Reverse Stumble 10,000 thousand visitors

stumble3.jpgI have had traffic from Stumbleupon before to my tattoo website and read a post by Jeremy trying to buy a stumbleupon and have not really given it that much attention until recently. I was creating a few mini sites and had one generic uk domain name that I didn’t know how to classify for mini site, there was no obvious choice for a topic to put on it.

After a few minutes I decided that I would do a reverse stumble as an experiment, I love experiments 😉 What I wanted to do was take a  funny cartoon or image that I found through stumbleupon that you see all the time and put them on a domain and then submit it back to be stumbled, back at ya!

If you have ever used the stumbleupon toolbar you’ll probably be familiar with the funny cartoons that often do the rounds, I quickly started looking for inspiration and soon found what I was looking for - those cool images of painted lorries, granted I have seen it a few times but they are cool, in fact doing a quick Google just now I can find that set of images on lots of blogs & websites so it’s popular and documented. I posted those images on my generic domain, uploaded and  I then click on “I like it” from my stumble toolbar and submitted it.

Stumble Upon 

Now I can only presume these get checked and when other people saw the page they probably thought it was cool and perhaps they had seen it before but hey they maybe clicked ‘I like it’ I don’t know, it was an experiment after all.

Anyway in that single day I had 5897 uniques which was quite an eye opener, over $10 in adsense, day two has already provided over 2875 uniques & $11 and day 3 already shows over 1200 uniques half way through the day, 10k visitors.
reverse stumble = great success!

Great Success!

The fact that I used an already successful stumble was the key to this and not using new material. Note: When I give an example like the above I am sharing an experiment, I am not saying copy it, don’t , maybe take the relevant bits and apply them in a better way. If I was to do a reverse stumble again it would be with motive to build a site or get exposure for an idea rather than a short term fix as that 10k visitors were quickly gone again, I don’t think stumbleupon offers much in terms of residual traffic unless you are clever and take it a stage further, interesting none the less.

stumble2.jpg

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. Nice idea for finding content ideas. I quite like Stumble as it does send a fair amount of traffic and unlike Digg it’s not just the occasional huge peak and I think the traffic is a bit less tech and ad savvy so easier to convert.

  2. Interesting Scott. I’ve just started experimenting with Stumbleupon myself.

    It would be interesting to see in the future if that traffic also brings you any links, i suspect people often blog about and link to humerous content like this….

  3. At present Ash there are 2 referrals from link dumps and around a dozen from people accessing the URL from emails they have received. I’ll keep an eye on that domain and see what happens over the few weeks in relation to backlinks it gains.

  4. Hmm, you inspired me, i put together this hopefully humerous page with hopefully a little spin from your idea.

    http://www.buyyourfirsthouse.co.uk/

    If you like it, please stumble it 😉

  5. Haha funny Ash, stumbled 🙂

  6. Very nice spin Ash, ‘I like it’

  7. I got great traffic from Stumble as well. Not lately though.

    They give you a hard time when you stumble the same site over and over again (Different Permalinks though). They even won’t let you add it to your own favorites.

    If that happens you need to stumble a few others and it works again.

    Just in case you wanna team up .. Vincente is my user name on stumble 😉

  8. Ash, I have to know how that one turns out, please! Awesome idea. Will be cool to see what kind of links are generated through that as well.

    Peace.

  9. I totally agree with you. My stats way up when I join Stumble. An article about the air car on my site: http://www.puregreencars.com
    was read 2600 times in one day.

  10. But what really matter is do you get “quality traffic”?

    I mean you made a few quick bucks (which most people don’t) there is hardly any return traffic unless you are stumbling some thing vary unique and thought provoking. Same goes for other social bookmarking sites like digg and reddit, besides providing little boasting value it basically brings nothing!

    And yet there are many who try to “buy” such traffic. After all those who are using stumbleupon would rather click stumble button again than click on your ads.

  11. Agreed Yogesh, it was just a test as I have never held much value in short peaks of untargetted traffic but backlinks did come from it and still I get traffic on that test domain so it was just sharing an experiment.

  12. I guess I was a bit harsh with my previous comment, I guess in your case it worked in a much batter manner than it did on my sites (mostly unique content). But still when I see people trying to buy votes for sites like digg, stumbleupon etc. it makes me wonder is it really worth it?

  13. I’ll do a follow up post to show the effect later but it was a short spike, not worth spending much time on and no a great gain in the long term, a bit of fun out of interest on my part.

  14. I love stumble! And whenever I see something I love, thumbs up! One time an online friend of mine asked some blog readers what stumble was bc suddenly she was getting LOADS of traffic - I then told her I added her site to it!

  15. All I can say is wow. I just read about StumbleUpon and eBay in talks…guess this is a great way to generate traffic =)

  16. yes nice report..i tried digg and did not give me any results. Heard alot from stumble, i wonder if that will help.. Sure will give it a try!

  17. sorry scott, you lost me on this one, are you saying you put some funny pics on a site, hit “i like it” on stumbleupon and you got thousands of visitors just like that?

Leave a Reply