Feb 23 2008
Stumble Upon for Traffic
If you are not familiar with Stumble Upon, it is a social bookmarking site owned by eBay. It works best if you are using the Firefox browser. It is an installed tool bar add on that allows you to thumbs up or thumbs down a site you come across. It puts that site in a cycle where it is sent out to people who are looking for a certain topic.
On Stumble Upon, you can also get friends (up to 200) and have fans of your personal page. When you have friends and fans, you can send pages to them for them to view. When you hit the stumble button, you will also view pages that your friends have sent.
Along with thumbs up and thumbs down, you can give a review of the page rather you liked it or not. This is helpful to other people.
Stumble Upon is fun and you can spend hours just stumbling sites and finding interesting sites to view. However, I just wanted to give a basic overview as an opening to the main point of this article so to find out more, just download . Once you have the browser go to tools and add ons and download the Stumble Upon add on and sign up for an account.
I use Stumble Upon everyday and every time I write a post on any of my blogs I stumble them. At one point I started a blog dedicated to website reviews and stumble exchanges but I was told this is no longer allowed so I changed the site to just website reviews.
Now on to the point of traffic from Stumble Upon. In my experience and the experiences of many webmasters that I converse with everyday, Stumble Upon provides a lot of traffic. The problem with the traffic from Stumble Upon is that it does not convert well. If you are selling something or trying to make money on clicks from ads, this traffic does not turn into money as well as regular search engine traffic.
Many users of Stumble Upon just keep clicking through and do not stay long enough to even read what you have on your site. I would venture to say that less than 1% converts into any ad click or sale. I am not sure what the percentage is that stay on your site and read it but I would say that is low too. There are those who search for your topic and are really interested in your site but like I said before, many just click right on through.
So after reading that, I am sure you have one big question. Why should I use Stumble Upon at all? The answer is clear. It is free and though it may not be the best traffic, it is still traffic. If you get just a few people out of thousands that will really enjoy your site and make you a little money, that is more than you had without Stumble Upon. It is also a great way to get your site seen. If you site get many thumbs up, you can thousands of visitors a day to your site. Many will not return. However, some will and you could end up with a nice loyal reader base.
I love Stumble Upon and find it both fun and a good way to drive traffic to my site. Do not use it as your only source of traffic because you will be disappointed. However, mixed with other sources, it can add visitors to your site and money to your pocket.
