3 StumbleUpon Traffic Myths Debunked
Most Internet marketers about to introduce StumbleUpon to you will tell more or less the same story. According to those StumbleUpon tutorials you have to undertake certain actions to succeed on SU to get more traffic for your own blog or website. Well, at least 3 often repeated tips are simply wrong according to my own experience as an active user on StumbleUpon during the last weeks.
The 3 most common StumbleUpon myths are:
- Get more friends on SU to get more popular and thus get more traffic
- Stumble yourself as much as possible
- Most stumblers are friendly and do not hate SEO
1: After initially just receiving traffic from StumbleUpon, I was stumbled for the first time on day 2 of SEO 2.0, and then again and again, I decided to use StumbleUpon myself. As I am real social media aficionado, until recently mostly in Germany, I gained momentum very quickly on SU. Maybe too fast for the algorithms or the SEO haters. Why? The more friends I got the less successful my SEO 2.0 blog got on StumbleUpon it seems.
While initially complete strangers would stumble me and I would receive a small wave of traffic each time after some weeks Lyndon of Cornwall SEO stumbled me a started the first avalanche that brought me massive and enduring traffic for a single post. This post still gets some visitors from SU.
In contrast the same Lyndon stumbled me some days ago and did not bring any significant traffic for some days now. Also several other SU friends of mine reviewed and stumbled this story. Either it was "disliked" by many others (the equivalent of burying it) or SU does not count your friends votes to prevent fraud. That's why I stopped to befriend people on SU in order not to hurt them and myself. Your friends will notice your posts and probably stumble you more often as they read your blog on SU and your real one probably but you won't get traffic if no strangers vote for you. So basically it would be better if those people would not be your friends, then their vote would count.
Conclusion: It is rather useless or even counterproductive to befriend all the other people of your niche at SU, especially if it's the SEO niche, as SEOs are watched ten times as close being perceived as spammers by most mortals. Lay low on SU or do not engage in the community at all if you do not want to be perceived as a SEO wanting to spam StumbleUpon (as any action by even the cleanest SEO will be perceived as spam by the SEO haters). I made the mistake to be outspoken about the SEO hate on SU and just more SEO haters buried me as a reaction and nobody else cared that people use hate speech to intimidate me.
2: Being active on SU is the prerequisite to success with your own projects on this social discovery site people tell you. Well, I noticed no positive change. Being active on SU is very time consuming and addictive, so you end up stumbling 1 or 2 hours per day. So think twice if you want to invest the time into an eBay company or into your own. The more active you are, the more SEO haters will notice you and offend you even without taking a look and who you are.
Conclusion: Think of your activity at SU as leisure, just like surfing the web. Do not mix it up with work for your blog. Write your blog posts and let the SU community discover you, but it doesn't make much sense wanting to push yourself by sheer SU activity.
3: I wrote it myself, "stumblers are much friendlier than Diggers" who will flame in the comments etc. Well, that's not true. The only difference is that SU sends more targeted traffic so the people who hate SEO or whatever your topic is won't notice you at first. After you become somehow popular on SU they will and they will stalk you. If you criticise them, they will inform all of their friends on SU and those will "review your SU blog" or your real site with a thumbs down and things like "Get some AIDS 2.0". I have at least 6 negative reviews out of 14 on my SU profile. 3 of them are so ugly that I decided to hide them. The difference to Digg is also that no other people will speak on your behalf. Nobody cares if those people puke on you.
Conclusion: Do not give additional publicity to the SEO haters. I know I do it again, as I'm not a true internet marketer. I've been on the net for 10 years and do SEO for 3 now. So things like Netiquette and truth are more important to me than to other people who earn their money and ignore those who mess up the Net. You should too if you want to get traffic from SU. If you are truly after a community like I am, SU will disappoint you. People don't care for the hate speech. Just those that want to hate care for it and will bring you more of it.
My overall conclusion is: I will curb my professional use of SU as it has a rather negative impact on my professional endevours at the end of the day. I will use the time for working on my projects instead. I will keep on stumbling photography sites and reading my SEO daily newspaper by my SU friends but I won't work for StumbleUpon that much anymore.
I have recieved a lot of traffic from SU over about the past 4 weeks. It is not true that stumbling a lot will not get you traffic. It will, but you need to do more.
You need to befriend, valuable people that are valuable to the community on SU and Stumble good sites or articles and give in-depth reviews, or at least reviews with value.
Also, stumble your own stuff, but not avidly. Stumbling your stuff over and over will not gain you more in the long-run, but it’s perfectly fine to do it now and then, with your most detailed work.
Also SEO is a bad category as it’s so confined and free of public or common knowledge so it will be very speculated and debated therefore difficult to attract good attention unless you can prove what you say.
The best thing to do is just to create the best content you can, as regular as you can and have a stumble it button beneath each post. This along with quality stumbling will get you traffic.
Well Nick, I have done all that and more. I am not sure you have visited my profile on SU. Great stumblers have stumbled my posts lately with litle or no traffic ensuing.
So that’s why I only agree with half of your conclusion: “create the best content you can, as regular as you can and have a stumble it button beneath each post” is allright, but stop stumbling and befriending everybody. It hurts more that it helps. Use the time to create more content for your site instead.
Chef Tad, change the title of this blog to: StumbleUpon 2.0! haha!
DF, you’re right, I should not limit myself to SU.
As a matter of fact, SU friends is who view the page once it is stumbled. The reason Lyndon sent a massive amount of traffic is that he has 355 fans.
SU has a small community of SEOs, designers, marketers and even social marketers, so if you tag your posts right, you should be fine. SU is a noticeable part of my traffic pattern.
So deliver value, target your audience, tag right and you’ll be fine. Thinking about whether you’ll be getting more traffic while communicating and delivering value is counterproductive (the same way it is not good to think about money, when you are helping a lady cross the street).
Yuri, although I agree with you, it seems that you have overseen some aspects of the situation: Lyndon brought me traffic before I was active on SU. Then he stumbled me once again along with others and brought NO traffic while I was already an acclaimed SU poweruser. So something has changed fundamentally.
I think about the value first, but I have the right to be dissapointed when after 4 positive reviews and a dozen “like its” a post of mine gets zero traffic.
Read about that here:
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/does-stumbleupon-crack-down-on-seo-already
Basically I got penalized for being too active on SU. So I take a step back and concentrate on creating value instead of relying on a community that will bar me from harvesting the fruits of my hard work.
[...] Tad Chef reveals the myths surrounding StumbleUpon and traffic in his post titled; “3 Stumble Upon Traffic Myths Debunked” [...]
I have used SU a fair bit on many sites. If I come across a good one, I give it the thumbs up. I have never given a site the thumbs down. I’ve got a few of my own sites listed, but the traffic is pretty ordinary when you analyse it. Sure, they come, but they are only there for 2 seconds and gone. That hardly ranks as a worthwhile visit and certainly not one worth counting.
Cheers,
Ric
[...] still not sure what to think about it. The more you stumble and the more friends you get the more difficult it gets to gain traffic via SU as your friends are counted as neutral votes. So I attempted to curb my StumbleUpon addiction: To [...]
“Lyndon brought me traffic before I was active on SU. Then he stumbled me once again along with others and brought NO traffic while I was already an acclaimed SU poweruser. So something has changed fundamentally.”
I stumbled two pages from the same site the other day, both equally interesting, just expresing different opinions. One got lots of stumbles, the other not one.
It may be that stumbleupon doesnt like rating too many pages from a site per stumbler rather than anything more sinister.
As a regular user of SU (no websites of my own to promote) I personally don’t have a problem with people who discover their own content, so long as it’s not;
A.)StumbleSpam, defined as pages made just for SU that contain affiliate links, “made for adsense” content, etc.
B.)A StumbleExchange, the absolute scourge of SU, perpetrated by webmasters who cannot get thumbs up on their own merit and must sink to bribing other failed webmasters with promises of reciprocal stumbles. (Shame on you DigitalPoint)
C.)StumbleAids, you’ll know when you find one. It will be a post about stumbleupon, either how to game the system to get traffic or recommendations/tips on how to stumble (who to befriend, how much to stumble etc.) to maximize your own self promotion.
D.)StumbleBait, this covers a variety of topics, from putting a gallery of popular pictures on a content-less site with nothing but ads to accompany them (ahem.. ), making a “shit stirring” page with the intention of creating some sort of controversy, and, of course, the obligatory blog entry about SU itself (nothing wrong with that, just don’t add it to SU yourself please, it makes you look stupid).
SU spammers need to realize, as a regular user of SU I see sites like theirs twenty times a day, and getting my intelligence insulted twenty times a day is rather frustrating. The majority of us can see your BS a mile away and we don’t appreciate it. Furthermore, you’re ruining it for your peers in the SEO topic, it ruins the little trust we have for people pusing an agenda that involves someone else profiting from us.
I agree that more SU = more traffic.. that is my once cent..:)
[...] 3 StumbleUpon Traffic Myths Debunked Author: Nick of seo2.0.onreact.com Looks at three ideas of traffic from StumbleUpon and how they are more myth than fact. [...]
[...] 3 StumbleUpon Traffic Myths Debunked Author: Nick of seo2.0.onreact.com Looks at three ideas of traffic from StumbleUpon and how they are more myth than fact. [...]