StumbleUpon – The force is strong with this one

StumbleUpon is one of my top traffic generators. Besides the visitors that come directly to your domain, most traffic is generated by search engine results or some other type of search. Social media sites and online bookmarking sites are another way to explode your traffic. I started paying attention to my StumbleUpon traffic after writing about the StumbleUpon Effect several months ago. This is the information for September. As you can see from the last post in March, StumbleUpon has been very nice to me. well, not just StumbleUpon but they great people that use it.

How to get more StumbleUpon Traffic

One of the hardest and most rewarding efforts I took on with StumbleUpon was building my network. Like any other social media sites, your network is everything. Get some friends. Initially I started doing this just by seeing who else was stumbling the same types of sites as me. I found some fun people online that had found some great sites so I just  subscribed to their favorites and them looked for the people that were also stumbling the same sites.

It didn’t take long to have a good number of people that I was following and some were in turn following me. Over time, I started getting new people subscribing to my favorites that I had never come across. As I said these numbers took some time to build but it was well worth it because I never have to search for something interesting online. I have 315 people constantly giving me new places to look.

Sometimes I stumble my own posts, I try not to do it too much because the admins would not be happy with that. So I balance out the self discoveries by also spending time going through other peoples favorites and giving the ones I like a thumbs up and discovering other new sites. Between all of the new sites I discover and the sites my friends are adding to their favorites, it’s not hard to build up stats for more websites. I figure if I stumble something and 10% of my followers go to the site then I just sent a blog about 30 people. If those 10% each give the same site a thumbs up then all of their followers have the potential of visiting the site too. Hence the StumbleUpon effect. In a matter of hours you can get hundreds or thousands of hits just from StumbleUpon if the post warrants it.

So far this year I have close to 275,000 unique visitors to this site and 92% of that came from StumbleUpon. That is just amazing to me. The other sites I manage do not get as much from StumbleUpon as I would like but as I said, it takes time to build a following for a niche but I am confident that the numbers will grow to match these.