dslade.blog

A friend recently pointed out an interesting site, StumbleUpon Exchange, for the sake of being short we’ll say “SUex”. Thanks Jake. I added two of my sites, aguywalkedintoabar.com and barmano.com to test it out with. My objective is long term, to build awareness/brand recognition for my sites. So after about 12 sites stumbled via the exchange, or 4hrs tinkering around, made a few learnings and observations. Sure there are more, so feel free to add a comment about it. Here you go.

• “SUex” is a simple and fairly clean site. A few edges to polish up.
• There are some power stumblers in there (ie, people with a lot of sites stumbled), so take the extra minutes to check out profile pages and see who’s who.
• I noticed a couple people claimed to stumble me back, but in fact didn’t. be sure check their SU page for evidence before awarding points (the website page on SU doesn’t always show a stumble, don’t know why). This may take an extra minute, but worth.
• A few e-marketers in there with their client portfolio in there, who sometimes have better sites to stumble. BUT sometimes they have a lot of sites and then redirect them all to one site hoping for some PR juice after a big traffic building effort. The latter was an annoying waste of time checking out 10 sites that all redirected to one.

PRO:

• Within 12hrs, no SU traffic except the stumblers themselves for barmano. For AGuy, last night after several hours of “SUex” got about 100 stumbles, so a mini-cascade there. Aguy being a humor site, easily get’s stumbled.
• Within 24hrs Aguy had 815+ stumbles, Barmano really only had the traffic from SUex. BUT both had 40-50 combined visitors, with not a huge amount of effort not bad. Not exact qualified traffic, but traffic nonetheless.

CON:

• Unfortunately no way to flag questionable users, and sadly there are a few
• A ton of shite, ad trap sites, and shady stumblers

Summary: The site is simple, clean and pretty easy to use, but does have some rough edges. It’s an interesting way to help build your traffic a little, in a “scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” sort of way AND discover a few new sites.

From my side, I really don’t want to just gain points for the sake of running up a point total on crap sites, and hurt my SU cred as I do believe in finding and sharing interesting websites, but if you found this helpful do me a favor and sign up today (yes, I get a referral), and stumble my sites, user “dslade”. The latter will give you points! I hope this site sticks around for a while, and makes a few improvements, and isn’t viewed as something “working the system”, I think there is value add in it.

What do you think? Found any other interesting SUex hacks or tips?

tnx. - dave