My 1.000 Stumbles, Reviewing 2 Years of Thumbs Up

Since February 2 2007 I’ve been a great fan of StumbleUpon. I just love the way the Stumble algorithm is serving you a new unexpected site every time you click on the little stumble button in the toolbar.

A common complaint I hear from people that have tried SU, is that the sites they get are not relevant to their interest. Yeah, duh..! The system learns more and more from your feedback. As long as you don’t give the thumbs up or down, the system cannot learn from you, and will serve any random site that only matches your interest just a little. The StumbleUpon system is hungry to learn from what you like, to serve you more that matches people’s thumbs up.

A Thousand Stumbles

After 2 years I accumulated exactly 1,000 stumbled today, exactly 2 years after subscribing to StumbleUpon.

And number thousand was a special StumbleUpon coffee: StumbleUpon, More addicting than Coffee!

Picture by Dayza.com

It’s pretty funny that I just realized that on the exact day of the two years anniversary of my subscription of StumbleUpon, I reached a 1,000 sites stumbled, and the #1,000 was a picture on how addictive StumbleUpon really can be!

Reviewing a site

Although I have 1,000 sites rated, I just have over 50% reviewed on StumbleUpon. The sites that have received a review from me are 505!

Reviews give you an opportunity to use StumbleUpon as a personal bookmarking repository. As long as you review the site so that you understand the content, and use tags to describe the content.

My StumbleUpon Tags

I have a wide variety of tags that I use whenever I review a site on StumbleUpon. This might be because I have a broad interest in different subjects of websites. It’s also because whenever I come across a site a really like, I’m not afraid to spend two minutes to give it the thumbs up and review the site. Sometimes you even get “lucky” to be the first. It can be very interesting to find a virgin site if it comes to stumble.

Here are my Stumble Tags:

Stumble Power

I have seen some of my Stumble Power in action when I discover a post of a site that I either have control over, or if I know the owner of the site (primarily the latter as I don’t like to discover my own stuff that much).

Sometimes StumbleUpon can be amazing in driving return traffic to your site. Enough blog posts have been written about the SU effect, where traffic does not only can come in an avalanche, but it comes back after a few weeks, and keeps coming back!

Below is a small graph of one of my sites. Every couple of weeks the site gets hit by a stream of new visitors through StumbleUpon. I have to admit, I need to revamp the site, as it is not really stumble worthy enough to go viral. but you can see the power of a simple stumble!

This graph is just showing on a small scale the power StumbleUpon can have. With better content and site structure, this particular site could even see much more!

Connect with me

If you found this interesting, make sure you try out StumbleUpon, and stick with the system for a while, I promise you, it’ll get better over time the more you stumble.

In the mean time, feel free to visit my profile: DennisGnl.stumbleupon.com. You can either ad me as a friend, or first review my profile.

How to use StumbleUpon

As I use StumbleUpon to discover great new sites, there is also a downside to the traffic generating factor of stumbleUpon. It attracts Spammers.

Don’t let that bother you, just make sure you rate the sites the way you want to rate them. If somebody is sending you a site through the send a friend button, don’t feel pressured to give a thumbs up only because it’s somebody you allowed in your inner circle. You, and only you control what you like!

Disclaimer

These thoughts are all my own experience and the love for StumbleUpon is real, as you can check in my profile by looking at the sites I stumbled.

I occasionally advise StumbleUpon on SEO, but they have an awesome team already, so who needs me anyway!