Stumbleupon overview

What is StumbleUpon:

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site that is driven by a community of users who share links to online content (such as blog posts) they enjoy.

How Does StumbleUpon Work?:

StumbleUpon works using a simple voting system. Users submit links to content they want to share, which is called "stumbling" that content. Other users can add their opinions to that stumbled content by giving it a thumbs up or a thumbs down using the StumbleUpon toolbar, which can be installed when a new user registers for a free StumbleUpon account.

The Social Aspect of StumbleUpon:
StumbleUpon users can add "friends" to their networks. Adding friends is a quick and easy way to share your stumbled content with like-minded users.

The Benefits of StumbleUpon:
StumbleUpon is easy to use. The handy StumbleUpon toolbar allows users to submit content with the click of the mouse. StumbleUpon has the potential to drive a lot of traffic to your blog in the long term if one of your submitted blog posts picks up a lot of stumbles. It's also a great place to find new blogs or blog post ideas as well as to network with other bloggers.


How to get started with Stumbleupon:
You can get started by installing the toolbar, which is compatible with I.E. and Firefox at Stumble Upon’s website. After which, you can check to see if your website is already listed on Stumble Upon. You can do this by visiting this page and typing in your site’s URL.

If your website is not listed, you can start using your newly installed toolbar to tag and review it by clicking on the blue thumbs up symbol which has “I like it!” next to it.
This will open a pop-up panel which allows you to categorize your website, write a short description and tag with specific keywords. Following which, your website will be included in Stumble Upon’s database and will show up when other users with interests similar to your tags use the Stumble Upon toolbar to surf the internet.


What type of traffic can I get from StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is different from a search engine, which offers very targeted traffic that matches keyword searches with the content on your blog.
On the other hand, the very nature of Stumble Upon invites open exploration of various websites which are loosely tagged by other users and hence may produce weak targeted traffic with specific characteristics.
My experience over the past few months has led me to the following conclusions on traffic from StumbleUpon:
• Diverse demographic. Visitors from StumbleUpon come from many countries from all over the world, though 40% of my traffic came from North America.
• Very low Adsense or contextual CTR. Why click on an ad when you can stumble to the next site in a few seconds?
• Good web design is important for StumbleUpon visitors. The average time spent on a web page can be less than 10 seconds. They tend to look more than they read.
• Fickle RSS subscribers. My feed subscription doubled when certain posts received a lot of traffic but 50% of the readers unsubscribed over the next few days. This will vary depending on your website.
• Not all websites are made equal. Video, Humor, Web 2.0 and eclectic websites do extremely well with SU. Some friends with video websites and Boing Boing-ish blogs usually retain at least 25% of Stumble Upon visitors after a spike in traffic.
Traffic is long-term. I’m still continuing to receive traffic for specific webpages that I’ve stumbled several weeks ago.


How many visitors can I get from Stumble Upon?
Expect an average of 100+ to 8000+ daily unique visitors for a specific web page that is stumbled. I’ve stumbled several post pages on Dosh Dosh as an experiment and the best performance was 2000+ visitors in 6 hours for a very short post on Dovetail.
The number of visitors slowly petered out as the day went on. I’m actually amazed that it received so many stumbles because the article in question was only a short news piece. Perhaps this indicates that brevity appeals to Stumble Upon visitors.
According to this article at SEOmoz, Stumble Upon outperforms Netscape and all other social networking websites by sending 12000+ visitors to a specific webpage in one day. The article in question was buried in Digg so there wasn’t a way to make an actual comparison.
A graph of the number of visitors to SEOmoz in the early half of 2006.