When I blogged as a hobby, I thought that building traffic meant seeking out and commenting on other blogs. Because very few readers get past the first few comments on a post, and even fewer visit commenter links, most comments only reach one reader: the site owner.

After years of flat traffic growth, I can tell you that commenting is a good way to make friends and network with other site owners, but relying on its one-to-one nature is much more time consuming and less effective than building traffic through social sites like StumbleUpon.

Before we get to how it can exponentially increase your traffic, let’s take a quick look at how StumbleUpon works.

How StumbleUpon Works

StumbleUpon works like this: You install the StumbleUpon toolbar into your browser and pick topics that you are interested in. When you click the Stumble button in your toolbar, StumbleUpon shows you a random web page from the topics that you like. If you give the page a thumbs up, it gets stored on your personal StumbleUpon page. When you click the toolbar again, StumbleUpon feeds you another random page.

Sounds like a waste of time, right? That’s what web surfing is, folks: a big, entertaining waste of time. If you’re going to waste time, StumbleUpon lets you waste it efficiently because it gives you pages in topics you want, recommended by people with similar tastes. It’s like having your own personal army of surfers who review and cut out a lot of the pages you don’t care about.

Stumbling pages is fun (and a little addictive), but where StumbleUpon gets interesting is in its networking capabilities. As you find other users with similar interests, either on your own or by StumbleUpon’s similar user introductions, you can add them to your StumbleUpon network. When you add someone to your network, their recommended pages are served up to you as you stumble.

What’s The Point?

The point of StumbleUpon is to find interesting things on the web. By adding people to your StumbleUpon friends list, you are painlessly building a network of people who have similar tastes as you. You benefit by enjoying what they stumble, and if they think that your stumbles are worth keeping track of, they might add you as a friend, too.

Let’s say that you spend enough time stumbling that you build up a network of fans and then stumble one of your own pages because you think that some of them might enjoy it. If one of your fans adds it as a favorite, your fan’s fans will see it when they stumble. If one of those people then adds it to their favorites, their fans will see it. As the page winds its way through the different networks, it exponentially drives traffic to your site.

Unlike other social sites, there’s no rule or stigma in StumbleUpon against stumbling your own pages, but I generally keep self-stumbling to a minimum because I hope other people will enjoy my writing enough to stumble them on their own. When I built my beard page in early November, I knew that no one was going to find it because it was outside of the normal blog flow, so I stumbled it myself.

Here are the results:

The graph above shows the number of visitors per day so far this month. The flat, light blue line is where my traffic had been hovering for years. The first major spike is where my beard page caught fire. In 2 days, I had surpassed my average monthly unique visitors from when I blogged as a hobby, and in 2 weeks, my average monthly traffic had doubled and was still rising.

But It’s Garbage Traffic, Right?

If you’ve had experience with other random web surfing sites, you may think that StumbleUpon delivers surfers who pop onto a single page and never come back. Years ago, when I used another random surfing site called BlogExplosion, that’s exactly what would happen. I’d get a rush of traffic, and the readers would barely stay for 10 seconds before running for the exit. The traffic was worthless for building any sort of reader relationships. In contrast, StumbleUpon has actually shown itself to be a higher quality source of traffic than I’m used to.

There is a statistic called the “bounce rate” that tells you what percentage of visitors are hitting your site and then leaving after only viewing one page. When I blogged as a hobby, my bounce rate was traditionally in the 70% range. The bounce rate for StumbleUpon traffic is around 35%, meaning that visitors from StumbleUpon are twice as likely as an average visitor to check out additional pages before moving on.

Get Stumbling!

StumbleUpon is a community of web surfers that can provide you with a more targeted surfing experience, but using the networking features can help you to create a personal network of people with similar interests. It’s a community, not a traffic building scam, so if you treat other Stumblers as people instead of numbers, you may end up with not only huge amounts of traffic, but with surfers who will explore more of your site.

To get started, head over to StumbleUpon and sign up. If you’re interested in seeing what I’m stumbling, don’t be shy about addding me into your network. If you need more info, be sure to check out the articles that I’ve compiled in the section below.

Good Luck and happy stumbling!

Further Resources

If you want to learn more about leveraging StumbleUpon to build your traffic, be sure to check out some of the articles below.

• Everything You Could Possibly Want to Know About Social Media
  Vandelay Website Design
• A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon
  Maki at DoshDosh
• Building Your Blog With StumbleUpon
  ProBlogger
• Building a StumbleUpon Power Profile
  ChristianR
• Claim Your StumbleUpon Blog Through Technorati
  Bill Hartzer

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

Posted in Blogging