Now that SU is pretty much mainstream and the average internet users are starting to grasp a hold of how fun and informative it can be the coders are now tweaking out their systems to thwart and deter webmasters (including bloggers) from stumbling their own sites. There are more and more reports of sites getting banned due to odd 'liked it' votes and I'm sure that internally more and more self promotional votes are being devalued. I would personally recommend that one limits their own votes to their personal sites to the very best of the best entires/pages and that they promote the use of their readers to do the stumbling. I also suggest that if you are going to use SU as a promotional tool that you should also diversify what you vote for. For every page of your own that you stumble, find a dozen others to promote as well. This not only helps to make it look like you are an honest to goodness user of the network, but everyone wins... I'm not talking about stumble exchanges either, as I'm sure those are on the hitlist just like they got smashed by DIGG. I'm talking about actually finding worthy pages and liking them. Promoting the use of SU as it's supposed to be used can only help yourself as well, as the more you stumble others, and promote the stumbling of others, the greater the chances of you getting natural stumbles. I <3 SU
i have to say that i went ahead and signed up for stubleupon and clicked the stumble icon 2 times. i then got a trojan that took me 2 days to get rid of. since, i have deleted stumbleupon and will never go back.
Generally, stumblers are poor traffic. Ask anybody who knows what they are talking about. A spinning counter is great, providing they spend more than 10 seconds on your site. Stumblers are the net couch potatoes.
I can't say that SU traffic is poor. Yes, they are not big ad clickers and don't stay much on the site, but I earn a lot more from CPM ads and StumbleUpon traffic. The CPM rate is also good, because most of the stumblers are US/Canada/Australia etc based and not from low paying countries like China, Iran, UAR etc. And also, it is free. Assume just 1% of the total (massive) SU visitors become loyal. That is still very good for free promotion.
StumbleUpon works great for me in bringing consistent traffic. This is because the pages that are stumbled are to TV Series that are on my site, so people are constantly searching for places to find them.
DO NOT spam StumbleUpon, especially with crappy pages. StumbleUpon is coming down hard on spammers. Here's an example of what your site may end up like: 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 Aside from that, StumbleUpon is an excellent source for getting great traffic (like I said, only on quality pages!!). The traffic is semi-targetted, however Stumblers are flighty. If they don't like the page, they'll hit Stumble! again OR WORSE report the page. Be smart about it! Read this thread about the bans Here's another about Stumbling BE SMART - DON'T ABUSE IT