I run a blog called The Undercover Recruiter which is all about helping people in their job search. It’s been going for about 6 months now and the traffic levels are decent and going up slowly but surely. I have the odd spikes of traffic from when a spectacular post goes up or when bloggerati like Chris Brogan retweets a post. But nothing ever came close to what happened this week.
On early Monday morning I posted “5 Tips to Keeping Your Cover Letter Simple and Effective” – a typical how-to post that will be useful for anyone looking to spruce up their cover letter. The post wasn’t controversial, it didn’t feature any celebrities and there were no incentives like free downloads offered. So it was a very normal post for a Monday morning.
Visitor avalanche deluxe
The blog runs on Drupal and when you are logged in you can see how many visitors are on the site at the same time as you. When publishing, not more than 5-10. After publishing the post, I logged out and got on with my daily work. I logged back on the site a few hours later and much to my surprise, there were about 60 people on the site, I had a cup of coffee and the visitor number kept climbing just like a big win on a slot machine in Vegas. First to about 100, then to roughly 200 where it stayed all day.
My first thought was that it was some sort of bot attack aimed to crash the site. I just couldn’t see where the traffic was coming from and why. Retweets were at a normal level, no exceptional activity on either LinkedIn or Facebook. I had to logon to Google Analytics and it told me clearly what was going on…
That was only the beginning. I logged on to StumbleUpon and saw that about ten people had given the post the thumbs up and it must have spiralled from there.
Two days later, I can see that StumbleUpon have sent 5,000 visitors to the page and no less than 56 people have now given it the thumbs up. The StumbleUpon link is here.
What's the secret to getting the traffic?
I would love to be able to tell you that there is a shortcut to getting this kind of traffic from StumbleUpon but in this case I can only put it down to fluke. I didn’t add the page to StumbleUpon myself, I didn’t thumbs up it, I didn’t ask anyone to do either of the two. It just happened organically and the timing must have been impeccable. If one influential Stumbler gives your page the thumbs up at the right time, it will spread to all their contacts and if they in turn like it, it creates a ripple effect. So I guess the content has to be good enough to get more Stumbles and you have to be discovered by the right people at the right time.
Bottom line
Some social media experts like Neal Schaffer encourage the use of StumbleUpon, I have used it but not been the biggest fan until now. I have added what I think are great posts to StumbleUpon and get absolutely zilch traffic back. Sometimes the traffic stats take off a bit, but more often than not it hasn't done much for me. The lesson learned here is that StumbleUpon is really like a lottery that you don’t even have to play. Keep writing quality content and sooner or later you’ll get the right people stumbling your stuff at the right time and it can spread like wildfire.
What’s your experience of StumbleUpon, any luck or does it seem like a giant waste of time?
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