A Brief Bit of Wankery: StumbleUpon

I’m not doing a preview today because I am hard at it loading drafts and writing. Let’s do this instead. Part Time Monster’s latest Top Ten Tuesday has been viewed 820 times since Diana published it.  Just under 600 of those views have come since Thursday and came from StumbleUpon.

Yesterday was Part Time Monster’s best day ever. Previous best day: Friday. Because of StumbleUpon. This is not the first time I’ve seen this kind of traffic from StumbleUpon. If you open an incognito window and google “Is Batman Marvel,” you will find a post from this very blog in the top five (maybe in the top three) and it’s StumbleUpon that put it there.

To whomever is periodically stumbling our posts: Thanks! I’ve seen a few referrals here and there at all three of our blogs over the past few weeks, so I know someone is doing it. I appreciate you keeping up with our blogs and sharing things you like very much. And I appreciate the shares that bring four views just as much as the ones that bring 400.

For those of you who have joined us since I cut back on the social media blogging on Sundays here, this is my basic scheme.

• Keep up with as many blogs as I can, make friends, and connect with them on all the networks we have in common.
• Figure out how to build an effective presence on networks other than WordPress and use those other networks to find readers for our blogs.
• Diana and I more or less have the social media divided up between us and we’re looking to build one strong account on as many networks as possible.
• In the beginning, I played around with nine or ten different networks (very time-consuming), figured out which ones were best for the sort of blogging we do, prioritized them, and started focusing on the ones that looked like the best bets.
• I spent most of last year focusing on Twitter, and our Twitter accounts have been very valuable for meeting people and building recognition in the blogosphere.
• In November I declared the Twitter good enough to serve and decided to go hard at Facebook this year.
• The Facebook is coming along nicely, and if things keep going well for us there, I’ll be ready to call it serviceable for blogging purposes by summer, check in on Fridays and Sundays, and do likes and shares from my phone the rest of the week.

Unless I see a couple of thousand hits in a very short amount of time from either Reddit or Tumblr over the next few months to change my mind, StumbleUpon has to be next. In fact, I’ve already said as much.

@Sourcererblog sweet 🙌

— StumbleUpon (@StumbleUpon) March 9, 2015

I’m not ready to jump back in there just yet, because April is coming. But soon. Here is why. After the Google, the WordPress reader, Twitter, and Facebook, it’s the next top source of referrals, and it’s the only one I’ve seen that brings the traffic in huge spikes.

So, as I do periodically, I am inviting anyone who has useful presence there or knows StumbleUpon tricks to chime in here. Figuring out a network through a combination of research and trial-and-error is difficult and time-consuming. I’d love it of someone who’s already figured out StumbleUpon and written about it would share their posts with me.

And I’ll add that every big traffic spike I’ve personally seen from StumbleUpon had these two things in common:

1. Was likely Stumbled either to the Books or Comics tags.
2. Included either one piece of can’t-miss art that displayed well when it was Stumbled, or a short, too-good-to-resist video.

Have a great week, and don’t forget about #SundayBlogShare!