Is getting stumbled worth it?
This past week we got stumbled. StumbleUpon.com is a website sharing social network, and someone liked my 5 reasons to move to Costa Rica. There was a DRAMATIC effect on our traffic - we went from some 20-ish visits per day to over 8,000 in 2 days. The majority of the visits were less than 1 minute, but a few people took the time to read and some did comment. Our feed subscriptions also increased by more than double, but I was immediately skeptical as to how many new people would actually continue subscribing.
Our traffic seems to be back to normal, though it’s hard to tell now since it’s the weekend, and the feed subscribers have dropped to just 40% more than before instead of 130%. I do think that some of the new subscribers will keep reading, and I feel good about the comment from the person who had never considered Costa Rica before. I suppose the big winner out of this experience was our host, as I didn’t notice any performance issues at all that day inspite of the insane traffic.
Personally I’m a fan of StumpleUpon. I’ve noticed that more stumbles I gt, especially in certain repeated areas, the more frequent hits I get and the more my numbers go up. It’s a good way to gt set up as an authority on a certain topic.
I’m very active with SU, but that only started after I began gettign some good traffic. It comes and goes, and I never really know what is going to be big. I’ve written posts that I thought would be huge with SU, nothing. A cookie post I wrote a month ago still brings in 100+ hits a day. LOL