Since I joined StumbleUpOn in May 2007, I have spent a lot of time discovering and stumbling web pages. I have also got good traffic from StumbleUpon to my personal blog which you are reading now. I stumbled photos and sites with thumb up, reviews and proper tags. While I am trying to be a good stumbler and enjoy my time viewing awesome photos and web sites, I have also received some critics about how my site got traffic and how I help other doing stumble the nature ways.

I don’t see anything wrong with what I am doing. So if you are interested in getting “SHORT TERM” traffic from StumbleUpOn, please continue reading.

First of all, I insist that good and quality content is the only solution for long term traffic. Second of all, I don’t call myself StumbleUpOn expert. I just follow the rules and play safe. All this traffic stuff are based on my observation. I did not manipulate the traffic in any way from StumbleUpOn. However, I do manipulate Alexa Traffic Ranking as you know. Again, I only recommend you to get traffic from StumbleUpOn the nature way. StumbleUpOn can only help you to boost short term traffic. There are some facts about StumbleUpOn, which I did not include in my previous post. StumbleUpOn - The No-Magic facts of building traffic.

These are the facts about StumbleUpOn that you might not pay attention to.

  1. Not all 2+ million stumblers are doing stumbler’s job to discover pages. Many of them are just for social purpose and to meet friends. There are also many dummy members, which were created as secondary account for whatever purposes.
  2. StumbleUpOn sell traffic to sponsor web site. You can find more about their StumbleUpon Advertising program. It costs the sponsor $0.05 per member visit. StumbleUpOn claims that the member will only see the sponsor page once. I am not 100% sure about this.
  3. StumbleUpOn is watching you. In order to know what page you have stumbled. It remembers what pages you visited(stumbled) as well. They will use this information to arrange the proper advertisement sites for you based on your preference and interest. What else do they know? How fast you are navigating the sites. In other words, how long do you stay on the site? They also know what page you are on in other browser windows with the toolbar installed. So they know every page your see on your browser, including your own web sites. That sounds scary. I just don’t know if they will ever use this information against their members for statistic purpose. It does the similar things as Google ToolBar!

[UPDATE] I received an email from one of the StumbleUpOn members telling me that there is misconception about the tool. Here is what he said.

Terence:

You are incorrect on #3 on your most recent post… SU has no knowledge about time-on-site, and has no insight into URLs you visit where you do NOT select a feedback for the site (Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down). Absent the direct “bookmarking” it is blind to your browser experience. Please correct that common misconception about the tool. It ends up making people think its like spyware.

My apology to all my readers who might have been miss-lead by my statement. I do not want people to think StumbleUpOn toolbar as spyware, but I still have the rights to question about it.

Again. I keep saying that a good stumbler will get a good stumbled traffic. You can see the post at StumbleUpOn - How to make yourself a good stumbler. Some people just read me wrong. In order words, if you are good stumbler, your traffic will come. Most people having problem with my statement are those who don’t have web site to send traffic to or don’t want to. If StumbleUpOn can ask you to buy traffic, why can’t we get traffic from StumbleUpOn? We follow the rules.

These are the guide line that I put together.

  1. Stumble (thumb up+review+tag) as many pages as you can.
  2. Join communities and help others.
  3. Get as many friends as you can.
  4. Thumb up and write review about other stumblers.
  5. Invite friends join your communities
  6. Link to your StumbleUpOn profile pages from other web site. Ex. MySpace.com, blogger, facebook, etc.
  7. Promote StumbleUpOn in any ways.

All I am saying above is trying to tell people to spent time doing what stumbler is doing and be a good stumbler. I did not mention any traffic at all. What’s wrong with the #1? Some people just don’t read my mind. Thumb down does NOT count in terms of your stumbler score.

There are also some extra facts that a stumbler should know about on StumbleUpOn - How to make yourself a good stumbler, which have generated some controversial attention and drove even more traffic to my site.

Remember, the traffic is based on the category and tag that people provides when they stumble the page. So if the page falls under those less popular categories, the traffic is smaller. Also, you only get portion of the traffic that you supposed to get from StumbleUpOn, because a lot of the members are not active members. They don’t come to your site at all.

The bottom line is not to stumble upon your own page, because it will miss the whole point of “Discovering a new site?” Once or twice is fine, but don’t over use it. So how does your page get stumbled at first place? It is simply get stumbled by other stumblers regardless that they are your friends or just a stranger or any other dummy accounts. If you are a good stumbler with great score and friendship with other stumblers, you can share you pages with them. There is a gray area between share your page and invite people to stumble your pages. Some people call “Invitation” a way of manipulation. I share my page to my friends. It’s up to my friends to thumb up my pages or thumb down my pages. I have no choice. However, if you are good stumbler, you have better chance to get thumbs up by your friends. There is nothing wrong with that? The point is that you DO NOT force and intend to exchange link for stumbling. You share your pages with them. It’s up to the stumbler to stumble your page. How you want to make it happen is not my business. You got the point!

In the past months, my stumbled page got a lot of thumbs up and also thumbs down with bad review. What make StumbleUpOn great is that people have the freedom to speak out their mind. I respect those feedbacks regardless good or bad. I am glad that only few of them are bad. Don’t be frustrated with the bad reviews you are getting. There are many stumblers with huge negative thoughts to everything. They either do that for fun or do that for attention. I give those negative reviews respect, but I won’t feel upset for that. If my page got very bad reviews, that means I will have to rethink about what I said. I will learn from that.

Back to the topic, let’s assume that you are a good stumbler, and you would like to stumble a page you really like. And you understand the benefits that the owner of the page will get, when you stumble the page. You know you will bring them the potential traffic.

So how do you stumble to make this more beneficial?

  1. Proper Topic/category and Tag. If you are the first person who discovers the page, you need to pick the correct and proper Topic for the page. If you don’t pick any topic, StumbleUpOn will pick it out from 500+ topics for you. In some case, it will pick the irrelevant one, which will put the page into the deep ocean. So use your own judgment to give it a proper topic (category) as a good stumbler.
  2. Thumb Up+Review. Don’t be afraid to thumb down a page. It doesn’t make you a worst person. However, more thumbs up you give out, higher score you will get. The higher score will make your stumble more important. I believe that the score is combined and analyzed by number of thumbs up + reviews + friends you gave out.
  3. Timing. If only one person stumble the page and his score is low, it won’t bring much traffic at all. If the second person with higher score thumbs up the page and review it. This will bring more traffic. The time in between these two thumbs up is important. The shorter, the best.
  4. The first few thumbs up matters. The first person who stumble the page is less important. The next stumbler with higher score is more important. If they put down the review, it creats more weight.
  5. Send message to other stumblers or your friends to take a look the page. Tell them you like it, just don’t force them to “Thumb Up” that page. This is one of the StumbleUpOn Toolbar functions. You can once click to sent the page to your friends or through e-mail. It make no difference than post your link on the Internet and ask people to take a look at it and potentially been stumbled. I don’t know why people are arguing about this as “EXCHANGE” link for traffic. If StumbleUpOn toolbar can do so, when can’t we?
  6. The more thumbs up, the more traffic will come. If the page gets more thumbs up in a short period, it gets more traffic faster. If the page has 20 thumbs up in 1 hours, it will generate more traffic than 100 thumbs up in one day does! This is why #2 and #3 is important. If the first few stumblers have higher score, it will have better chance to get other stumblers with the same interest to view the page. So the page will get stumbled faster than random viewers.

All of this observation is not just my observation. It’s not magic. Some of them are written on StumbleUpOn’s web site. I put up all this information because I enjoyed to be a good stumbler and enjoyed the benefits that StumbleUpOn brought to my site. I share this information in return of my appreciation to StumbleUpOn and all of my StumbleUpOn friends. So be a good stumbler to get good stumbled traffic back is what I am saying.

I think StumbleUpOn is a great community and services which bring traffic to a lot of the web sites. We need to appreciate what a great community brought to us. Join me to discover new we sites. You can find my profile on StumbleUpOn.

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