Know your visitors: StumbleUpon
Written by Nico on December 28, 2008 – 4:54 pm -Social media websites can be a good traffic source for your website or blog. There are several WordPress plugins available that make it easier for your visitors to submit a page they like to their favorite social media site.
StumbleUpon is one of the sites that can bring a heap of new visitors to your site. I’ve seen 18,000 page views in a single day on one of my sites, all traffic from StumbleUpon. The number of visitors that came to my site from StumbleUpon decreased considerably over the next couple of days, but I was still getting over 1,000 visitors a day for about a month.
We all want traffic, right? Well, actually, most webmasters think it’s all about the number of visitors, but what they really want is to make some money from ads running on their site. If you are running AdSense ads on your site, StumbleUpon traffic, or rather social media traffic in general, is no money maker. If you want to get a good return on all that free traffic, you have to know who your visitors are!
So, who is stumbling? Your typical StumbleUpon user is not as easily described as the average Digg user. StumbleUpon has a much broader user base than Digg. You can find any kind of people on StumbleUpon, which of them get send to your website depends on the category that your site was submitted to.
One thing that can be said about StumbleUpon users is that they are bored, not boring, just bored. See, the whole point of StumbleUpon is to give bored people something to do on the web.
I know I’ve spend countless times staring at a search engine, trying to figure out what I wanted to search for. I didn’t have anything better to do, and just wanted to browse the ‘net, but I had no idea where to start.
Today, whenever I feel like just browsing the web, with no particular goal in mind, I just hit the Stumble! button in my browser and I will be taken to an interesting site. I’ve put the subjects I’m interested in into my profile page, so the system knows what I like and doesn’t send me to just any random website.
When you get visitors from StumbleUpon to your website, you know they are people that are interested in the topic of your site, you also know that they are bored and where not looking for your website in particular. Visitors from search engines came to your site by searching for something that is on your site, they will probably also click on your AdSense ads, because the ads show links to sites on a similar topic. StumbleUpon visitors will not click the ads on your site, when they are done reading, they click on the Stumble! button to be send to the next website.
A few might click an ad, bookmark your site or even subscribe to your rss feed, but most of them will not. The best thing they can do, is give your site a thumb-up, so it will be send to more StumbleUpon users. So, if you are enjoying this post, please give me a thumb up!
What about other ways to make money from the StumbleUpon traffic? Your best bet would probably be CPM ads, these are ads that pay for each time it is viewed, instead of requiring a click to make money. This depends on your websites topic however, I’m mostly writing for webmasters and they are generally more web-savvy than your average visitor on other sites. Most of my visitors use the Firefox browser and I’m pretty sure a lot of them have some ad-blocking extensions installed, so they will never see the CPM ads, and will not make me any money.
Other Posts you might like:
Tags: plugin, StumbleUpon
Posted in make money, plugins, traffic | 13 Comments »
December 28th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
A very good observation about StumbleUpon and a good analysis about mentality of SU users.
Another thing I had difficulty finding was where exactly is my story on SU.
The low conversion rate is not limited to SU, even Digg users are not good, Reddit and Mixx are slightly better but that might just be coincidence.
BTW, I didn’t come here from SU but was still shown the top message.
December 29th, 2008 at 3:49 am
Yes, social media visitors in general are converting very poorly.
I think the WP super-cache plugin is messing with the SU plugin.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:37 am
I’ve been hearing a lot about StumbleUpon, I’m just not decided whether to join or not.
December 31st, 2008 at 4:38 am
I get around 1-5 visitors daily from StumbleUpon, they stay for an average of 1:10 minutes, and go through 1.5 pages. It’s pretty good traffic
(stats are from google analytics).
March 6th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Must be nice to have enough free time to be bored and not know what seach for next! Finding even 15 minutes of free time to myself is a challenge these days.
April 23rd, 2009 at 8:37 pm
howdy!…many would say that, digg is currently the top bookmarking site, but i have to agree with you though… StumbleUpon is really a thumb up!
May 28th, 2009 at 9:44 am
yes social media is good source for traffic and the best thing that is free.
May 31st, 2009 at 10:18 am
hey
I like your concept to invest the revenue of year ago in your goals for the next year.you have to spend money in order to make money.i like your MMO goals for year 2009 it’s requierd more work ‘but as i see your way of working i belive that you will complite these goals.
good luck in 2009
July 22nd, 2009 at 9:36 am
Nico, another good post. It’s interesting…there’s so much more than just quantity of traffic. And I can speak from experience…I have a few friends will waste HOURS just browsing all the bookmarked sites at StumbleUpon, Digg, Fark, etc. Sure, they are traffic to those sites…but they’re not clicking on ads. They’re not buying anything. Thy are not qualified traffic. They are simply bored with lots of time on their hands!
At the very least, one thing bloggers can do is to make sure you submit to the proper categories/subcategories when you DO submit your blog posts to various bookmarking services. That way, if you have a cooking blog, at least you’re more likely to have someone who is interested in cooking visit your site (and hopefully be more likely to take advantage of your site’s monetization).
July 23rd, 2009 at 9:36 am
A very good observation about StumbleUpon and a good analysis about mentality of SU users.
August 13th, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Good point! No doubt alot of people focus their attention on getting loads of traffic, which isn’t a bad thing…But if making money is the goal, 1000 targeted visitors is always going to be better than 10,000 untargeted visitors, at least in my opinion. But then again, for bloggers any type of traffic is good traffic since a portion of those people will no doubt become regular visitors.
August 23rd, 2009 at 5:10 pm
In my opinion social traffic is very weak for making money. They are far overrated and frankly you are better off investing your efforts in SEO or even PPC. Having said that however, If you pick the right low competion keywords you can use social sites like webmasters use article submission websites like ezinearticles for SEO. That is, you target keywords that get your post, digg, tweet etc. which will be ranked well on google. The blog poster summed it up very well and anything that comes as easy as social traffic has little value.
December 25th, 2009 at 12:03 am
I agree with you about social traffic, especially StumbleUpon. While some marketers automatically write off most social media, it takes a special breed of businessmen and communication to make social media work. CPM ads are a good idea, particularly if you design the site to encourage extra page views.