Get Perpetual Traffic on Sumbleupon for Ten Bucks

Stubleupon is one of the greatest time-wasting activities to have ever hit the land of cubicles. You get a button on the browser task bar that allows you to randomly visit websites that have been voted on by others with the same interests as you. Thus, if I define my interest as travel, I am likely to “stumble upon” travel websites. At that point, I can either vote for the site by giving it a thumbs up - thus making it more likely that the next person is going to stumble upon it – or I can give it the thumbs down and make it less likely that the next person is going to stumble upon it.

What many people don’t know – and what I didn’t know until I heard Greg Hartnett of BOTW talk about it at PubCon – is that you can “buy” stumbles for .05 cents a click. As a long term business plan, buying traffic from Stubleupon for this low, low price is not really viable. Like Digg users, “stumblers” do not convert well into buyers and rarely click on advertising.

So why would anyone want to buy stumblers?
Aside from getting their website in front of more eyes, and using the Stumbleupon comments section to gain feedback, YOU DON’T HAVE TO KEEP PAYING to receive traffic. I had this idea while listening to Greg speak. What if you purchased a certain amount of stumbles, and then just turned off the campaign – wouldn’t a quality website have received enough thumb-ups to continue gaining traffic without paying for it?

I decided to test this myself with a travel website that I set up about two months ago. It provides information about immigrating to Chile, including visa requirements, how to buy real estate, cultural considerations, etc. Prior to throwing down $10 at Stumbleupon, I was getting about 10 visitors a day. Remember, the site is only a couple of months old, and I have done no link-building or advertising for it. In terms of my time, this website was a low priority.

Results
I spent $10 at stumbleupon, which brought me 200 visitors, with an average pageview of about 2 pages. Out of these stumblers, only a small fraction took the time to thumb-up the site. But it was enough. The campaign has been off since the last week of November, and my biggest referral continues to be Stumbleupon for the month of December. This website has gone from 10 visitors per day to about 25 visitors per day, most of them coming from stumbleupon stumbles that I no longer pay for. In terms of total traffic, and extra 15 visitors per day isn’t much. But any way you put it, a 150% increase in daily visitors to your website is nothing to scoff at.

Who should buy stumbles?
Paying for unqualified, poorly converting traffic is not a wise idea for most webmasters, even at a mere .05 cents per click. But for those who aren’t looking for direct conversions, such as a new site looking to get the word out, someone who plans on selling a domain soon, anyone looking to raise Alexa rankings, etc. A single $10 – $20 investment is a small price to pay for a long-term traffic increase. There is one exception, however. If you have a site that you know people will not want to thumb-up, such as a made-for-adsense scraper site, kickstarting your stumble listing will not do very much good. The whole idea is to get enough thumb-ups that you no longer have to pay for the traffic.

What’s the difference between buying clicks from Stumbleupon and buying clicks from I Need Hits or 180-Solutions?
When you buy clicks from one of these “cheap click” type outfits, they are typically obtained by showing pop-up or pop-under windows. They do not convert, but worse still is that they can do more harm than good if your goal is to increase awareness of your site by getting it in front of more eyes. I immediately lose respect for any website that advertises this way, and so do most other web users, I would assume. Stumbleupon, on the other hand, requires the user to “opt-in” by pressing the Stubble button every time they ”choose” to see a new site. Furthermore, when your campaign runs out of money, places like 180-Solutions immediatly stop showing your website to users. With Stumbleupon, the traffic continues to come in long after you stop paying for it.