Stumble on, and on, and on

Just going to do a recap on how the reverse stumble played out over the last few weeks.

Initially the one page reverse stumble website had over 10,000 visitors in the immediate 2 day period, I’ll take a little look at the after effects of the stumble to see what gives in relation to backlinks and residual traffic over a month later.

As with many social websites when content is stumbled it can create a wave effect giving a few popular spikes as its gets stumbled and rediscovered and also as with most websites I own Tuesday is a peak day.

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Tuesdays are the days I usually earn most, probably because Monday can be a busy catchup day for most people.

Stumbleupon continues to drive traffic to the one page domain and still averages over 100 visitors per day one month after the initial stumble and is still the main referrer as the domain had virtually zero history.

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Impressively in the 3rd week the traffic spiked upwards again as the page become more popular bringing in over 4000 visitors. Pages can be re-discovered and surge in popularity using Stumble.

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So there is certainly a residual effect that can be felt long after the initial stumble.

Geo traffic, certainly mostly US traffic with almost 10% coming from the UK

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Links
Not particularly strong backlinks but they were gained, the domain became a PR4 and using Yahoo site explorer it shows 96 backlinks, Google shows 4 backlinks.

Income
Although adsense was on the page this was not an income experiment, more a traffic. The page has however generated $80 since the stumble.

Traffic quality, the traffic is fast and furious however they do not stick around long, it does lead to some blog posts though and it did indeed generate backlinks, from what I can see Stumbleupon would serve as a good traffic boost and add a few backlinks and your overall websites stats, I wouldn’t think it added too much to your readership unless you took preemptive steps but it can offer some residual traffic for some time afterwards and a good way to get your site spidered, indexed and a little boost for organic rankings which means it would be very healthy for deep inside pages of your site.

Is it worth it?
Always! and of course there are things you can do when your stumbled that you wouldn’t normally do to other traffic.  As mentioned earlier the traffic is fast moving so basically people looking for a quick laugh or an interesting read and then they are gone, using methods like adsense and adverts are often very poor performing for this type of traffic and I did experience this.

Overall Thoughts
Instead of adverts if you are experiencing a good amount of stumble traffic what I would suggest is removing or not showing current ads and replacing them with links, adverts and tasters to others parts of your website that may be of interest, Stumbleupon traffic do click on links and would be willing to explore your site if you catch them within the first 20 seconds with interesting content, therefore keep the pages short and dangle bait quickly to take them to other parts of your site. Once a user clicks once to another part of your site then they are far more likely to hand around, bookmark or explore your site further. Tim made a great post on the difference between Digg and Stumbleupon users which explains very well the difference in how both types of visitors interact with your site. Overall I was very impressed with the continuous traffic that Stumble provided long after the initial spike.

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 summary guys, and cheers for the link, one thing that I haven’t covered much is saturation. Their is a magic point where stumbling a site has almost no effect regardless of how “powerful” a stumble account the people voting have. I noticed that our Stumbles have dramatically dropped recently, and where some one submitting to Stumbleupon would normally bring 500-800 visitors we are now lucky to get 50 even with 4 or 5 reviews and thumbs up.

  2. Thanks for the link to the post on the differences between Digg and StumbleUpon users. Very thoughtful analysis.

    A bit off-topic, I’m curious about why you use only a Digg button for your posts, as opposed to StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, etc.

    Jay

    • Al just recently added the Digg button here, perhaps more will be added later, funnily enough I recently just added the main one’s on my tattoo site. If you check the left hand navigation http://www.tattoos-by-design.co.uk/

      • Thanks! I’m always curious how well the social bookmarking buttons really work. I know that for StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us, I use the browser plugins.

        Are you seeing much use of them yet in your tatoo site?

        • Not getting much use Jay from what I am tracking at present, perhaps thats the site/audience more than the idea, if there is much change I’ll let you know, as you say from most they are done through plugins so less use for it but I thought it worthy of a try for now.

  3. You mentioned 96 Yahoo Backlinks. Did you run a test to see how many were there before the stumble?

  4. Hey Scott,

    Any tips on how to Stumblebait? I have experimented with stumble myself and have only moderate success.

    Scott

    P.S. gave this a stumble & Digg

    • stumblers are very visual driven so big bold pictures are a great way to attract stumblers in, when writing copy for stumblers remember they will see the page as a whole and make a very quick interpretation of what its about, the companion to the article Scott mentions is about how stumblers and diggers react to pages and page layouts.

      • I’d totally agree with Tim, big bold pictures were very successful for me, trying other more clever attempts often didn’t work so well, you need to offer good clear and immediate gratification to the stumbler.

  5. Over time, StumbleUpon has proven to be immensely beneficial to me as earlier submitted pages are visited over and over again. FYI, I found this page while stumbling, so your comments are definitely spot on.

  6. I recently use digg and give great visitor before my SEO strategy establish. however stumbleupon seems good idea to try.

Trackbacks

  1. [...] is anecdotally true with other blogs.  Self Made Minds recently posted about Stumble driving continuous traffic to his site.  Chris over at Blog-Op has told me the same thing in several comment [...]

  2. [...] after a good stumble the traffic can rumble on which is really great unlike other large spikes for example a digg. __________________ Self Made [...]

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