With the way I see it there are 3 primary sources of Web site traffic:

  1. Search Engines,
  2. other Web sites,
  3. and Social Media sites

By paying close attention to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) it’s possible to eventually rank well on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for high-traffic keywords, and actively participating in sites in your niche will yield highly-targeted traffic to your site. Both sources of traffic are incredibly important and a Web site cannot prosper without them. However, today’s discussion does not surround either of them, instead, we’re going to focus on the third, Social Media, and in particular: StumbleUpon.

What is StumbleUpon?

Like I said before, StumbleUpon can be categorized as a Social Media site just like Digg, Del.icio.us, and even Facebook. However, up until recently, I never got the draw of StumbleUpon. It requires the installation of a toolbar (that doesn’t work with my browser of choice: Safari), and you’re constantly clicking a button to view random Web sites. The first time I used it I thought “I don’t get the concept behind this”.

Discovering Stumbling Great Content

Determined to discover why this site has such a huge user base, I decided that a closer inspection was in order, and as I dove deeper I started to uncover the real magic of StumbleUpon. I completed my profile, updated my interests, and soon began stumbling, actively giving sites “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” and leaving reviews of the sites that I really liked. Before long, I found myself stumbling across amazing informative Web sites about things that I was actually interested in.

Today, after a thousand or so clicks on my stumble toolbar, I’m confident that amazing content is waiting for me each time that I click that stumble button in the corner of my Firefox browser (though I’m still wishing it was Safari). I’m actively participating in many of the sites that I have stumbled upon (after all they’re targeted to my interests) and learning lots of random facts along the way. The best part is that this isn’t all that StumbleUpon has to offer!

What StumbleUpon Can Do For Your Website

Not only can StumbleUpon provide you with amazing content, but it also can provide amazing amounts of traffic to your Web site if the articles you write are worthy of being stumbled. Now I don’t want this post to become overrun with graphs and numbers, but I do want to share some insight regarding Truebluetitan and StumbleUpon.

On March 6, 2008 I wrote a post entitled Why I’m A Mac Addict. For a little over a month this post was fairly dormant with a comment posted here or there, but nothing crazy…until yesterday.

With my Internet connection down, and my iPhone refusing to let me access the Edge network, I was unable to check my Web site statistics for the greater part of the day. Finally, at about 5 PM I was able to log in and found that close to 1,000 people had visited Truebluetitan already. At 6 PM I checked again, and found that the number was now over 1,200. As the clock struck midnight I decided to check for one last time. Much to my surprise, I discovered that over 2,400 people had visited my site in a 24 hour period. I was floored.

Truebluetitan used to receive 2,400 visitors a month, but thanks to StumbleUpon and other Social Media sites, it has become possible for this to happen in a day! Not only that, but my post, Why I’m A Mac Addict, has become the most popular post on this site and seems to be sparking a bit of a debate between the Apple Fanboys and M$ faithful.

One Last Thing…

Don’t forget to friend me if you’re a StumbleUpon user! I’d love to meet some new members of the community! Now if you excuse me, I just received an alert from my server telling me that I’ve used 80% of the Truebluetitan’s monthly bandwidth allotment…time to bump it up!