Someone tell me about Stumbleupon...

[petelta]

I always use stumbleupon as part of my every day backlinking for each article. Lately I've been getting a couple hundred of useless views from stumpleupon. Right when I submit my article, 30 seconds later Ive had 200 views from stumbleupon but none of them click anything or stay but a few seconds. Is this actual viewers or does stumbleupon have some kind of bot system that does that many views?

[DogScout]

You have under 7 seconds to capture their interest. That means time to read one short headline OR see an image that piques their interest. If 200 stumblers are bouncing that quick, look at your over all bounce rate and if it is high, it is the page, not the traffic.

[petelta]

yea, i thought that too but all my other traffic has a 40% ctr on my articles. Its only the stumbleupons that bounce quick

[DogScout]

Originally Posted by petelta

yea, i thought that too but all my other traffic has a 40% ctr on my articles. Its only the stumbleupons that bounce quick

Maybe they just attract an ADD crowd?

[verbose]

Stumble is Ok if you have game or music but it is pretty useless other wise

[Happy_Balance]

Originally Posted by verbose

Stumble is Ok if you have game or music but it is pretty useless other wise

26 posts in ~3.5 years, and you call yourself "verbose?"

Originally Posted by petelta

yea, i thought that too but all my other traffic has a 40% ctr on my articles. Its only the stumbleupons that bounce quick

Congrats, on your normally great CTR.

I've used SU (for surfing) only a bit, and am surprised to hear about the bounce rate being so poor. Isn't the whole idea of SU that the users are "real people" looking to be shown the types of sites they are interested in.

What about 24 hours later?
You must get at least a few hits the next day, do they tend to be any better?

[DogScout]

Any better luck with digg?

[petelta]

My typical first day line up for backinking my new articles are squidoo, wetpaint, gather, xanga, blogger, goarticles, ezinearticles, stumbleupon, digg, and onlywire. All my other traffic does fine and the traffic I get from stumbleupon after the initial bursts are normal. I really don't mind this is useless traffic because I really jsut use it as a backlink and get the majority of my sales from search engine traffic, but still wondering why stumbleupon does that lol

[ShaneRQR]

So, you stumble your own sites/articles regularly?

I read that SU will penalize you for that, if they find out. I don't know if it's true or not and I don't know what that penalty would look like, but maybe there's a connection to your problem?

I know this isn't terribly helpful, but maybe someone who knows something about SU can pick up on this.

[DogScout]

Use a proxy with a different account?

[petelta]

its stumbled automatically with onlywire.

[ramkarthik]

StumbleUpon is one of the best ways to get traffic and even make an article go viral.

But it all starts with grabbing attention.

StumbleUpon users click the "stumble a random site" button and land in your site. They read the headline and have a quick look at your site overall. Within 5 seconds, they do this.

Now since the users have come by clicking the stumble button, they can leave your site in a second by again clicking it.

In order to make them take action and also stumble it (so you could get more traffic), you can do few things:
I assume you have quality content in the first place.

1. Attractive Headline

Just like with products, headlines matter a lot. They are not going to stay if my headline is "Check out twitter" but they will stay if I wrote a post with the following headline:

"Finally! A Site Where You Can Really Talk To Celebrities"

Okay that may not be the best, but still you get it.

For more headline tips, you can read this really useful article at CopyBlogger.Com:
How to Write Magnetic Headlines

2. Fast Loading Site

If your site takes more than 5 seconds to load, they'll click on stumble-another-site and leave your page. If you have a blog, use WP-Supercache or some plugin to increase your site loading speed.

3. No Ads

StumbleUpon users don't like ads if they are so blatant. Sidebar 125x125 ads are fine but don't have adsense in the middle of the post or worse case, at the top of the post.

4. Super Cool Image

You can use a super cool image from Flickr to spice up your post. Some people stumble the articles for the image alone. Trust me. I have experienced it in my blog and in other blogs where I have written. They say "A picture is worth thousand words" for a reason.

Hope this helps

[petelta]

yea, im going to test out some new headlines to see if that increases the time stumbleupon visitors stay. Its just wierd because yesterday I got 258 views from stumbleupon which averaged 18 seconds on my site and 1.14 pages. Then I had 367 viewers from my various other sources that averaged a stay of 24 minutes and 14.67 pageviews.

[ramkarthik]

Originally Posted by petelta

yea, im going to test out some new headlines to see if that increases the time stumbleupon visitors stay. Its just wierd because yesterday I got 258 views from stumbleupon which averaged 18 seconds on my site and 1.14 pages. Then I had 367 viewers from my various other sources that averaged a stay of 24 minutes and 14.67 pageviews.

Maybe its the niche?

Try writing a list post. When you write a list post, remember to number it backwards (like 7,5,6 etc) and see if they are staying at your page longer. If they do, then the high bounce rate is probably because of improper formatting or average content.

It maybe due to some other reason also but you could try the above test.

Cheers

You must be pushing something of interest to your hopefully targeted followers/friends.. If you build a targeted userbase to follow you then your results will be much better. Not to mention if you also spend time on the site sharing with your followers.

I have some that call me a liar (not going to mention their names but they know who they are) but hey that is their problem since they cannot use stumbleupon effective when they proclaim themselves to be experts. I have done many times over sending 600+ visitors to a certain article and it will produce 12, 15, or even 20 sales which would net me about $600 or so.

If you use the site properly and build a subscriber base that is targeted to what you are pushing then you will have no problem. Untargeted and random users will only spend a few seconds on your site.

James

[petelta]

Good thought James. I have never actually used stumbleupon's features. Ive only used it as a backlink so far

Originally Posted by petelta

Good thought James. I have never actually used stumbleupon's features. Ive only used it as a backlink so far

As I have always said these sites was created for users to interact with the community. Build a profile, make friends, communicate with each other and etc.. If anyone is using a web 2.0 site such as stumbleupon just to bookmark then they will never see the results they should be getting.

Yes it takes time but this is business and not everything can be put on auto-pilot. Working smart does not always mean using the fastest way to do something or use automative means, sometimes it means taking the proper time to get something going.

James

[Kevin Williams]

I always use SU, but it always has a REALLY high bounce rate. Stumblers just look for something really exciting and if they don't find it, they leave. You need to capture their attention fast and images work a lot better than words for that.

[goingup]

Would purchased stumbles work for one page review sites?
Thats all i have at the moment.
Or for cash making power sites? Which are squeeze pages....

[michalgordon51]

i never get any hits from stumble upon....

Originally Posted by goingup

Would purchased stumbles work for one page review sites?
Thats all i have at the moment.
Or for cash making power sites? Which are squeeze pages....

You do not need to purchase hits, you could create an account and work that account.. Get some great quality bookmarks on it and start creating some friends in the network. As I said getting related friends into your network will work wonders for you...

James