of hits, visitors did not stick around. Maybe I need to work on the headline a bit more.
Got any suggestions for keeping stumblers around?

Steven
#17. July 21st, 2007, at 10:12 PM.

That’s something I’m trying to work on too. I think I am going to add a call for subscriptions at the top of my posts like you see on some blogs. Obviously increasing the percentage of visitors that turn into subscribers would be a big improvement.

I’ve also thought about adding an add to del.icio.us link high on the page. Maybe if Stumblers bookmark the pages they will be repeat visitors.

Another idea is to include links to other posts (when appropriate) in the first paragraph or two. I’m sure the majority of visitors from Stumble Upon do not read an entire article, so if links to other posts are high on the page it may increase page views.

Pixelhead
#18. July 21st, 2007, at 11:00 PM.

Hmm, I had not thought of adding the bookmarks thing higher. That sounds interesting. I know I have the bookmarks badge at the bottom of the posts. I wonder if I should consider moving it up near the Posted by name?

Debra Hamel
#19. July 22nd, 2007, at 12:02 AM.

Why don’t you try it for a week or two and see if you get any results?

Pixelhead
#20. July 22nd, 2007, at 4:56 AM.

I will have to do it prior to my next post. I’ll have to keep better records to be sure. At this point in time my record keeping is anything but accurate, so I wouldn’t be sure if it was effective or not.

Kevin
#21. July 23rd, 2007, at 7:32 PM.

I’ve come to think of stumbling as a sort of speed-dating for websites. It allows you to see a whole bunch of sites in a short period of time — and you’ll find yourself coming back to only a handful. But that handful will be tuned to just what your interests are.

I think this is good news to those who create quality sites since they’ll gain users faster. If you have bad content, you won’t get the gains.

Kevin
–
http://www.21st-century-citizen.com

Pixelhead
#22. July 23rd, 2007, at 7:42 PM.

How right you are Kevin about the quality content.

I don’t spend too much time actually stumbling, but I guess I should put it on my daily schedule to do a bit of stumbling a day. I know at least one blogger that does a “daily stumble post”.

Stephen Cronin
#23. September 4th, 2007, at 8:47 AM.

Hi, I haven’t tried StumbleUpon yet, but I can see I’ll have to.

One thing which puzzles me – I’ve heard reports about people getting in trouble from StumbleUpon for stumbling their own content. I can’t remember where I read it, but apparently it’s against the Terms and Conditions. Can anybody verify whether this is true?

Aaron M. Potts
#24. September 4th, 2007, at 12:32 PM.

I have heard many people say that Stumbling your own content is NOT a good idea. I do not know how (or even if) Stumbleupon actually tracks that, but personally, I don’t think it is worth the risk.

If you’ve got good content, other people will Stumble it, and you casting one more vote for your own content will not make enough of a difference in the overall scheme of things to justify the chance of Stumbleupon penalizing you for doing so.

That’s just my opinion, though!

Pixelhead
#25. September 4th, 2007, at 12:33 PM.

Stephen, I believe you can stumble your own site, but if it is crap, the stumblers will give you a thumbs down. I read through the terms and did not find anything about it, but I could be wrong.

Aaron, great advice as always, thanks.

Kevin
#26. September 4th, 2007, at 1:00 PM.

I’ve stumbled a number of my own pages. At first, I got a lot of traffic from it — but later I was unable to stumble any more pages on the site. I sent a note to the SU folks and they replied that they have rules about how many pages you can stumble on a particular site — and I guess I used up the number I had for my own site.

I believe they’d encourage you to stumble your own pages so you get a sense for how much traffic they can generate — this helps them sell their ‘paid stumbles’. If you have no sense for their traffic, you probably wouldn’t be interested.

Now I focus on writing good content and my readers stumble pages for me. It works better in the long run.

In fact, this page got stumble this morning – (now I just need a few more stumblers to pile on and I’ll get a nice traffic rush…).

Good luck –
Kevin

Pixelhead
#27. September 4th, 2007, at 1:34 PM.

Kevin, that does make sense about allowing you to get a sense of the amount of traffic. I did not know about their “paid stumbles”.

Steven Snell
#28. September 4th, 2007, at 10:06 PM.

I’ve seen quotes from their terms that say they don’t allow you to stumble your own pages, but I didn’t actually read the terms myself (I’m sure I checked a box that I read them). Yes, you can buy visitors for $0.05 a piece, I just set up an advertisers account last night. It’s interesting because if the paid visitors give your page a thumbs up it can create even more traffic, and you won’t pay for that traffic.

Pixelhead
#29. September 4th, 2007, at 10:21 PM.

Thanks Steven. Hmmm so at least 200 visitors for 10 bucks. I guess if your page is designed to keep them around for extended periods of time it would be worth it.

Steve Elliott
#30. March 10th, 2008, at 7:49 PM.

Sorry to bump an old thread but it was in your “review of 2007″ on the front page!

There are various forums out there where people are offering deals on Stumbles. The kind of things you see are 100 stumbles with some reviews and tags for maybe $20.

Surely that spoils the spirit of things and just lets the spammers run riot. Eventually, the quality of sites that are recommended will lessen and the value of stumbles will deteriorate?

http://www.gadgets4nowt.co.uk

xpango
#31. March 13th, 2008, at 11:14 AM.

Yeah, I use Stumbleupon. We have a stumble exchange on the entrecard forums and it has produced very good traffic for me. I had 1k day one time with it

Rome

free Sudoku Puzzles
#33. July 24th, 2008, at 5:50 PM.

I use Stumbleupon and i really love it .first i would like to say thanks for your link. i know really its produced traffic .Nowadays most of them provide these kind of links…..