StumbleUpon Project was a great success. Users contributed and I did the same. You can view the pages that I exchanged with here. Once you see my page you can chose "Pages I like" in the drop down menu. I found a very interesting piece of study when doing this project and I had fun doing it as well.
Several Blogs I have tagged were a pretty good read and provided me with a more insight to blogging on the internet. So far there was only 1 trackback. That is great that one person participated and I would like to know their stats, if they do not mind sharing it with me.
I do not mind sharing this data because I am in a learning experience and would like to know others inputs.
Well lets take a look at some pictures shall we. From the image on the left hand side, there is a HUGE burst of traffic once I started the project. This is for the week of June 3 to June 9, one weeks worth of data.
As you can see the data was steadily climbing. As my traffic was directly coming from StumbleUpon. But then the next day a drop in traffic and it slowly tends to decrease, even though my pages have been fav through stumble. I was a little disappointed in this because I was hoping to have good steady traffic with this project. Even after 4 days after the project, my traffic is decreasing EVEN though my page is being fav.
I notice several pages were fav as well, as Google Analytics showed me some stats as to where the traffic was coming from and where they landed. Let's now take a look at the traffic sources.
Now most of my sources are coming directly from referring sites, which in this case would be StumbleUpon. Now usually my average traffic a day would be about 45-60 hits a day. I was happy with that, since my blog is only 3 months old. Receiving 866 hits from refer sites is amazing! I usually concentrate more on SEO but any traffic is better than no traffic.
I am glad that for a good week I received an excess amount of targeted traffic from StumbleUpon. With these new stats and number I know StumbleUpon is a great tool to use for generating traffic. Here is a list of my referring site:
Here are the finalized stats from StumbleUpon. The best part its they are all unique visits to my blog. I am also glad to see that users also tend to search my blog than read the page they were directed to. Readers tend to view at least 2 more pages before leaving my website. With that in mind they are strictly staying on my blog for an average of 2 minutes.
90.25% of the readers are new, since it was either stumbled. These stats are very helpful. It provides me a new insight of how my blog is doing successfully.
BUT, like I stated earlier there was a drop in traffic.
To my assumption, StumbleUpon traffic is only geared towards that specific page. Someone could just be stumbling, from the IE plugin or Firefox plugin and just read your page and stumble again.
I took lots of advice from Dosh Dosh where his blogs explains a comprehensive way of getting traffic from StumbleUpon. He explains ways of getting constant traffic, but all of his strategies is what you would need to do to monetize your blog anyways. For example creating great traffic is a great way of grabbing readers and feeders, stumbled or not.
The fact that my traffic is dieing is because, to my assumption, is members need to be high stumblers, you need them to be part of your network, you need them to write a review about your stumbled page. These actions take into affect on how often it will get Stumbled on. I have 3 other stumbled pages that are doing way better than the post about the StumbleUpon project.
This would take in the fact that the more stumblers that fav it does not mean anything if they do not write about it, add you as a friend, etc. The other 3 pages that were on StumbleUpon have reviews and comments. They were also commented by high Stumblers, still trying to learn how to become a high Stumbler.
But other than that I am trying to receive consistent traffic to my website whether it be from StumbleUpon or other means of sources. I will still exchange Stumbles as I would like to see where it can lead as it has only been a good week. What would the numbers be after a month, 2 months, 1 year?
Google Blog searching other blogs I have found some others who uses StumbleUpon for traffic. Lets see who done so.
Tamar from 10e20, suggests to create and personalize your profile page. Which makes sense since you want to show your community who added you to see who you are stumbling as well and why you fav a blog. You want to catch that readers attention.
Shankar, learned the same things I did with StumbleUpon.
- Stumblers prefer brief and up to-the-point articles (not all, though)
- Tag articles correctly while giving a thumbs up. An incorrectly tagged post may end up in not getting the attention it deserves
- There are some hot tags which will give you instant traffic: Ubuntu, blogging, and many others. But your post has to be good enough to receive long-term traffic.
- StumbleUpon users love hidden tricks.
- Even an old post gets instant popularity if it’s given a thumbs up by a powerful stumbler
I do not know about the hidden tricks, since I don't have anything related as to what Shankar was stating.
In the end the project may still go on. For those of you who use StumbleUpon I want to know your results. For those of you who exchange Stumbles with me what were your results? What do you think of StumbleUpon? If there is a need for a retest, I do not mind doing another one maybe even a more sophisticated plan of route. I was just stump when my traffic decreased slowly.
