ONLIMA Blog

One popular web service that can bring in heaps of traffic is Stumble Upon. Lets have a look at how this service works:
The usage of stumble upon is very easy, this is probably the reason why it got so popular. After signing up for an account, you install the stumble upon toolbar for your favorite browser. This will give you a few buttons you can click on to use the system. The 3 basic buttons to use are the thumb-up, thumb-down and the stumble button. There are some more functions like adding friends and sending messages through the system, but let’s focus on the basics here: each time you visit a website you can let the system know if you like it or not by using the thumb-up or thumb-down button. Your vote for the web page is recorded by the service and will determine if the page will be send to other stumblers, which brings us to the stumble button: if you are just browsing the internet, with no particular goal in mind, where do you go? You can visit sites you have stored in your favorites or type in something your interested in into a search engine. There are however very interesting pages that are not showing up in the search engines because the site owner doesn’t know anything about SEO or just doesn’t care.

This is where your stumble account comes into play. In your account you can list topics that interest you, like cars, games, web design, pets or anything else you can think of. When you can’t think of any website to visit you can just hit the stumble button and Stumble Upon will re-direct you to a website that matches one of your listed interests. If many users have thumbed-down a website it will not be send to other stumblers, so basically you should be served quality pages when hitting the stumble button.

The details on how the thumb-ups and thumb-downs are counted and affecting the sending of a certain page is of course a well kept secret. Tim Nash figured out how the votes affect users and sites by doing some very extensive testing. His findings are just a theory, but I think he is probably pretty close. Since Tim did all the testing and figuring out already, I won’t post it here but you can read it in his own post: Stumbleupon mathematics for stumblers.

Now that we know how the system works, lets see how we can use it to get some traffic to our own site. What we learned from Tim’s post is that we need to use the system to get our accounts audience score up, so start stumbling!

I have been using the system for quite some time now and gotten some visitors to my own sites. The typical traffic stream I see when one of my pages is submitted to the Stumble Upon system is like this: the first day I get a few hundred visitors, the second day around a thousand, the third day about 500, then 200 and after that the traffic dies down to next to nothing. That’s a total of about 2000 visitors, not bad but we can do better.

To keep the traffic flowing we need to think about what stumblers are looking for. Think about it: why did the user hit the stumble button? The obvious reason is: because he (or she) was bored and couldn’t think of any website to visit. If the click on the stumble button send them to your site and the page doesn’t look interesting they will click on the stumble button again and they are gone as fast as they came. When thinking about this a little more you can come up with ways that will increase the chance of the visitor staying on your site a little longer than a split second. A big chunk of text is often a turnoff to the stumblers looking for some quick entertainment, a (funny) picture will do much better here.

I’ve done some experimenting myself and got some truly amazing results, learned a bit more about the stumble users and made a few bucks on the way! Here’s what I did: I created a single page website, put some text on there and a picture of a quite decent looking girl. The text was accompanied by some AdSense ads and the page was submitted to Stumble Upon. The results where amazing! After just 24 hours I had gotten over 10,000 visitors and I was wrong when I thought that it would soon end. Over the next 3 weeks I received 120,000 visitors and they still keep coming. The ad clicks on that page have been good for a little over $80, not very much at all considering the amount of page views, but it is easy money!

With that many page views I did get to learn a little bit more about the Stumble Upon users, just by looking at my sites stats: 91% of the visitors where using Firefox and only 7.5% where using Internet Explorer. These numbers are very different from the Global Stats. 75% of the visitors came from the USA. And comparing my site stats with the Google ads stats: about 50% of the visitors did not get to see the ads, the adblock Firefox extension seems to be popular.