I was chatting with Cynthia from It All Changes the other day, and one of the main things that we agreed on is that there are just.so.many.dang.flashy.shiny.things.to.do. when it comes to blogging and marketing our posts.
I mean, look at all of the options in one of my favorite plugins — SexyBookmarks:
Trouble is, there are diminishing returns…just because you share through lots of networks does not mean you’ll get lots of traffic. And in fact, when you devote your time to posting your work across the board, you may even LOSE traffic because you’re not spending quality time on any of them.
I typically encourage bloggers to pick a handful of sites to focus on, including:
1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. StumbleUpon
But here’s where I fail a bit as a blogger. I love me some Facebook (see my Facebook tips here). Twitter? You know it! (see my Twitter tips here.) But StumbleUpon? I just never figured it out.
And, to be fair, I never spent that much time trying to figure it out.
Then I read these posts:
- Building Your Traffic With StumbleUpon (via ProBlogger)
- 38 Brilliant Bloggers Talk About StumbleUpon (via Blog World Expo) **a must-read
- How to Use StumbleUpon to Increase Your Blog Traffic Overnight (via Justin Wise)
I knew I needed to make a change.
And, as the world works…fate stepped in to help.
Why, it’s my good friend DubyaWife! So I reached out and asked her what the fuss was all about. Turns out someone stumbled her post:
What I Learned From Harry Potter
And look what happened next (shared with permission):
Do you see what I see? 13,000 + page views, mostly from StumbleUpon? And this was early on Wednesday — DubyaWife tells me that the numbers have continued to climb since then.
And the good news? They’re not just reading the post and bouncing. Her page views also went up on other pages and posts — notably, her About page.
Here’s the catch…it doesn’t pay off to Stumble your own posts, so you really have to encourage your readers to do the work for you. That’s a two step process: 1) create great content that’s worth sharing 2) make great big calls to action when it comes to sharing through StumbleUpon.
My new goal: work to increase my Stumbles and see if I can use that site to increase page views to my site — maybe even more aggressively than on Facebook and Twitter.
Do any of you have StumbleUpon success stories? Let me know and I’ll highlight you in an upcoming progress post!
About Katy
I’m pretty confused about Stumble Upon. Can you stumble you own pages or does someone else have to do it? I hit the stumble upon button on one of my posts that I thought would be interesting…nothing happened!
Lee recently posted..Upgrade + Massaged Kale and Red Bean Salad
Lee,
You *can* stumble your own pages, but it doesn’t do you much good. People tend not to click on posts that people have stumbled for themselves.
When you hit the button, you say nothing happened — like, nothing nothing, or nothing that you expected?
My editor from Blissfully Domestic keeps encouraging us to use StumbleUpon – I’m signed up but I never remember, and truth is, I don’t really understand it!!!!
Thi sis a great overview! I currently use SU for recipe inspirations and health articles, but I never thought about actually joining the community and writing reviews and having dialogue with other site owners to increase my traffic. It’s kind of like commenting on other people’s blogs–you’re building up that relationships so people start to know you as well.
Jessica @ Sushi and Sit-Ups recently posted..Chi Pan Asian
Ok- I guess it is time to figure this stumble upon thing out…you’ve convinced me.
kristen (inspiredbydooce) recently posted..three things thursday- the running related edition
Thank you for this overview!! Barefoot Foodie has also mentioned Stumble Upon and I have been so confused/clueless about it.
Michelle @ Crazy*Running*Legs recently posted..Running Jamz
My Monday post(raw vegan chocolate hazelnut cake) is already the most viewed page on my site, racking up about 10000 views on StumbleUpon so far this week. It looks like the popularity is fading, but it was a nice spike while it lasted and definitely brought in new subscribers. I wrote a post all about using stumbleupon for increased traffic back in February(http://www.thewannabechef.net/2011/02/05/how-to-use-stumbleupon-to-gain-traffic/) and have been using those practices since, but this is the first time a post has REALLY taken off.
Evan Thomas recently posted..“What Are Capers?”
Awesome — I went to read it and realized I had starred it in my Reader as “important: go back to!” and apparently never went back to.
In the history of my blog I’ve been blessed with two such spikes — the most recent being last week.
Although my traffic is humble (about 150-200 views a day) I ended up with an 800 views thanks to StumbleUpon. It was one single person who stumbled me, I found them and we are now FB/Twitter friend (thanks @chibijeebs).
Traffic has returned to normal, but it is a nice surprise to get an unexpected boost.
KatieP recently posted..Contest : Book Giveaway – Two Books by David Deida (Sacred Intimacy)
Just last week I was saying how confused by stumbleupon I was so this post is kind of perfect timing for me! Going to read all those links above now b/c even though I signed up and played around, it still isn’t totally making sense to me.
Gina @ Running to the Kitchen recently posted..Soaking it all up
I actually didn’t know that you could use SU haha…wow newbie blogger mistake perhaps? I’m going to look more into this! Thank you so much for sharing
Lindsay@ In Sweetness and In Health recently posted..Another Day of Florida Fun
Yes!! My beer soaked french fries were stumbled by Jessica, How Sweet It Is, which caused 10,000 views coming from SU! Pretty crazy + exciting. I’m just trying to figure out exactly how SU works, so again, perfect timing with this post!
Ashley recently posted..seasonal smoothie
WOWZA! I guess the hard part is that you really kind of have to count on other people to stumble your posts…doing it yourself doesn’t do a lot of good.
Great topic! I have used stumbleupon for years to find content that is interesting but never really interacted with it other than receiving emails. I know it can have a lot of potential for boosting readership because I have found awesome blogs using it.
Hi Katy! Awesome post! Especially considering I was having a Twitter convo about SU earlier today. I just have one question… I don’t think Justin really describes WHY we’d want to import our RSS into SU. He says it will instantly boost are traffic, but I don’t get how! I’m guessing you did it and that’s why this post starts with Stumbleupon.com, right? But how will that help?
By the way, I stumbled this post
Sues recently posted..Make Your Own Rock Candy
I actually didn’t find the RSS option that Justin talks about — it seems that’s a beta program that’s only open to longtime and active SU users. Oops.
However, I DID use the scheduled Stumble option of su.pr today as a test and was surprised at the number of clicks I got in just a few hours. So I’m going to continue to use that. It’s manual (I don’t want to install the plugin…yet) but not a hard step.
I’ve never had any luck with SU. I read Evan’s post a few months ago and signed up, but I guess no one stumbles my posts but me, so it doesn’t help!
Thanks for these links. I am going to spend some time this weekend going through them all. StumbleUpon confuses me to no end.
Emily @ Life on Food recently posted..Frenando’s Grille Restaurant review
StumbleUpon confuses me, but I still love it. My strawberry-champagne slushies have garnered me over 125,000 hits in the last few days…yeah. Awesome
WOW! Yummy slushies and a traffic spike? Cool beans
StumbleUpon is great for big spikes, but my experience has been that it’s mostly crap traffic, folks who stick around for 10 seconds and bounce to the next site. The few times that I’ve gotten big swings from SU, traffic went back down to “normal” levels almost immediately afterwards.
Maybe it’s just me, but it’s somewhat of a turn-off for a blogger to plea for readers to share a post. Don’t get me wrong… I love it when things I’ve created go even the slightest bit viral, but I’m much prouder when it happens organically.
Jack Sh*t recently posted..In Honor of Death Week…
Jack pretty much summed up what I was going to say exactly.
Mary (A Merry Life) recently posted..Reading For Six Year Olds: Maggie Goes On A Diet
Great post Katy! I’ve lurked around SU but still hasn’t figured it out (it’s a K thing). I know folks that have great success with it – I’d love to learn with you. But yes, content is king and I think that timing is important too. Hmmmm – maybe I’ll ask around – I’ll keep you posted!
Kris @Krazy_Kris recently posted..How To Be Happy – Being Mindful of the Little Things
I was just talking to some local bloggers about this after our monthly meetup, and we’re going to have a little tutorial at someone’s house next week to talk about StumbeUpon.
JackSh*t is right that it’s not necessarily quality traffic, and I’m guilty of that when I stumble, too. It’s like flipping channels — you see a snippet of the site and decide if you want to keep watching. A lot of sites, I keep flipping after a few seconds, but sometimes I find a new site that I want to comment on, follow, or otherwise engage. How would I have found them if not for StumbleUpon?
Stacy (Little Blue Hen) recently posted..easy lemon almond cupcakes
I have joined SU but I’m fairly confused by it. After all of the other social media outlets I use, I usually run out of time and it falls to the wayside!
I just discovered the benefits of StumbleUpon about a month ago. I have seen a rise in traffic and am slowly asking my community to stumble! Let’s hope it catches on!
Thank you for answering one of my questions. @ Stumble!
I am not convinced about traffic coming from SU. I received 5000+ visits from SU yesterday. Problem is, all that traffic visited my blog at 10pm yesterday. Something is not right.
That’s really interesting…do you have Google Analytics installed on your blog? You might want to look and see if it’s possible that the traffic was coming from an overseas time zone.
Somehow a post of mine on steel cut oatmeal got stumbled, and it continues to almost daily be my top post. Crazy.
My tip is to make sure you’re active on stumble upon- discover posts, share posts, like posts, etc. You can’t promote your own (with success), so make sure you’re doing everything you can to promote other people. It’s good stumble-karma.
Heather @ Side of Sneakers recently posted..Pumpkin Market
So I’m still a little confuse. Do you have to put a stumble upon gadget on your blog or sign up your website? I am definitely a SU newbie! I use blogger so I don’t have the share it Icon at he bottom of my post like you.
Lauren @ Fun, Fit and Fabulous! recently posted..Take Me Out To The Ball Game!
Hey Lauren — good questions!
If you want someone to share your content, you need to add a button. Even though you’re on Blogger, I’m pretty sure you can add it through your design tab:
http://www.selfgrowthtips.com/2011/04/easily-add-stumbleupon-button-code-for_28.html
If you don’t want to do that, people can just manually plug your URL into StumbleUpon.com, or they can stumble it using a special bookmarklet/shortcut they add to their Web address bar…but you are definitely counting on others to do the work. It’s hard, but that’s how it works
Can you use Stumble Upon on blogger?
Amanda- The Nutritionist Reviews recently posted..Gluten Free Macaroni and Cheese with Melt Butter
Amanda — you bet! The example I showed above from DubyaWife was from a Blogger blog. You can add a badge: http://www.stumbleupon.com/badges/landing/ or you can add a widget right through your Blogger dashboard: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=06bb4fe2f9368997&hl=en
It’s kind of like commenting on other people’s blogs–you’re building up that relationships so people start to know you as well.
Patrica Farrell recently posted..Cancer Tattoos Tumblr
I’ve been experimenting with StumblUpon recently with a group of bloggers. One of my post hit 537 page views from StumbleUpon. Thought SU is a top referrer this was huge for me. Now I’m on the search to find out why so I can replicate it.