StumbleUpon Marketing

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When it comes to generating traffic from StumbleUpon there are many different ways one can go about doing it. Obviously there is the legitimate way of stumbling it yourself or asking a friend to do it, but I also wanted to cover a couple of other ways more specifically buying stumbles from StumbleUpon and buying stumbles from “other sources”.

StumbleUpon can generate some pretty massive spikes of traffic and one of the reason I like it more than let’s say Digg is that I have noticed the traffic StumbleUpon sends comes in waves over time as apposed to the direct spike and no more traffic seen with Digg.

The only thing I believe StumbleUpon is good for is brand recognition period. That’s right I said it! That’s all StumbleUpon is good for nothing more and nothing less. What do I mean by brand recognition? Simply put you have a new site, service or product and you want as many eyeballs on it as possible.

Since I recently launched a Social Media Software site at Soxialize.com (that by the way has an awesome affiliate program!) I wanted to put the power of StumbleUpon to the test. I have tried three different SU marketing methods “White Hat”, “Grey Hat” and “Black Hat” and this is what I found works best if you are looking to get the most out of StumbleUpon. Keep in mind that this site at the time of this writing is a bit over a month old.

“White Hat” – Failed
StumbleUpon allows for direct advertising to all who have a SU Toolbar installed in their browsers. Its not really advertising in the normal sense, what it does is SU tries to match up users within the specification you selected like age, country, city, tags, etc… SU then simply queues your site to the next stumble for SU users who match your target. Except for those who are sponsors of SU and opt out of advertised stumbles (ie. Probably most of the power stumblers).

Once you have paid SU via PayPal and waited several and I mean several hours for your campaigns to be approved you experience something similar to watching water evaporate on concrete during the hottest day of summer, THE HOTTEST DAY EVER, in the history of the world! The water of course being the money you just handed over to SU.

So why the fail? Well if the money evaporation story wasn’t enough, analytics showed that time spent on the site, pages viewed and bounce rate where pretty bad. A huge percentage (almost all) of SU users never even vote up or down or review the site (something SU markets as a benefit of advertising). No feedback (good or bad), no conversion, high bounce rate and money suckage equals fail in my book.

Below is a screen shot of analytics from the SU campaign:
Visits:282
Pages/Visit: 1.11
Avg. Time on Site: 14 seconds!
Bounce Rate: 94.68%

Use SU advertisement at your own risk and don’t say nobody ever warned you about it, especially the money suckage part.

“Grey Hat” – WINS
First off let me explain what I mean by “Grey Hat” so you don’t get the wrong idea. Grey Hat to me is using SU properly, meaning no bots, no automation, no money exchanging hands, etc. Just leveraging a registered SU account that has been built up over time and the friends and subscribers that comes with that.

As you can tell by this url (http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.soxialize.com/)
the Soxialize.com site was stumbled by RMonkeyGirl (http://www.rheadrysdale.com/blog/).
RMonkeyGirl managed to push just over half the same amount of traffic with just one stumble and at the time of this post with only two other supporting stumbles.

Below is a screenshot of analytics from the one stumble:
Visits: 154
Pages/Visit: 1.73
Avg. Time on Site: 57 seconds!
Bounce Rate: 34.42% (pretty damn good %)

Although these numbers are not huge they do tell a huge story. SU users that stumbled even without providing a thumbs up/down or a review visited more pages, stayed on the site longer and didn’t bounce off the landing page. Rhea is a quality stumbler that subscribers and friends trust, so they gave the site more time to see what it was about and didn’t just bounce to the next stumble. Keep in mind I never asked Rhea or anyone else I know to stumble this page in order to have clean numbers for this post focused on new site branding.

“Black Hat” - Failed
I cant be as detailed in this section but will provide you with some tips if you decide to venture into the darkside of SU marketing. First of all let me start by saying I did not test any “Black Hat” techniques on Soxialize.com. First rule of thumb is do not “test” on sites you care about or make you money. It takes a lot of trial and error to find techniques that work and the last thing you want to do is get your site or your account banned.

So here are few tips:

• Have several sites and accounts that you can afford to get banned and test on those.
• There are people who offer services out there for SU and promise to get you x amount of stumbles for x amount of dollars. Problem is they are easy to fingerprint so you can potentially get banned and generally do not generate much if any traffic.
• SU is getting pretty good at removing accounts, reviews and “stumble juice” from spammy accounts and urls as most are just to easy to spot. Again make sure you test on a site you can afford to lose.
• Generating thousands of accounts, using proxies, multiple computers and bots really takes up a lot more time and is less effective than if you just spend the time to build up a few real solid accounts.

Conclusion
To get the most out of SU you really need to put in the time to see the results. There is no “easy” way to game SU and if your real purpose is to build brand awareness and generate traffic, building up a solid SU account is the way to go.

You can start by subscribing to my StumbleUpon account!
http://soxialize.stumbleupon.com/

I check my friends stumbles everyday and stumble their submissions as they are usually pretty good.

I would also greatly appreciate it if you would stumble this blog post! It helps you build your total stumbles and helps me get a bit of traffic.

Thanks!