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In the past couple years, there’s been plenty of speculation about the value of StumbleUpon traffic. Some have argued strongly in favor while others disagree. While I’ve always been in favor of getting my posts stumbled, I’ve been on the ropes about its usefulness. Today, I was poking around my Google Analytics account, and immediately noticed a spike in traffic on my other blog, JoeTech.com from 12.21.2008. A couple clicks later, I found the source of the traffic to be StumbleUpon hits to a post from last March. Looking back further, I noticed a few more spikes from StumbleUpon in 2007 and 2008, resulting in almost 9,000 visits. I love unexpected traffic, but good marketing requires understanding of methods that seem to work so I wondered, is this traffic even valuable, why is it coming in months later, and how can I keep it up?

Why the sudden interest in an old post?
4mind4life “discovered” my post about a Swiss Mini Gun back on March 6th. A couple days later, someone else stumbled it and the post was viewed just over 200 times. Then it quickly faded into the darkness of my blog archives. More people stumbled it, but it takes someone with plenty of subscribers to get a burst of traffic to your post, so it sat silent until it got stumbled by another “power user” on April 9th, bringing me an additional 300+ views. Quietly, the post lay in the archives for months after that initial traffic, averaging about 5 views per day, from Google and other sources. In late November, it had a couple small traffic bumps, leading another power Stumbler to find the post and stumble it. That stumble resulted in a new 200+ views burst of traffic. These bursts of traffic from power users stumbling your content are why many social media experts tell you to invest time making connections with the right people on StumbleUpon and other social media sites, something I need to do more of, admittedly.

Is this traffic even valuable?
This is another point of contention when it comes to sites like StumbleUpon. Ultimately, any traffic that isn’t someone just trying to bury your web server is good traffic. When I look at the bounce rates below for my SU traffic, they’re not bad, but they’re not great, either. This means about 48% of the people who came to my site from StumbleUpon walked right back out. But I’m a “glass half full” type of guy, so I see that 52% of these new visitors decided to drop back in later and read other posts. This means StumbleUpon has brought me about 4,300 new readers that ended up coming back. That’s not too bad for free traffic.

I also see 1.73 pages per visit on average, which is great. It means that about 73% of these new visitors checked out another page on the site before they left. I’d love a much higher number, but once again, all I’ve done to get this free traffic is add a StumbleUpon link to my posts. Better still, I’m sure a couple of these visitors also stumbled the second post they read. StumbleUpon traffic, in my opinion, is very valuable. If you’re not taking advantage of it, you should.

How do I make it happen more?
I’ve already pointed out part of this above. If you want to succeed with social marketing, you should be social. These sites rely on people suggesting things for other people to view and read, so you need those first few stumbles to get the ball rolling. While I’ve been a horrible slacker on StumbleUpon, I tried some social participation on Digg, which works on a similar principal, with some degree of success. When you join the site, make sure your blog’s URL is in your profile and add an icon so you’ll be noticeable. Next, find a tag related to the type of content you regularly post. Pick a popular (more bold) one for better results.

Don’t stop there. Working to get those initial stumbles is just the door-opener. The real power behind StumbleUpon is the viral effect it can have. If each person who sees the initial stumbles stumbles the post themselves, the traffic momentum will continue to grow. There’s no way to make sure this happens, but you can certainly increase your odds. Put a StumbleUpon link at the bottom of your post, making it easy for anyone to stumble it. The easier you make it, the more success you’ll see.

If you want to really remind those stumblers to re-stumble your post, do like Saad Kamal did in this post and display a special message to people that came from stumbleupon.com, asking them to stumble your post.

Targeting a stumble request like this is a great way to take advantage of the ability to know where the reader is coming from. This works for other services like Digg, etc., too. Check out this plugin if you’re using WordPress.

Be worthy of stumbles
Just like Digg or any other social media traffic engine, StumbleUpon has users that generally promote specific types of stories, images, etc. over others. Most bloggers should write about what makes them happy and in a way they are comfortable with, but if you need a big traffic boost, take a look at what others are stumbling and gear a post to it. Digg, for example, loves lists like “10 reasons you should…” or “5 ways to get… for free”. Take a look at what the power users like and give it to them. Chances are, they’ll stumble it and you’ll have some instant traffic.