Stumble Bait - Harnessing the Viral Power of StumbleUpon

Hi Caroline - This is a great example of something that could go viral. I can’t take your StumbleUpon course though, as I was banned. It’s still useful to have these tips on potential viral posts though.

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Great post!

I think the core thing that you hit on is that people need to feel a need /desire to pass it on to others. If you have this then everything is cake.

Reminds me of those silly email I get from family members warning me of some fake scam out there. People get scared and feel the desire to email everyone they know to warn them about the scam.

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Erm, mine seems to have got lost in the post :-(

Do you think they will replace or add to the page contents with something else once they have the votes?
Or could this be a genuine link mistake and there is a page which uses this picture somewhere?

I presume Stumble don’t police changes to a page? But users could unvote if they found out?

Hmm, no mines still not arrives?

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Stumble Bait. I like that term.

It’s nice to see the bounce rate of such piece. I believe the readers are engaged more than most of my blog posts. Some of them have more than 90% bounce rate for traffic from SU.

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I’ve learned the hard way several times that StumbleUpon visitors tend to prefer something they can understand and evaluate within one or two seconds. They’re like TV channel surfers - gimme something good, now, and maybe I’ll stick around. So a 3,000-word article might fare worse than a 22-word bit like the one you highlighted.

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My sister posted the contents of a email that was forwarded to her. It was stumbled and we’ve received well over 150,000 uniques since February because of it! I would say, however, that it is an ‘accidental hero’.

http://fiveblondes.com/pigs/the-world-is-amazing/

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I often wondered about this and you post showed a good example of something that would create a frenzy amongst the stumbleuponers. I am going to have to try to create something that will catch their attention. I also signed up for your course and can’t wait.

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I tried stumbleupon a few times before and got low quality traffic.

In my testings ezinearticles.com and squidoo has 5x times better traffic.

The worst traffic service in the web 2.0 sphere is twitter. I got up to 520 visitors and all of them exit by blog in less than 5 seconds.

It’s whether those where fake clicks/hits, or twitter is not working for me.

Yet, I’ll try it again soon as I like to never give up :)

I find that stumbleupon is a positive menace. It floods the stats with lots of hits that don’t go anywhere and reduces the bounce rate.

I hope I don’t get stumbled again.

I like using it as a stumbler though.

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@Easton, yes that’s right. The very ‘channel-surfing’ nature of the toolbar encourages short, snappy pages that can be appreciated very quickly.

@Erica, I have seen that story before - I have one of the photos of the pig sleeping on the tiger in a slideshow that I’ve seen.

@Codrut, it’s interesting how people’s experiences differ. Twitter follows closely behind StumbleUpon in terms of web 2.0 traffic for me and they tend to engage well with the blog.

@Colin, yeah people forget what a cool tool it is just to use as a user!

WOW! Erica story is amazing.

I wish I could find such an “accidental” post that would send that many people to my site.

Great post Caroline…as usual!

Miss Gisele B.

Having one of your blog posts go viral is a very cool thing. What’s not cool however if you become a victim of your own success. You get thousands of hits that your server buckles under the stress of incoming traffic.

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Having one of your blog posts go viral is a very cool thing. What’s not cool however is if you become a victim of your own success. You get thousands of hits that your server buckles under the stress of incoming traffic.

Third World Geeks last blog post..Me Linky Love You Long Time

HI

Well I have had good and bad experiences with Stumble Upon and received two peeks in traffic from them.

The bad (let’s get it out the way) is that it blows my bandwidth. I’ve since upgraded my account but it’s not nice to wake up one morning, check your stats and say “WOW!” only to find when you visit your page that it’s been pulled.

Bearing that in mind, the good news is that Stumbler’s from my experience don’t stay long and only a minority come back. That’s my experience anyway.

People who find you and give you a thumbs up shouldn’t be counted as regular visitors. The danger is that you end up writing for and chasing Stumblers rather than focusing on value-adding content you truly want to write and gradually building loyal readership.

Or maybe it’s just the niche I’m in.

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That’s crazy that the image itself got over 30 reviews, definitely an important lesson in stumble-baiting that I enjoyed reading. :)

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@Third World Geek, that rarely happens with StumbleUpon. They send to send traffic more slowly over a period of hours, days and even weeks unlike other social media sites like Digg that tend to come in server-crashing peaks.

@Andrew, most website owners want to get lots of traffic from their site :-)

While I would argue this is a great viral piece, it is not a great marketing tool. Rather than calling on us to go somewhere to buy or learn about something, it calls upon us to send the page to a friend; once that action is taken, no need to do anything that would benefit the creator.

The way this could be made useful is for branding. For branding, the action has already been taken once the reader views the page, so it’s ideal to have them pass the page along. Even better is if the branding is for a cosmetics or hair or fashion company…or some other entity that is related to beauty.

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@David, yeah that’s why I think it was rather an ‘accidental hero’. Had this been planned the page author would have benefited from putting the image on a page that had some other call to action.

Stumble upon can drive waves of traffic ! Its a great network to tap into!

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Those messages really do get forwarded a lot. And it’s not only effects SU. I’ve seen it happen on Facebook, even Yahoo! Messenger IMs…

Keep on blogging, we need you. I’ve got so much useful stuff from your blog and really value you opinion in this stuff.

I recently found out that you can buy stumble upon traffic for $.05 per visit.

That’s pretty cheap even considering the fickle nature of users.

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@Carnival, yes that’s true and in terms of PPC that’s quite cheap but the problem is that the same rules of SU apply. You can’t use that to publicize a blatant ad for example because you’ll just get thumbed down.