I’ve been Stumbled
One of my entries about ensuring your passwords are as secure as possible was picked up by StumbleUpon. I posted that entry in late April.
Over the last day and a half, over 2,000 4,000 visitors have visited that entry via SU. That’s pretty much what this blog did in terms of traffic all of last month. Here are a few things I’ve noticed during the surge.
I’m glad I installed the WP SuperCache plugin awhile back. I don’t have the Super Cache functionality turned on (it lets you just turn on WP Cache, which I do have on), but by caching that entry, I was able to serve that entry quickly and without a large number of database calls. If you run any kind of popular Wordpress-powered blog, I would recommend WP Cache or WP SuperCache.
I’ve read many blog posts that say StumbleUpon traffic comes quickly but doesn’t really convert in terms of RSS feed subscriptions. My subs are about the same as they had been. Has anyone else noticed this? I wonder too if this will create repeat traffic.
I’m also surprised by the lack of comments considering the amount of visitors to that post. I figured a post about security and PHP would garner some discussion either way, but thus far, I’ve only received 1 comment on that post, and it wasn’t so much a comment as it was a correction.
I’m going to keep an eye on this for the next few weeks and see what the long term effects are, traffic-wise.
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Comments
5 Responses to “I’ve been Stumbled”
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Don’t worry about not getting comments. Some people clicked the “I like it!” button which sent more traffic again. It’s even better than comments, sort of!
Glad you’re using the caching plugin. Helps deal with a spike of traffic doesn’t it?
Stumble traffic is absolute junk. It’s like 4,000 people driving by your house that’s for sale and saying ‘ooh ahh’, but no one stops to really take a look at it. Or something like that.
Give me targeted traffic and people who genuinely care about my content over StumbleUpon traffic any day of the week.
Your welcome.
You can send the check in the mail anytime you want. Lol.
I second Brad’s opinion on StumbleUpon traffic, just upset he beat me to it. My site was stumbled a month or so ago and like your experience there was a major spike in traffic for about 36 hours.
Absolutely no return visitors and time on site was generally less than 10 seconds. There was no value at all for this type of traffic, not for my site anyways.
Like Brad, I would much rather have a loyal base of viewers that come back day in and day out and like to think I have something meaningful to say.
All it did for me was to throw off the analytics for the month.
Brad/Joe,
You guys are totally missing one of the most important elements of a website. IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW GOOD YOUR SITE IS IF NOBODY IS VISITING IT!
If you have ONE single stumbler convert then is this not a gain? Also you should always be reading analytics for trends and understanding those trends and if thinking that stumble traffic throws your analytics off for a month is a bad thing then why do you even look at analytics? Instead of hating the love something getting picked up on stumble is a warm fuzzy it’s like people leaving a comment. It means they actually like your content *gasp*. I mean what more could a blogger want than for people to actually be enjoying their content and sharing it with friends? It’s social media!
But if you feel that strongly I promise to never stumble anything on either of your sites again.