Is Stumbling your site worth it?

[Bishop81]

Well, I know that I have to keep the site maintained in order to keep the traffic, and who knows how many of them will be back, but...

A picture is worth a thousand words. Check out the one attached to this post.

This site has only been up for probably 4 hours. I stumbled the home page, and 2 posts that I had written. I can only hope that the effects are lasting.

[JMichaelZ]

Congratulation on your traffic.

If you were looking for more 2.0 traffic, maybe you could try some other social sites, and add to your traffic, maybe even stumble your posts on those other sites. Tumblr seems to be growing in popularity, jaiku I think is still closed but I think Pownce is still open. Clearblogs, and wetpaint are places you could stumble as well I bet.

[hebsgaard]

Social bookmarking can be really cool. Maybe you should look at BIGMike's SocialBot offer.

[Andyhenry]

Originally Posted by Bishop81

Well, I know that I have to keep the site maintained in order to keep the traffic, and who knows how many of them will be back, but...

A picture is worth a thousand words. Check out the one attached to this post.

This site has only been up for probably 4 hours. I stumbled the home page, and 2 posts that I had written. I can only hope that the effects are lasting.

The results will not last. You've hardly done anything - how can you expect lasting results?

Getting a few hundred visitors a day is almost a no-brainer for anyone using a blog with decent plugins, but that has no relation to making money.

[Mike Bogowski]

Originally Posted by Andyhenry

The results will not last. You've hardly done anything - how can you expect lasting results?

Getting a few hundred visitors a day is almost a no-brainer for anyone using a blog with decent plugins, but that has no relation to making money.

Woah Woah Andy take it easy on the guy

This is a positive sign for sure, it will likely die off a little but that fact that you are getting traffic at all from stumbleupon is good.

Ive had blogs I stumbled and got zilch from it.

[precious007]

Social bookmarking can be tremendously great. but you need to be active on those communities, which is pretty time consuming , I know people squeezing thousands a month just from Digg alone, that might sound great but it`s time consuming, anybody is free to try it. On the other side some bookmarking sites are good for back links on the long run, gain popularity, and increase search engine rankings.

[rosetrees]

Originally Posted by hebsgaard

Social bookmarking can be really cool. Maybe you should look at BIGMike's SocialBot offer.

Thanks for the heads up. Heading on over to purchase.

[Neil Morgan]

Is Stumbling your site worth it?

To answer the specific question by the OP...

...I tend to ignore Stumble traffic when I'm working out my site's visitor value, mainly because the traffic is not targeted and therefore low quality from a sales conversion point of view.

It really depends on your niche. My opinion is that Stumble traffic will be more useful for sites that are targeted at the public at large, and not narrow niches such as IM.

Cheers,

Neil

[Paul M]

If you really want to get into social bookmarking you can use:

Social bookmarking service. Fast tagging and posting to all major social websites - SocialMarker.com

Social marker will allow you to bookmark your site on 48 social bookmarking sites,
however you do have to sign up at each one first but after that it becomes easy.

From my point of view, traffic direct from the social bookmarking sites themselves
isn't really worth much because it's un-targeted.

The big upside to social bookmarking, you can often get on the front page of google
with properly targeted keywords, which means more free targeted traffic from the
search engines.

Also as mentioned in this thread, social bookmarking generally give you
short term traffic, which means you have to keep it up constantly.

paul

[quantikev]

From my perspective, Stumbleupon is worth using if you have a site people care enough to link back to.

Most knowledge topics work for this.

The key is continuously building your profile by regularly stumbling & discovering other sites.

As other responders have said - this can take an hour or two per day.. but it may be worth doing to you in the beginning for a new site - Back links can be difficult to build.

[Bishop81]

Lol, so many experts pop up when somebody shares something.

All I was saying is that the initial rush can be really good. Whether the traffic comes back or not is up to the person in charge of the site. With mine, the traffic usually dies down with a day or two to a normal level of 1 - 2 visitors.

If I can update the site regularly, though, and provide quality content that people decided to come back and check, then I may be able to keep a percentage of those initial visitors.

I just wanted to let people who wonder if a stumble on your site is worth it or not, have a chance to see first-hand what it can do. It doesn't take much time to build up your profile either. When DP still had their friend exchanges going on, and stumble exchanges, I participated in those, not knowing how it was actually helping. Now, I don't do any of that any more. The key is to have a decent number of friends, however, and to build your profile up. If you see a page you like, stumble it. Discovering pages helps quite a bit too. Spend a little bit of time on stumble and add some friends. I'm not sure how you get it, but in FF there's an option when you right-click on a picture to Stumble Photo-Blog it. Take advantage of that as an easy way to share some good pics. With a good profile, you can drive hundreds of visitors to your site in a very short time. Now, keeping them coming back is an entirely different matter.

[Andyhenry]

Originally Posted by Bishop81

Lol, so many experts pop up when somebody shares something.

All I was saying is that the initial rush can be really good. Whether the traffic comes back or not is up to the person in charge of the site. With mine, the traffic usually dies down with a day or two to a normal level of 1 - 2 visitors.

The reason 'experts' pop up is because this is a community and some of us feel a responsibility to stop others wasting their time doing ineffective things that they don't properly understand.

There's nothing wrong with spending your time wandering around the web stumbling interesting things - it's just not an effective way to get targeted traffic for someone just starting out. There are many other more productive things you can do.

I'd be first in the line to say that social bookmarking can be useful - when done effectively.

You can do a ton of social bookmarketing on auto-pilot just from using a couple of free plugins, so it's not something that should take your time.

Most IMers are effectively using social bookmarking and so it's more of a waste of time and a distraction than a useful addition to their business.

The problem is that many people don't take their business seriously and will try anything to desparately just some traffic, no matter how unfocused it is. If that traffic is then the basis for their business they're onto a rocky start and can waste months trying to make money from a poor position.

Why would it make sense for anyone to tell others to do that?

You may think my comments were harsh, but they're not negative, they're just a reality check because whether you care or not, others will read your comments and think they should go and do social bookmarking instead of something more productive and it's not going to help them if they just do a couple of bookmarks and then expect significant results.

Andy