Stumbleupon traffic surge Caught on video..
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I had my first SURGE of stumbleupon traffic and managed to capture the event on Camtasia!
I think I only got the tail end of it but it lasted for a nice while, it even came back the next day although at a reduced rate, stats and geekery below the video.
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I’m guilty of giving some of my own posts a thumbs up now and then to start a trickle of Stumbleupon traffic to an article I have written or seen elsewhere such as the Hide a rar file in a jpeg. I saw it on a blog completely obliterated with adsense blocks so I decided to reprint it here in a cleaner-easier-to-read way. It got some traffic and upped my feed subscriber count but, the traffic wasn’t huge, just a few hits each hour, but still nice to have some new readers to my new blog
Then, I saw a small side article in a daily newspaper (yes, there is news available outside the internet!) about how Tussauds in London was due to show it’s first ever computer game character, it looked like a great story and I did a bit of research on Google for “Tussauds” ,”London” and “master chief”.
There were plenty of articles but none that mentioned London. Great!, there was one page that I found about Master Chief being in the Las Vegas version of Tussauds, it had some good information and some really great pics so I thought I would snag the pics, do some Photoshopping on it to give them a London edge and “make me an article” for here.
I was quite pleased with the Master chief is coming to London and gave it a thumbs up on my work browser and finished off for the day and went home content with writing a new article that didn’t suck and wasn’t a copy and paste of some content found elsewhere.
When I got back home, I went to my Live page (a plugin [link] that displays hits to your site in realtime) in my Wordpress dashboard to see what was going on at FiddyP and I was amazed!, the video above is the tail end of what I saw.
These are the load times in the middle of the spike..
So, even with 141 at a time coming in, the server was still able to send the page in less than 5 seconds to most of the world.
I think the difference with this self stumble was that it was for a unique article and a few people gave it a thumbs up one after the other, I think that if you can get a few thumbs up as soon as the submitted page goes into circulation then you get a sort of exponential increase which could lead to another one and so on. As long as you keep getting thumbs up, the traffic will keep coming.
The hits started again the next day..
Some google stats..
One of the (many) good things about Google analytics is the way you can refine the stats so you can see all the individual stats for a particular referrer or page, here’s what was found just for the stumbleupon visitors
Not bad, average of 2 pages per visit means a lot of them took the time to see what else was on the site. 33% is a pretty good bounce rate for a social networking happening.
Encouragingly, nearly 90% of the people coming in were using Firefox. Sensible people use Stumbleupon 
The vast majority of visitors had bigger than a 1024×768 screen, most had widescreens which surprised me, there must be a lot more widescreens out there than I thought.
I’ve seen a lot of advice about being a top Stumbler or increasing your ‘juice’ at places like StumbleGods that say you should add as many friends as you like and be a social junkie with comments and reviews of peoples profile pages. I think they’re right but for someone as busy as me, it’s hard to dedicate time to spend all my day trying to make contacts, the upside is, the contacts I do make are because they have recommended particularly good pages or I’ve ‘met’ them through this blog.
I was trying to think how I could repeat the event with a new post and spent a little while thinking what “they” want but, I don’t want to try and predict what people that come here will like, that’s not why I started this blog.
The best thing that I can do is, not worry about what Stumblers want and carry on making my blog for me for fun and writing about things that I find interesting without re-hashing stuff that’s already been done, if people like a post they will stumble it and if it’s good enough then sure as eggs is eggs, other people will and so on.
Overall, it was a good experience being bathed in hits for a short while. At least my server didn’t crash and it has given me some encouragement to carry on doing the things I like to do anyway and that’s plenty of geekery with a sprinkle of humour and a drop or two of nice pictures.
Thanks Stumbleupon! (and users) it was fun while it lasted!
Popularity: 5% [?]
Tags: buzz, seo, stumbleupon, traffic
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September 27th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Good luck and congrats for the traffic.
Online Money’s last blog post..The Chows & Cows Desperate to Milk You!
September 27th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Wow, that’s interesting! I never really gave importance to Stumbleupon, I guess it’s high time I gave it a shot.
September 27th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
it’s definitely worth getting familiar with, there are some high quality finds in there!
btw.. I see you’re using the old version of CommentLuv, there’s a new one available here
September 27th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
[...] you a pretty cool idea of how quickly stumblers will hit your site during such a rush of traffic. FiddyP put together this little ditty. Have a look below and then check out his site for the rest of the [...]
September 28th, 2007 at 3:01 am
Fantastic, Andy - and the StumbleGods linked your post as well!
You’re right about not worrying about writing for SU - just write what you love and know best - and then do your usual promotion and socialising - it will come.
Congrats for the traffic!
YC’s last blog post..StumbleUpon Breaks Up Relationships
September 28th, 2007 at 9:38 am
thanks for your comments YC! I’m glad someone else thinks I should just carry on what I’m doing and not try and target particular groups of people. I think that’s what makes stumbleupon a little better than Digg - good posts and sites get attention because people like them and not just because a clique of hi-rankers decide they want to cross promote their articles.
September 28th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
I really like that live feed you have on your dashboard. Great job in recording it. I appreciate you sharing that. It must always be an exciting feeling when you break or come close to breaking little mini records like most visitors online. Congrats!
CHESSNOID’s last blog post..SNL George Bush on the Iraq troop surge
September 28th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
thanks Chessnoid, you reminded me to add a link to the plugin in the post.
that video you have about the president on your last post is really funny!
September 28th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Very Good job … so sorry about seo, the “guy not gay” technique was one of your best traffic techniques too .
September 28th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
hehe, thats right I remember! that was funny, the swicki’s that you showed me are still getting some decent traffic and earning a few dollars a week in tick over. great tip that might be worth writing up here one day!
September 28th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
I am glad you liked it. I am now getting some stumble traffic on that video. I don’t think anyone who is a bush fan will like it.
CHESSNOID’s last blog post..SNL George Bush on the Iraq troop surge
September 29th, 2007 at 4:37 am
Congrats on the traffic. I get a lot of traffic myself from SU.
Rose’s last blog post..Delurk yourself on Ask a Stupid Question Day
September 29th, 2007 at 7:19 am
Andy, I also noticed that your Alexa ranking went way up.
I am almost positive just a week ago you were close to 1.2M. Right now, you are at 601,101.
Way to go Andy! A higher Google Page Rank is sure to follow.
BTW, sorry I haven’t been around. I got hit by the nastiest flu a week ago and I’ve been trying to sleep it off. I am not sure I am going to be around this weekend either in the blogosphere because I think I’m just having one of those rare hour of feeling better.
I just updated the CommentLuv plugin
Sharon’s last blog post..Celebrity Crushes Chimeric Day Dreams Style
September 29th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Sharon: oh noes! I hope I don’t catch if from you
I am away from home this weekend with only a pc or two for company and to top it all, my remote desktop connection to my own pc has just died. I bet it’s that automatic update/restart that Windows likes to do when I’m away. grrrr
I noticed my Alexa rank go up too, also with Technorati, that went up from 6 to to 47 which I suspect had something to do with Chessnoid or the contest I’m running. hehe, this is the first time I’ve made a site and not cared what PR, alexa or Technorati palava goes on and it all still goes up anyway LOL
thanks for updating your plugin, I had changed the link to the plugin page and lots of people were clicking to a 404 page from the old plugin link.
Get well soon!
September 29th, 2007 at 10:21 am
So, Andy, how many computers do you really need at one time. Sounds like you have already one too many…..
Sharon’s last blog post..Celebrity Crushes Chimeric Day Dreams Style
September 29th, 2007 at 11:07 am
I have too may to be sure!
desktop at home, media centre, ubuntu laptop, xda orbit, shuttle xpc, xbox 360, xda IIi and a tablet pc for work, 3 desktops here and a server and I still can’t catch up on my personal email LOL!
September 29th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
I wonder why do we see in the video that you have only 37 MBL contacts while you had 42 if not 41 for the last few days.
I noticed that also that when I click on previous page while browsing your website, it sometimes shows the 37 contacts, and when I refresh the page, it gets back to the correct number.
Any idea what’s happening?
September 29th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
I made that post a while ago, the video capture was the same day as the master chief post and the content of this post was saved as a draft while I got all the stats together so I probably had the 37 contacts back then, you can also see how many total hits as much bigger now.
I think there may be some caching issues here and that’s why an older posts page is showing less contacts, the number is shown by a small php script which parses my MBL page. sometimes browsers don’t update the output of some small php scripts which is why it shows correctly when you refresh.
September 29th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Doh! I just noticed the date: Sept 10th. My bad!
Hihi, thought I was bringing up some new mystery, for you to play some geekery. :p [That rhymes]
Lalla Mira’s last blog post..Whos Amung Us?
September 29th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Men and their toys …..
Sharoon’s last blog post..Timeless Herbal Cold Remedy
October 4th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
[...] StumbleUpon Traffic Surge Caught On Video [...]
October 7th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
Hey! That video is awesome! The best I have done on Stumble is roughly 140 hits in 12 minutes and then it died down.
Like you, I am trying to figure out how that occurred so I can re-create it. I’m not sure if it’s going to work or not, and like you said I need to keep doing what I normally do (as I write mostly for myself, but love the feedback. Typical writer, no?)
Good job!
October 8th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
hi cardiogirl, I only had a few hits coming in off SU before the master chief post so it was a reall buzz to see so many hits coming in!
It’s true about keep doing what you normally do, I’m sure the SU angel will come again!
February 10th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
[...] Stumbleupon traffic surge Caught on video.. Author: Andy Bailey of FiddyP.co.uk Watch the wave of stumble format. Video. [...]
February 26th, 2008 at 10:51 am
This is obviously one great post. The information are very insightful and helpful. Thanks for sharing all of these.
Aurelius Tjin’s last blog post..“I’m an Internet Marketer”
March 7th, 2008 at 4:51 am
Ah, good ol’ StumbleUpon. So many clients these days are courting StumbleUpon users, rather than the obvious choices like Digg users.
By the way, that’s a great video of the Live plugin in action. I’m going to embed that at headzoo.com. With a link back to your site of course.
Sean’s last blog post..New Plugin: Theme Test Run
March 7th, 2008 at 11:13 am
March 7th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Wow, I had no idea the Live plugin existed. As it stands already, I reload my dashboard fairly often to see how things are going… now I’ll never move from in front of the computer. And boy do I need exercise! So thanks, I guess… hehe!
Tee’s last blog post..Breakthrough in Treating Crohn’s Disease
March 7th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
May 4th, 2008 at 7:59 am
For a few of my sites, the greatest number of visitors come from SU. However, the bounce rate from SU is terrible! Nevertheless, it’s traffic! Any experience with Digg?
Make money newbies last blog post..Associate-O-Matic | Building an Amazon Store
May 26th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
I’m using SU on daily basis, but still haven’t have detailed knowledge about amount and quality of traffic I’m getting from SU. I think that’s quality is not first class, and certainly traffic is on single turn. Maybe I’m wrong, but…
Emmas last blog post..Beef salad
June 26th, 2008 at 1:04 am
I’m new on SU, but as I heard social networks like SU are the future.
Tomassos last blog post..Anxiety disorders
July 6th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
This is something interesting and extraordinary. I will try it.
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