Stumbling Stumble Upon
written by John Chow
I’ve been fooling around with Stumble Upon. I get quite a bit of traffic from them because of readers “Stumbling” my articles. Stumble Upon is a browser based toolbar that helps you discover and share great websites. When you click the Stumble button. the service delivers Web pages matched to your personal preferences. Rating the sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people and helps you discover sites other Stumblers recommend.
Stumble Upon makes money but selling Stumbles. When you hit the Stumble button on the toolbar, you are supposed to get a page that was recommended by other Stumblers. However, for 5 cents per user, Stumble Upon will show that user your page.
Signing up for an advertiser account was easy enough. You can even create a campaign before signing up. I decided to test Stumble Upon by sending traffic to my Making Money from A Blog - February 2007 recap. All new campaign has to be approved and that usually takes less than 24 hours. For whatever reason, Stumble Upon didn’t approved the campaign. There was no explanation - the campaign just disappeared from the approval list. So I decided to use the blog’s front page. I listed myself under the Weblog category but Stumble Upon changed it to Cars. No doubt they saw the Pagani Zonda R post and the Zonda Fs in the header and assumed I was a car site - dumb asses.
Stumble Upon sent me 326 visitors before I stop campaign. Approval was running at a not so great 63% from Stumblers who visited the blog. That’s not very surprising since this blog isn’t really about cars. Yes I have some car posts, but this is not a car blog.
I resubmitted the campaign in the proper category and I’m waiting for approval. Stumble Upon doesn’t seem to work on the weekend because it’s been way more than 24 hours. I assume they will approve the new campaign on Monday. Stay tuned.
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(7 votes, average: 3.43 out of 5)
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I’ve just implemented the Stumbleupon button onto my site and I’m still trying to figure out how to use the system to promote my site. I just read a great article on doshdosh.com about his stumbleupon experiences. I think he’s really maximized the stumble effect from what i’ve read. By the way, when I first saw this post on my feed reader, I thought you came up with some diabolical way to abuse Stumble!
I saw that you submitted one of my posts Gary, thanks. It brought an extra 350+ visitors that day.
really? how’d i do that? hahaha . . i’m such a stumblerookie right now . .
I think just by stumbling it…by clicking “I like it”
Atleast I think it was you
it was me
cuz i do like your articles . . .
350 from one Stumble Upon link?!?! That’s crazy! I must be missing out!
How does this work?
To lazy to go to their site…
I’m sure I can get answers from this “forum”
This is a pretty cool thing, a new angle to. I know I never would have though of this. This helps both ends very well to, I think I might use the user end one, not the advertising end-part.
I’ve tried the user end and not the advertiser. I’m pretty happy with them. The only downside is that I had to download the toolbar to submit anything. I wonder if there’s a way to get around downloading the toolbar? I don’t want it on my personal computer, I care less for my work one
I’m not a fan of toolbars either, I want maximum viewage!
I’m not a big fan either, i think that stumble upon should come up with another idea to make everything look nicer
It really works.Best is to ask your friends do it for you and you do it for them…it rocks
I have stumble on my toolbar, haven’t really used it too much. I offer people to StumbleIt as well on my site and people do it. I get a little amount of traffic from stumble but its not crazy insane either
John you need to check the Pagani I photoshopped on my site one day
I installed the toolbar too . . . it’s annoying to look at, but to be honest with you, when i’m really bored, I click the stumble button and I’ve found some really cool sites . . . most graphical stuff
I agree with you. I like the idea of discovering interesting sites by random.
That’s what I use Digg for!
yeah i dont get like insane traffic.Guess you need to know the algorithm
Cheers mate!
write some tutorial then.It will help bloggers like me who think really stupid when it comes to desings
I’ve played around with StumbleUpon loads, I even included it in my series of articles on advertising your website StumbleUpon Advertising.
I found it’s quite an interesting system and a consistent means of getting cheap visitors ($0.05 per unique) but the quality of visit is rather low, and the actual number of conversions to visitors is just awful.
Out of the 30,000 unique visitors to http://bla.st/ this year, 24% of them have been from stumble upon.
I paid $40 (800 visitors) in an attempt to promote certain areas of the site which means the other 7200 were natural, not paid.
Stumbleupon is a good way to test a new design. You can send people to the site, and see their response. If they stick around you know your site makes a good first impression. If people don’t like it it’s not worth paying for more visitors. If they really like your site, they’ll vote for it, which will send visitors to your site free.
http://bla.st/john-chow-network/
A cycle definitely. You attract new visitors to your site, and if they like it they stay, and perhaps bring in more visitors tagging along.
i agree with you.New bloggers are coming now and then and they will never stop so attract them with this..
That’s a very interesting point! I should look into this…
I hope someone will stumble upon my blog
Hmm, so thats why I stumbled your blog. I love your blog by the way! It’s so interesting I just want to read more of your posts!
It doesn’t make sense for them to move the category without getting your approval.
If they had a question about it then they should have asked you first before making you waste money targeting people that like cars!
They seem to be constantly updating the toolbar as I’ll get “do you want to update” messages.
Yesterday I tried Stumbling and couldn’t - I clicked Start Stumbling and..nothing. I then went to the actual website and saw that they were doing maintenance until 8pm. The login didn’t display any error, just went away.
HMTKSteve SU’ed one of my posts and my traffic shot up that day. Until I figured out why by looking at the referrers and tracing back. First I’d really heard about SU. I’m not sure how many people who found my site have returned to it since then.
It does allow you to find a lot of interesting sites and overall I like it.
Yes it does.I am working on a a post and i found one great info …will definetly helps it to make better
Nice post John, similar post to mine that I published last week - I would’ve thought your blog would’ve kicked ass on StumbleUpon. Mine’s doing quite well:
http://www.harpzon.com/articles/28/1/StumbleUpon-Day-3-Update/Page1.html
Sounds like an interesting advertising resource - but it would be nice to see some ROI stats from advertisers. Not sure if semi-random traffic is worth it…
I agree . . the conversion rates and click through rates are going to be disgustingly low, no matter how you spin it . . . 5 cts a click might even be too much if you ask me!
wow didnt knew that.Now u scare me for that…so what we should do not stumble?
I wrote an article about how worthless StumbleUpon was for my small $10 test campaign, here it is in case you’re interested.
I wrote an article that was stumbleupon and my hits went crazy for 3-4 days. It went from my normal 200 hits to 1800 hits/day. Trying to replicate it again but without much success.
it just happens once.These algorithm are strong enough to control where traffic goes.They d it my intelligence feed Artificial intelligence algorithm…
Only problem I have with StumbleUpon is the users (like on Digg) make it seem like your fault if an article they disagree with gets posted on there.
its called driven my common sense and human intelligence. that will be web 3.0
I’ve paid for them before (for visitors to my products side) and have had a grand total of ONE visitor translate into a sale. Although when you think about CPC it is still better than Google, perhaps it’s the nature of my business that people love to look around everywhere and then come back to buy, without of course telling me exactly where they found me in the first place. I do better with Stumble traffic from the oddest articles, I wrote a blip about Hittail and got a ton of traffic from that for some unexplained reason, since my blog is not about that at all, really, it didn’t help with returning visitors though.
I’ll have to check it out, I’ve never bothered to learn about it for some reason…
Time to play around with it
@david lol stumble my posts too
Mine too! Mine too!
Hmm… I never knew you could buy traffic from SU but I have used it from the enduser side. Its great for days where you’re bored and want to find some new sites you never would stumble upon… (sorry, I had to!)
Yeah I love StumbleUpon when I have some free time as well.. but usually I end up in places that are really really good!
I’ve signed up for an advertisers account, but they have yet to approve me.
For the users, get the Firefox extension, who really wants or needs another toolbar?
I used it as a user for a while, I could never remeber to actually stumble sites and the random thing works for a while, but if I’m that bored, I’ll just go watch TV, not surf who knows what sites.
I tried paying for the SU advertising. It did not do me any good. It did deliver the number of hits they said it would. But none of the visitors stayed long enough to view the page. Most people in SU just take a quick look and stumble on to the next page.
If you have good content they will stay.
Definitely so. Most users on the stumble toolbar are there to pass time. You have to create a strong first impression for them to stay.
make your post title eye catchy they aint going anywhere
I had some visitors that seemed to have stumbled from nowhere onto my site, so it was quite ’stumbling’ surprise. Quite an interesting site though. Much like, erm.. “digg”.
SU is no Digg. I mean that in a good way.
Yea, I don’t mean it in the operative way though. As able to find at good/ interesting articles by chance. That is better than spending loads of time trying to sift through the useful and non-useful stuff.
its lot better than digg but then u cant beat digg in terms of traffic.it can rip of your bandwith
Much as I like the traffic, I would rather have evenly-spread traffic, than a one-time splurge on the site. It is damaging for your other regular readers. And, if you are a relatively small-time blogger.