The more I know about StumbleUpon, the more there is to love. I first discovered it on February 15th, 2006, when I got a sudden spike of 250 visits to an article I had written a month before, What Europeans and Americans Can Learn From Each Other
When I checked Google Analytics, I realized that most of the traffic was from StumbleUpon. At the time, this was the biggest traffic spike I had seen on Genius Types.
I immediately went to StumbleUpon.com, downloaded the plugin for Firefox, and started stumbling.
Problem Solved
Have you ever been on the internet trying to kill some mindless time, but didn’t know what to click next? I hate when that happens.
In those moments, I just want to be entertained and enlightened, but all my regular sites are starting to bore me. Sometimes I just need something new to work with.
Lately, I’ve been solving this problem by stumbling pages recommended by my network of friends on StumbleUpon. Now, I have an endless source of entertainment and enlightenment to feed my brain whenever I need it.
Building My Network
To build my network, I look for people with similar interests. The first people I add to my friends list are people who discover and stumble one of my pages. I used to stumble my own posts, but now I prefer to let them be discovered naturally.
There is a little button on my stumble bar with an icon of two people. When I click that button, it pulls up a page that one of my stumble friends has recommended. About every other page is something interesting to me and worth my time.
Please add me to your list of stumble friends so that you can keep up with my top recommendations.
A More Democratic Way
I’m a huge advocate for the little guy, which is another reason I love StumbleUpon. It levels the playing field for smaller website owners. Once your page has been discovered by someone, it’s automatically sent out to a certain number of people. If enough of those people like it, it continues to get traffic.
Before StumbleUpon, you might’ve had a blog with the most amazing, life-changing posts in the world, but no one would have known about it if you hadn’t already built up an audience. Now, great content rises to the top, regardless of the size of the blog.
It’s So Easy
Another reason I love StumbleUpon is that they make it so easy. It’s hard to get people to submit your site to Digg, Reddit, or Del.icio.us, because it takes three or four clicks, a few decisions, and some typing; and that’s if you have a button waiting for them to click.
I’m like everyone else when I’m surfing the net: lazy. I like to give people recognition, but not if it’s a hassle. With StumbleUpon, all it takes is one little click in the stumble bar… done.
Top Stumbles for 20 April 2007
Here are some great sites I recently discovered on StumbleUpon. Check them out and make sure that you join my stumble network.
:: Blogging is Harder Than You Think ::
Dan at The Wrong Advices writes an honest article about the difficulties of blogging and what makes a successful blogger. My favorite line:
Learn from successful bloggers, but try not to mimic them. I don’t want to read another John Chow or Darren Rowse clone. I want to hear what you have to say whether I agree or not. And for that matter don’t be afraid to disagree with people. I don’t see the point of having all these personal blogs around if everyone’s just going to nod their heads and walk in a straight line.
My sentiments exactly. I really like Dan’s writing style. It’s succinct, honest, and from his heart. You have to check out his about page. It’s hilarious! Plus, I really like his site layout. Very clean.
:: Bodies in the Solar System Larger than 200 Miles in Diameter ::
As an astronomy geek, I can’t resist an enormous, graphic depiction of the heavenly bodies in our solar system.
:: Neave Planetarium ::
More awesome astronomy. Just put in your latitude, longitude, date, and time, and voila: instant navigable sky with descriptions of stars and constellations on mouseover.
:: InternetFrog.com Connection Speed Test ::
I love stats. This site gives you the speed of your internet connection. Mine is 5.09 mps download and 639 kbps upload. Yours?
:: Speed Reading Test ::
More stats. This time it’s how fast you can read. I’ve always been fascinated with speed-reading. Is it real, or do you just scan the page and not retain anything? I would sure save a lot of time if I could speed-read all of these blogs.
I read your post and joined up with SU and found similar results. I did not think about the similar interest in friends and will now make that part of my strategy.
Thanks for the great script, Adam!
I guess it would be nice if there were more information on how to improve my score.
I am glad you liked it (its my script
) Any suggestion on how I could improve it (besides adding a comprehension test). I like stumbleupon also, nice blog!
You might like my reaction test as well
I believe I wrote a post on that on my blog a short while ago. It’s not any where near perfection…. I guess I wanted to make it into a blog series but kinda forgot about it.
BTW: You have a new subscriber Brian, I am glad to be your 276th subscriber.
Take care!
StumbleUpon does indeed level the field. I’ve had much better success with getting small traffic spikes from SU for writing a quality article (all natural traffic), than from submitting the same piece to large networks such as Digg and getting my friends to vote it up on the latter.
Aloha! I’m a latecomer to Garry Conn’s Technorati favorites list. Hope you’ve been able to keep up with adding newer adds. If you haven’t gotten to me yet, you can do it here:
http://technorati.com/faves/?add=http://skeetsstuff.skeeterbess.com/
I’ve added you. Mahalo for returning the favor!
Love stumbleupon! Find great stuff, and I’ve gotten wonderful traffic from a couple of my own pages that are posted there.
I just felt like sharing that one of my articles has recently hit “popular” on stumbleupon, bringing in a steady stream of nearly 1000 visitors over the day