I started up a new forum yesterday and wanted to experiment a little more with stumble upon. So here is what I did. I am stumbling each new post that I add to the site. Then I watched the status of my forum monitor and TADA!. 104 Visitors in 5 minutes like BAMM!. This is a travel forum that I put up and I guess that travel is probably a big stumbler. So I just wanted to share that with everyone. Try it out and see if it works for you
no yet. they are reading my announcements and post. Im sure they will start. I launched it last night and did not work on it much all day until now. But yes it does bring the traffic.
Yes, don't stumble "worthless" pages, like forum threads, as people will very possibly report them and either/or end up having your url blocked or have your StumbleUpon account deactivated. You'll get a message of (a site I know that was banned by StumbleUpon): Banned site Banned Site You cannot rate or comment on this website. It has been banned from StumbleUpon because the owner has been abusing our service, or has asked that their site not be included in StumbleUpon. If this still doesn't work for you, please Contact Us to let us know
I have 'liked it' to a few of my better threads and once had over 3000 visits in 48 hours. Of those 3k visitors NONE converted. Of the other threads that seemed to average 10-300 visitors each I have gained one confirmed new member. It's easy work, but with so many webmasters flooding their own sites, and with the stumble exchanges, they are now adding more rules and restrictions. I have refrained from doing exchanges for months now, and only rarely push my own threads/pages/sites. It kind of hurts traffic wise, at least in numbers, but heh, you are talking what, MAYBE 3 cents on impressions if you are lucky, and a click via a stumbler is like a miracle. I now use stumble like it should be used. To share sites I that I think are cool.
I have done this too you will eventually find you start getting no more traffic they probably either block or limit you
Cozmo and Q, what do you mean by "converted"? Do you have sales on your website? Membership signup? Some way of tracking repeat visitors? If someone is just looking to get some repeat visitors, is stumbling a good way to go?
Well, it in some way,it's more then just bulk traffic you want. You'll either want membership or a sale. If you are getting what you want (other then traffic) then that is what I'd call a conversion. In my case its a member sign up, as I offer nothing for sale. Either way though, there has to be some ROI (return on investment) in all forms of advertising, and free adverts such as social bookmarking, and in this case SU, the investment is time, and the return would be a new contributing member, or sale. Even a new lucking guest is better then just a bunch of bandwidth munchers that pop in, stay for .5 minutes, and pop back out as they once again click the stumble button. So regardless of what you call it or what it even means, in most cases its more then just the base traffic you want, unless of course you are on an awesome pay per impression ad network, lol. Stumble users need something to look at, and something that will make them like it as much as you do. Simply stumbling your site announcements is not the way to go, that's for sure, heh...your members don't even care about those, why should some stranger? Got a good topic? GOOD, maybe someone will stumble it for you... Got a great topic? GREAT! Maybe you should reserve your stumbles for those Anything less is just a waste of time for everyone.
Stumblers tend to be like the traffic from Digg.. they just browse through and are off again.. very low conversion rates with both groups.