I don’t normally post on weekends because we entertain my in-laws pretty much full time. (My mother-in-law is progressing into Alzheimer’s and my father-in-law needs company.)
Still, I knew I got a few Stumble’s last evening. I just checked sitemeter and I’m amazed to see this:
This pretty much goes on for the 100 recent hits Sitemeter shows.
I was planning to send out a few thank-yous for the Stumbles. I think I’ll manage to get a few out– but most of my thankyous will be sent on Monday when the weekend entertainment frenzy is over for me!
I’d planned to publish statistics after trying my own advice for a week– but I’ll be needing to take a look through Google Analytics on Monday. I’ll report more thorough stats then. 
It’s quite amazing isn’t it!
Not necessarily. There is a fine line between what is going to be approved by everyone, and what may generate a few negative reviews.
Some of the people whose preference is Stumbling adult pictures and other content have this habit of organised thumb downs.
Hehe, and don’t think you’re quite gone of them yet. They’ll probably keep on coming for a while
. It’s a great way to get visitors in numbers and can definitely bring a couple of thousand of viewers. The good side is it’s more spread out than with systems like digg and such so stress on the site is less.
@Andy– I also would assume that at a certain point, any audience is going to get sick of reading about the same thing over and over. I noticed that not only did the previous post get stumbled– but an older post got ‘discovered’ and another accumulated a stumble thumbs up.
Obviously, those two things couldn’t happen until after a person has some content. I also have a few suspicions about nuances to getting traffic by writing about Stumble and so would never advise it as a primary tactic!
For example: I am recognizing about 1/3 of the people who stumbled me as people whose avatars I have seen on places like Bumpzee, Sphinn, on their own blogs etc. So, maybe it’s a “warmed up” audience?
People stumble their friends stumbles using the friends channel. Based on Tim’s algorithm this collectively makes all your friends more powerful stumblers and if they are reciprocal and do the same, that helps boost your Stumble juice.
It is very incestuous, thus you have to try to bring in fresher content to ensure the gene pool doesn’t mutate.
Even helpful posts about social news and bookmarking sites can totally bomb. My Digg friends post is a classic, I got loads of Stumble traffic, but it got buried.
It did however highlight that most people didn’t know how to see who had friended them.
Whilst it might have been buried, the new interface does highlight friends a lot better on Digg. they seem to want more casual users to use the friends features.
I gave you a stumble yesterday, but I doubt it generated a whole lot of traffic. Your recent post on StumbleUpon was a good reminder that using it the right way can generate quite a bit of traffic.
I’ve been using it over a year but I never really looked into it much. I honestly didn’t even know what it was all about, but now I do.
I think my biggest problem was that I wasn’t stumbling things just because I thought they were interesting. Yeah, I know! I’m not a spammer but with things like this I end up submitting my stuff and leaving it.
The only articles I stumble of my own from now on will be those that I know would be interesting to others. At the same time I’ll be stumbling others interesting posts because they deserve it.
Hi Josh– Sorry SpamKarma got you! (I’ll white list you to avoid that in future.)
I’m like you. I joined StumbleUpon a long time ago–when I was only blogging about knitting. I never used it and only occasionally noticed sudden bursts of traffic.
But the reality is that it’s a well designed system for picking out good material. It can be gamed a bit– but mostly, it seems to be set up to reward good material. So, it’s wise to learn to stumble the good stuff (so as to improve your own rank and the rank of those who happen to be your friends). Then be active in the system, and you’ll benefit.
But, the people who have examined the algorithm have noticed that the Stumble algorithm includes algorithm that protects a bit against active gaming — so doing nothing but stumbling yourself has diminishing returns.
I think that may make StumbleUpon the best social network in the long run!
I can’t wait to see what your stats showed. My own showed a remarkable jump as well!
I just wanted to say thanks for a great article… ones with a ‘call to action’ and positive result are fantastic!