StumbleUpon can be a great source of traffic for many websites, but it can also have the opposite effect and not send any, or very little traffic your way. It all depends on how you, and the people who vote up your content use it.
There is no doubt that many webmasters and bloggers will submit their own content to StumbleUpon. It is quite a natural thing to do, and as it is done on lots of other websites such as Twitter and Facebook, why should StumbleUpon be any different? The simple answer is that it is.
I have read many articles which talk about the complicated algorithms StumbleUpon uses to monitor submissions and votes. I don’t know for certain which factors it takes into consideration, but I would think that too many votes for particular domains from the same IP address is almost certainly going to be high up on the list. And that is probably the most popular way self promote.
There is quite a degree of secrecy surrounding StumbleUpon’s algorithms, as there should be, so the reasons why your site may or not be doing well can only be speculation. I have just read an interesting article which lists a number of reasons to consider and a lot of what is talked about makes a great deal of sense.
One of my websites recently benefited from a StumbleUpon spike. A SU user voted for a picture which I thought was not one of the better ones available, the traffic for the whole site doubled for a period of a few days but quickly died down. I think this was because most of the StumbleUpon users who voted for the page gave it a “thumbs down” rather than a “thumbs up” (reasons number 1 and 2 in the article I mentioned earlier).
I have always loved StumbleUpon and found a great deal of wonderful content through it, but I have to admit that my use of it has wained a lot in recent months. It was good to see this article as it has reminded me about the site and I will no doubt be spending a bit more time over there in the future.
I would be very interested to know your thoughts about StumbleUpon and your experiences of using it as a promotional tool and a source for finding websites which you may not usually come across.
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