When I first started blogging, every now and then I’d receive an avalanche of traffic. In fact, the first time it happened it crashed my server (I had been running the Servantofchaos.com blog on a server in my garage, and it just could not cope) – and I ended up switching to Typepad.
The culprit was StumbleUpon.
These days, social networks like Twitter or Facebook garner most of the attention, but this new infographic from column 5 media shows just how powerful StumbleUpon can be. In fact, it drives over 50% of social media traffic in the US. And the coolest thing is that while pages shared via Twitter have a half life of about 3 hours, stumbled pages are over 130 times more effective.
StumbleUpon also has a cool way of managing and scheduling your shared links. Called su.pr, it helps you optimise your shared links by time of day – I wrote about it here. And while many people tend to dislike the StumbleUpon toolbar, with a small investment of your time, the system can deliver you some great content and plenty of new on-topic information. It takes the randomness of the web out and replaces it with serendipity. What more could you ask for?
Good timing squire. I recently started posting there, and I’m pleased at the traffic I’m getting from Stumbleupon.
It’s not successful every time I post a link but when it is shared by their users, it seems to gather momentum quickly and in high numbers. I’m not even sure I’m doing it correctly as I’ve been using the ‘favourites interface’ to post my links so this post will be very helpful to take a closer look.
Recently I’ve been speculating how to manipulate Google ranking. I’m curious to play the variables and see what can be learned . I get the feeling an none to serious effort by a collective of 20 or so Bloggers could be interesting. However my idea of interesting isn’t always universal.
I’m definitely a huge StumbleUpon fan, Gavin. I’m also coming to really love the Paid Discovery component of it.
See here for a quick look at a campaign I’m working on now: http://blogcampaigning.com/2011/11/stumbleupon-and-teletoon-retro/
Heh – love your thinking 😉
All these tools keep evolving – which is part of the game, I guess. Small, well connected groups blogging on similar topics could make an impact relatively quickly. That’s why reblogging lists used to help tremendously. I think these days you need to be a little more subtle!