StumbleUpon Frenzy Rattles Our Website!
A few of the articles on this site have proved popular in the search marketing industry network this week, the result being a lot of traffic to our seo blog.
The articles like our interview with expert seo geek Sebastian about robots.txt, how top bloggers started their blogs, how top bloggers use Robots.txt, the Unethical SEO Company Handbook and my Google Links & Lasers Analogy has also led to this – a traffic bonanza from StumbleUpon users (thank you very much!); :)
Look At The Free Traffic StumbleUpon Is Currently Sending Here
….and it’s been like that for days. Traffic from Stumbleupon has been non-stop and hammering away at our website bandwidth – which is nice. Average time spent on site is still about 2 minutes per visit so people seem to genuinely like what we’ve put out recently and stayed around too, as the unique visitor graph below details;
StumbleUpon is an amazingly fun tool and having the StumbleUpon Toolbar installed, I often play about with it myself, the result being it leads me to great sites I’m interested in and excellent articles I might not have found otherwise. From a business point of view, StumbleUpon is an excellent Branding mechanism, that can send hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site in one day – it gets you noticed. It’s also proving to be a neat networking tool to hep me touch base with some of the best SEO/SEMs in the industry.
Of course everything we do is for ultimately IBLs and good visibility in Google and other search engines – in return, getting good, qualified leads for our seo and website design services. But Brand Visibility and Eyes On Corporate ID is nice too.
The aim of course, is to give up blogging for a while and get back to work as we get too many leads from our site as it is because of a ton of good serps. Actually, so much so we’re introducing a minimum fee for seo work, to save visitors the shock of finding out over the telephone what the ‘best seo company in Scotland’ charges for SEO. ;)
The job at hand in 2008 is to take what we’ve learned in latter 2007 and drive more traffic to clients’ sites, after all.
Cheers! :)
Stumbled ;) I get a lot of good traffic from StumbleUpon as well. Surprisingly the time on site is a lot longer than I would have thought. Much better than digg traffic.
Cheers for the Stumble Aaron!
Thanks for the mention, Stumbleupon is a great tool, especially when you find yourself in a huge snowball effect!
Hi Matt, Thanks for the comment! It’s fantastic – I can see how it can get addictive, using it and generating traffic from it.
Just stumbled… ;) Congratulations on the traffic, Shaun! If you ask me, you deserve it :D And yeah, StumbleUpon is really, really addictive as you say. I’ve been using it along with the toolbar for ages now and it’s really a life-saver for me sometimes because it keeps me from missing out on some very interesting and important articles.
Hi Sam – Cheers! :) Thanks for the comment! Seen you about in some of the SERPS I hunt in :)
You’re welcome! I stumbled across this page while stumbling my friends’ pages today — thanks for the mention. Stumbled and reviewed too!
Many Thanks Matt! Didn’t you send me Stumble Traffic before? :)
Stumble.. and Digg do send traffic but whether this traffic is good or bad depends on why you are blogging. If you are blogging to get Adsense clicks then this traffic is bad as you have loads of impressions and no clicks which is an issue of “smart pricing”, Google actually gives you only a small percentage of what the click is actually worth.
I got a MASSIVE thousands of traffics in a few hours time on my post here : http://www.michaelaulia.com/blogs/2008/02/pc-games-battlefield-heroes-free-to-play.html It’s crazy enough to send the tech support at my hosting company to transfer my account to another server cause I was hogging theirs :( Will this mad traffic cease? I don’t want to upgrade to a dedicated hosting if this traffic ceases in a few days
Michael, the initial hit against your host’s servers should pass. If you continue to get thousands of visits, then your host may need to do something. I got whacked last year when an article I wrote about Firefox got stumbled like crazy. I didn’t expect it either as it wasn’t my best work, but within hours 5000 visitors flooded my site. Fortunately, my web host was patient and the initial hit subsided. Getting transferred to a dedicated host is expensive too. I saw one host charging $99 per month, but most charge a lot more. If the hits continue, maybe your shared host can block things for a few days. Let us know what happens. Regards, MattK
I’ve installed a WordPress cache plug-in called WP-SuperCache. It will generate HTML files instead of letting WordPress dynamically generate the files using PHP. This should reduce the server load significantly! Let’s wait and see what my hosting says..
I’ve had a couple of nice Stumbleupon spikes in the last month too (not enough to cripple my host though – I’m not sure if that’s something to aspire to or not :) ). Haven’t generated much from it in terms of ad clicks, but interestingly have benefited a bit from Adsense CPM impressions. The other thing I’ve noticed is a slight increase in RSS subscribers. I’ve heard (from Darren Rowse in particular) that Stumbleupon traffic tends to be quite long-lasting, but unfortunately not in my case – lasts for a few hours, then gone!