How To Make StumbleUpon Your Servant

The stats speak for themselves. Thanks for sharing this! I think I’m going to try out something like this.

The next challenge will be converting the one time viewers into regular readers.

So the answer to the question “How To Make StumbleUpon Your Servant” is: stumble your content? Am I missing the magic here?

awesome dude! I’ve been trying this out for 4 days and it’s working beautifully.

Those are some impressive stats. It’s even more interesting when you have the digg stats in there waaaay at the bottom. I’ll have to give this a try and see what happens.
~Terry

You really don’t tell us anything about how to actually do this. What about the fact that StumbleUpon has a ban that will only allow you to stumble your content about 10 times because they shut down your ability for that domain name?

This could have been a good post if you told us something more practical…

About 1 out of 25 members on StumbleUpon are real members. The rest are supposedly bots from what I’ve heard

-Mike

John I would also like to add, that I’m more than sure than sure that you know this, because you’ve said it before “It’s not good to put all your eggs in one basket” and that is exactly what you are doing here. I would suggest you not submit the site to Stumble as it could cause the domain to be banned from the popular bookmark site.

As you know, There are many other ways to get traffic. If that domain gets banned then it will only leave the 5% of traffic that you are currently getting.

In my opinion you are setting a bad example for other people that want to learn from you, such as myself, because they might try the same tactic and end up getting banned.
Please, correct me if I am wrong.

I think I might try this but I dunno if it will work. Thanks for the post though, it’s worth a try.

I think it’s quite easy to get one-off or a moderate run of success on any one social bookmarking site. Recently a tongue-in-cheek review I wrote about the classic 80s movie, Road House, made the front page of Reddit (and by assocation, Wired) and had 20,000 page views in the space of about an hour. At the same time, it was completely ignored on Digg, and had only moderate ’success’ on StumbleUpon.

These are impressive stats, but as others have said, there’s no real advice there. Just an example of how it can work, which I think we all knew already.

SU is great! I have been doing several posts on it and I even gave away free stumbles from http://www.stumblematic.com.

I discovered that humor and controversy work best: http://www.notjohnchow.com/john-chow-killed-by-panda/

Come on John, you couldn’t have edited that for the guy? He can’t get through the first paragraph without sounding like he failed English as a second language.

I like this site, and there’s a lot of useful information on it(maybe even in that post) but I think you should take a little more pride in what you put up in the future. Blog posts don’t have to follow the guide but they should at least approach conversational English.

SU is really great way to improve traffic to your site. Absolutely recommended!

SU is an awesome concept… but I was wondering too, so your method is to stumble your own site’s content?

That’s supposed to be a no-no… right? I accidentally stumbled my site once because of a “mis-click”… and right away someone told me that bad netiquette. hmm….

I must admit that despite being a regular Stumbleupon user, with what appears to be a decent reputation and a long track record of both rating and submitting sites, I’ve never got anything list that kind of response. At best, on the rare occasions that I’ve stumbled my sites, I’ve picked up a couple of hundred stumbles in a very short period of time, and then no further stumbles. Whether that’s poor ratings for those particular pages (I don’t see any way to surmise the thumbs down numbers for a page unless they are linked to a review).

I still think that Stumbleupon is a good way to drive traffic over the long term, but I’m not sure that stumbling your own content is the best way. I’d also be curious to see how many of the visitors cited above actually read or stayed on the page rather than just stumbling through. I think the trick is really to get your page (legitimately) stumbled by other users, in just the same was as sites like Digg also seem to provide far greater success when your pages are independently dugg rather than self-dugg.

Good post.

Have you written similar posts detailing the use of other similar sites? I read your e-book about how you got benned from Digg - but what about some of the other sites? Do you use any of those?

I’m going to give StumbleUpon a try myself.

You know what, I’m going to change my vote from “Can’t write English” to “Complete horse shit.”

You’re telling me this guy’s site, with a google page rank of 2, got almost 400k hits in the past few months just by stumbling his own stuff one time. Well, not really his own stuff since he copied it from other places but still.

I can prove to you he lied at least about finding friends on stumbledupon. He’s a fan of 50 people, only 23 are friends with him. He clearly lied about seeking people out on stumbled upon:
http://mfmalive.stumbleupon.com/friends/

And it just seems much more likely that he photoshoped his stats instead of actually generating those kinds of numbers. I mean, we’ve all read his stuff and clearly there was no useful information there. Why would 200 people(that’s the tipping point number I’ve heard in the past for stumble) give his generic, unfunny, useless pictures and videos a thumbs up? Look at his site, did you find anything there you would thumb up?

John, did this guy pay you so he could put a guest post here?

I think its in everyone’s best interest to read the “Terms of Service” with social bookmarking sites and find out if its cool to stumble or digg your own stuff. Like someone posted, it might only be allowed a limited number of times, or not at all. Get to know the neighbourhood first I guess!

300k is a ton of readers plus you ahve to consider he didn’t buy any of that traffic. If the stats are real they are pretty good.

StumbleUpon is great for traffic, especially for “evergreen” content. One of my recent posts — 7 Handy Google Search Tips and Tricks — got picked up on StumbleUpon and I’ve enjoyed a healthy influx of traffic as a result.

SU has never been good for me.
I tried to experiment with it, but it just was wastage of bandwidth, with complete non-quality traffic.

And ya, the title of the post should have been -
“Why to make Stumbleupon your servant”

My experience with StumbleUpon is that it will send you traffic. But how much traffic it send you, and how sustainable it is, depends on how often you stumble other member sites and pages.

I suppose it’s all about the niche. Just was thinking why people do stumble? They are looking for something or what?

SU traffic is just a waste, the just keep clicking SU button but dont see what’s there in the site.

This is the same reason why I never use stumble upon to bring in some traffics!

And also:

80% of stumbleupon users browse with firefox, and a high percentage of them have the No Script add on running. As the stumbleupon site says, that means that javascript based tracking software won’t register all the hits.

Those screenshots are from the wordpress tracker plugin, which needs to make a javascript call to track traffic. So if that data is to be believed, he probably had twice as many hits as indicated.

That’s averaging 140,000 hits a month. From stumbleupon. To content taken from elsewhere.

By stumbling himself once.

AHHHHHhhhh, now THIS is what I like to see. Yesterday we were talking about being nice to posters and I said I prefer to hear a variety of opinions rather than everybody fawning over the top dog blogger-of course this is just a guest, but I still like seeing all these varied inputs.

At any rate, yeah you can Stumble your own junk. I did about a dozen times, and then they just disabled my ability to Stumble my own site, I can do other people and other people can do me. But I wasn’t so blown away by the traffic numbers or quality that I was bummed about how that all went down. I might get 3-400 visitors over a day or so on a hot post-no clicks on ANYTHING, so it’s just traffic as far as I’m concerned. Like Entrecard-actually not EVEN as good as Entre visitors; those guys come in and sit down for a while, comment, give me free credits or advice.

So my feeling is SU is a GREAT way to explore the web, and good for some spikes in traffic, but not a viable “longterm internet marketing strategy.”

Very good info indeed. Hope you will share more on how to generate traffic. Thanks

It is overwhelming traffic lol. I am very happy that way….let me try it on. thanx for sharing.

Woohooo! I see dead people counting traffic. That’s why John’s probably lovin’ reading this comment thread. That’s lots of traffic already.

I’ve tried to get traffic from stumbleupon, but haven’t had much luck. I think that my articles on my blog are decent. Maybe its just that my niche is a little too specific or technical for the average stumbleupon user. I think advice given above is somewhat useless because the amount of traffic you get really depends on several different variables.

I don’t think there was enough useful information in this post. Many sites have done stumblupon guides which had more information than this post. Doshdosh for instance has several stumbleupon guides which are pretty good.
http://www.doshdosh.com/a-comprehensive-guide-to-stumbleupon-how-to-build-massive-traffic-to-your-website-and-monetize-it/

John… c’mon buddy… Guest blogging once in a while is OK… but this post… c’mon… This is not good stuff! It’s not the kind of posts I expect from your blog. A post showing a pic or your Big Mac would’ve been more valuable than this.

My apologies to your guest blogger… but we do not have to like everything you post, right?

Have a great day.

i believe that posting a humor for once in a week rather than posting friendly content which could bind your users to return and also sends you the stumble upon traffic… by the way that was purely your way and was new idea to get some…

I also can’t believe that the post wasn’t monetized. There’s no guarantee that the ads would’ve been clicked on, but I guess you’ll never know now.

Wow! That sure is a lot of traffic from stumble upon And the fact that most of your site traffic is from stumble upon is quite amazing. I need to use stumble upon more:)

I’ve noticed that having a link to my RSS feed at the end of each post seems to help me get a bit of a subscriber increase from stumbleupon traffic.

While stumbleupon is a great source of traffic, this post doesn’t share half the things It could possibly share. Also people be aware, your domain will be banned if you try to abuse this good service. As I know people who are selling stumbles on 600+ accounts … and all those 600 of them are made by themselves using a script!

Stumble Upon never worked for me. Whenever I’ve stumbled my pages, I got tons of visitors. Majority of them left from the same page. I bet they never even read anything.

John,
I’m highly disappointed in the quality of your recent guest posts. Guess that you’re burnt out or what ever, seems you’re letting just about anyone with a third grade education, “write” on your blog. What’s up? Quality posts have gone out the window, evidence this post. There’s no “how to” in it. Slight a mention of stumbling one’s own post (big no no).
So, John, if you’re out there, consider writing more yourself (a) and (b) if you’ve just got to have guest posters, at least read their writing, prior to post. This does nothing valuable for your blog.

Oh wait, it does. You’ve created link bait. Sorry, won’t link to it.
I am almost as disappointed with this post as I am with your utter refusal to answer my emails about 1M Memories. So, I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised. Is it simply your way of pushing the “little guys down”? and keeping them down?
I think its time that your audience wakes up and realize exactly what goes on. Maybe its time I quit reading your blog.

I use stumble for about half of my posts. My site is fairly new, and I haven’t established a decent archive of good solid content yet. I have noticed, some of the posts I put time into and stumbled, i received 3 times more hits in one day. That is also including diggs, facebook, and adding to delicious.. Looks like I need to step up my stumbles for my good posts!

I actually paid stumbleupon to get traffic. For 5 dollars you get a hundred targeted visitors. Which is actually not a bad deal. My traffic didn’t explode the way I wanted it too, but overall it worked ok.

horrible post

Nice stats, I guess but…Isn’t manipulating StumbleUpon against it’s TOS? or T&C or whatever. I definitely can’t be bothered reading them all (lol) but it doesn’t sound so legit.

Stumble upon had improved a lot of website ’s traffics.But the criteria is must use it everyday,review at least 20 and above website-i mean sincere review,do it consistently,you will see result in a month or even in a week.