Yes Stumble Upon works! I have to say I had my doubts but I'm pretty convinced now that it can help drive a lot of quality traffic. I wrote a little bit about how I usually go about driving traffic on my website here. But so you don't have to go to my website if you don't feel like it I'll summarize: Basically I worked on getting several positive stumble ratings to my homepage first. Then whenever I write a new post or article I would first bookmark it (delicious, reddit, etc) and then stumble that post... you might want to do a stumble exchange on the forum also. The first several weeks of stumbling my homepage didn't drive much traffic but when I started to stumble sub pages I saw results (over 100/uniques per day) every time. Yesterday I got over 1000 referals from stumble upon. So if you have a bit of patience you can get good free traffic. Cheers. Pete.
Thanks, I too was very surprised by the traffic. I usually get between 100-300 visits when I do this. To be perfectly honest with you, the revenue isn't even worth mentioning. I might have make only a few dollars more (maybe up to $5). This is because I haven't taken any major steps to monetizing my website. I want to keep it clean and clear of ads. I've noticed that less ads often leads to more traffic and pageviews. I'm also trying to figure out if it will help with subscription rates. If I can go a month or two without ads and build up enough steady traffic then I'm sure people will forgive me if I insert an extra ad unit!
I think stumble upon is good for Alexa rating. But I really have my doubts on its traffic. If you think about it, people are "Channel Surfing" the site and therefore, are likely to stay on your website for just 1 minute before they go and "surf" the next. The traffic from StumbleUpon never seems to convert for some reason. This is because it is not targeted traffic. I have found, however that humor and bizzare tags are the best ones for traffic.
I have to disagree, nothing personal. I keep an eye on my stats and use Google analytics (it's free) to closely monitor visitor actions. Stumble traffic (for me) has a bounce rate of only 20-25% and an average of about 3.x page views per visit. That's pretty high quality traffic. That means that over 75% of the people that come in from stumble are looking at more than one page. The targeting is good because of the tags, as long as you make sure the tags are accurate then you should have good targeting. The added benefit is that some of them (probably a lot) will also click the thumbs up and stumble you even more... because they are already using stumble it's like a snowball effect. Me Like!
How long did it take you to reach this result? It would be nice if you give us more details on how you have achieved this. Thanks in advance.
Stumblers do seem to visit a lot of pages on my sites. About 2 on average, far more than digg. Getting 1000+ visitors per day is pretty easy. Just create something cool and then give it the thumbs up on your toolbar.
Well like I mentioned above I started by stumbling my homepage for a few weeks. So I'd say about 2-3 weeks of homepage stumbles, on the forum. This built up a decent number of stumbles (over 30) and obviously the ones that my regular visitors did on their own. Like mad said, give fresh content a thumbs up on the toolbar and the traffic starts. Mind you just saying "create something cool" is easier said than done. Just do your best and don't give up. Even if your content isn't that great you will eventually get a break. The thumbs up didn't start working for me until: #1 - I had a few homepage stumbles #2 - I added my links to Delicious, reddit, etc... Your results may vary but that's how I do it and it seems to work ok.
good work itsme. I had success with stumbleupon also, is a good source of traffic if your site hit the right keyword. Some keywords (TAGS in stumbleupon) can bring you alot of traffic, but of course your cannot add unrelated tags to your sites.
As always I believe the only way to get quality traffic is by Pay per click advertising. You know what type of people to target and you can then convert them into potential customers. After all you are tragetting them. Traffic from free places is very untargeted and that is the reason for low amounts of money. Just my opinion.
You are wrong. Although it's free it's still targeted. Considering how cheap bandwidth is, any amount of money earned is almost pure profit. So even if 1000 visits results in $1 that is $1 you wouldn't have had... I think that even $1 is worth getting. PPC suffers from click fraud and that's even worse because you pay for it.
You don't get money from visitors from social networks, the idea is that they link to your site and then your rankings get better and the people who arrive from Google buy your products.
Also you in pay per click, if you do it wrong (and more than 70% do it wrong), you'll spend the money and not gain what was expected. There are many free good traffic sources to get, pay per click for me, should be used only if you have a good amount to spend whithout worries.
SU is not a golden traffic generater it is good for one day but how do you know they just didnt stumbled your page and re stumbled another page? when I look for new sites or blogs I use SU to search and I just keep clicking my SU FF button until I find something appealing SU is great - and I was really excited about it that I made an exchange program with it on my blog and it became pretty succesful - but after my case study I was disappointed to find out some issues with it - its not consistant but congratulations
No it's not a golden traffic generator but it is good for giving you a shot of relevant traffic. There is nothing wrong with people stumbling onto other sites, that's good... it's the reason they found me in the first place. While it's not a steady source of traffic in the classic sense, it's still pretty consistent (so far). When I stumble something new I can expect SOME traffic and that is better than no traffic. My hopes are that the newest visitors will like what they see and either subscribe to RSS, email or bookmark my website. Nothing is as good as relevant link exchanges and steady visitors but I'll take what I can get.