Dave and Jay - Crazy Web Entrepreneurs

Earlier in the week, one of my other blogs got stumbled. If you haven’t heard about StumbleUpon or how they were recently purchased by Ebay for $75 million:

1. Move out from the rock you’re living under, and keep up with the latest tech news. :)

2. I’ll give you a brief run down of how it works.

Using a browser add-on, users can click a button and be sent to a random website. These are websites that have been “stumbled upon” by other users or in some cases are paid insertions into the StumbleUpon list. Once you are at the site, you have a plethora of options…vote that you like or dislike the page, send it to your friends and more. In very basic terms, the more people who click the little “I like it!” thumbs-up icon, the more people are sent to stumble upon the website.

So What Were The Results?

Over two days, the blog was sent over 1060 visitors referred from StumbleUpon (although I’m sure there is potential for even larger amounts of traffic) and even now, a week later, it is sending 20 - 50 referrers daily to the blog. That’s a good chunk of traffic more than when I purchased an advertising campaign on StumbleUpon, and it didn’t cost me $50 this time! Since we’re on the subject, let me talk about their advertising program. While the cost per visitor is very reasonable (only 5 cents per) and you are able to choose a category that fits your site’s general category, there is one major problem: StumbleUpon users are extremely fickle.

During my advertising campaign of 100 users per day for 10 days, the RSS subscription numbers fluctuated wildly and after it was over, the retention of users was relatively low. This is not a big deal when you are getting the traffic for free, but at 5 cents a click the value just isn’t there. While there are always exceptions to the rule, advertising on StumbleUpon gets the thumbs down from me.

Characteristics Of StumbleUpon Traffic

1. Fickle Users - As I mentioned before, like most social media users, Stumblers are very fickle. So your retention rate / repeat visitor rate will most likely be very low. However, topical sites that traditionally do well with social media users will fare better (Humor, Techie, Web 2.0 , etc.).

2. Short Attention Span - The Stumble toolbar is very, very easy to use. If the page you load doesn’t strike you right away, your mouse is already hovering over the “Stumble” button, ready to load a new site for you. The page stumblers will land on needs to draw the user’s attention right away. Having a nice design on the site, or content that draws your attention right away will help limit the number of users who leave your page before finding out what it is.

3. Internet Joe Who’s In The Know - Like most social media site users, Stumblers are quite ad blind… so don’t think you can use SU as a method of sending an army of Google Adsense / contextual ad clickers to your website. The best way to leverage the traffic you can get is to help grow your readership in a blog or a similar type of site that is frequently updated, or if you’re evil you can try cleverly disguised affiliate offers.

4. After The Burst - Unlike sites like Digg or Reddit, who send you an avalanche of traffic and then toss you aside like a cheap “lady of the evening“, SU will continue to send residual traffic your way for days or even weeks after your post becomes popular.

Now that I’ve got you interested in using StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your website(s), you’ll definitely want to check back tomorrow for a breakdown of how to actually use it effectively. If you don’t want to miss it, why not subscribe to my RSS?

Good Profits.