This post was guest blogged by Faisal Anwar of Letscafe Media.
I tried this method before and it worked quite well. Overall I got around 300K legit views, no paid to surf whatsoever. All I did was to use StumbleUpon. Most of you may say that’s normal, to get a couple hundred thousand views from Social bookmarking site. I don’t think so, simply because I don’t take StumbleUpon as a social bookmarking site. SU is totally different from Digg and the users are also more subject based. Unlike Digg, user sees whatever that is on their frontpage. It’s almost like a visit to the toilet for digg, come in and go.
What’s The Magic?
I tested this on my site letscafe.com. Basically I treat every post as potential viewer subscribing to my content. The content you show on your site reflects what your site is all about. From my experience, funny stuff does really really well on StumbleUpon. All you need to do is post some funny stuff once a week and wait for the magic to begin. Like I said, your content reflects your site. So don’t overdo it or people would think your site is suppose to be a humor site (That’s the last thing you want). To make sure that doesn’t happen, title your post something like “Your Site funny moment of the week” as an example.
Community on StumbleUpon?
You don’t even need friends on StumbleUpon for this to work. I did it without any friends. Instead people add me as friends after seeing the content I deliver. StumbleUpon works by itself. Just stumble your content and wait a few hours or day for it to get you views.
Where’s The Proof?
These are the stats over 4 months. Take note that 95% of the views came from StumbleUpon. December was when I started using this method. Unfortunately for me, I pumped in too much picture to my site almost every day until it became a humor site (that not my original intention). Since then viewers just came for the pictures and revenue dropped tremendously. No one read my articles, it’s really disappointing. Now I am starting everything from scratch and trying to gain back my viewership.
Here are the referrers I got all time. Just look at how many views I got from StumbleUpon!
Overall I got nearly 370k views from StumbleUpon keeping in mind that the remaining 5% came from other source.
Maximizing The Views
Yet again I made a mistake with my site by taking the free view for granted. You must never make the same mistake I did. I simply posted the picture with nothing else. Yeah, looking back it was a stupid move. What I should have done is to find a way to relate the picture to any of my previous post. Just make a short write up before the picture and link it to something within your site. This is how you expose visitors to the real content of your site. The chance of visitor clicking a link in the post compared to an ad on your site is actually 200:1. That explain why a John Chow dot Com review is so expensive, haha. With that I wish you all the best in getting views and potential reader on your sites/ blog.