Last week I made a post about the evolution of my office over the last several years. It made the front page of fark and also was submitted to Stumble Upon. I figure I would share the results 
.
From the image below you can see that not only did Stumble Upon send more users but they stuck round to visit more pages (only a 26.23% bounce rate vs farks crappy 87.74%).
So what does this mean? Well basically when you hit the homepage of fark people just look at the content fast then make a comment back on the page. You can tell hardly any of them even read the article cause most were commenting on how fat I am.
Here is the image below if you want to see all the traffic sources for the post:
(btw this is a pre dated post I am actually sitting on a beach with my wife. If you made a comment dont expect me to see it or respond for a week or so)
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2415 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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{ 73 comments… read them below or add one }
wow … I didn’t know stumbleupon carries that much weight
Well..Digg and technorati also can bring more traffic too..
Yeah, stumbleupon is great, I nearly received 100000 hits from them in the past month.
Stumble Upon is now getting a lot of spam when i see many of people shouting on digitalpoint forums “Get 100 stumbles with reviews now for xx$” etc. etc.
Very interesting post, I have always thought SU was much better.
Actually SU more better than digg and other..!
Ya, Stumble Upon has always worked better. The best part is you’ll continue to see a decent amount of traffic from them as well. Fark will wear off after a day or so.
Have a good time on the beach dude, you earned it.
I’ve brought in good traffic through Stumble Upon, but I’ve found that the conversions are very, very low. SU users are looking for quick fun and not specificially looking for your content or pages so they don’t care to dig too deep.
The benefit I’ve found from SU is that I get a lot of inbound links from users that like certain pages and link to them from their blogs, message boards, Web sites, and email blasts. I’ve even got a link from Fox news that I’m sure was found via SU.
If you want to get your site noticed SU is invaluable.
Oh yeah, if you want to get started with SU contact me via my SU name, Sagegoat, and I’ll help you get started. It’s not a magic bullet but it will get a site rolling.
I have always found that stumble upons traffic was pretty good. while it doesnt compare to being number one for your term the nice bursts of traffic is great. and if it is a REALLY good article you can get traffic from it for weeks.
StumbleUpon has been good to me. I’m going to go look into Fark though.
Yeah, StumbleUpon is indeed working very nicely… and I wish you a great time at the beach, too!
Fark is very web 1.0, pretty much irrelevant since 2004.
Stumble Upon traffic freakin rocks…. just need to get it!
As long as people as the stumblees keep stumbling…
Stumble Upon has always sent me decent traffic. Some old pages continue to get traffic even today.
I havent used Fark yet. I will be signing up today.
I don’t mean to be rude. And I really want people to take this comment positively. But blogs, affiliates, traffic, SEO etc – are they all sustainable? Or are an awful lot of people riding the crest of a wave that will come crashing into the beach sometime soon?
I ask this because I don’t really feel qualified to judge. I started, failed and resurrected a “real-world” business doing real stuff, for real people in return for a real payment.
I must admit, that I hardly understand this post (or blogging, affiliates etc.) but there doesn’t to me appear to be any real substance to alot of it?
Maybe I’m getting old – and my real-world business is IT, but I personally find it really difficult to get a grip on all this fast comment mullarkey.
Ive had some amazing success in the real-world following a failure. Not financial I hasten to add, but personal.
Is that now completely under-rated? So much so that everyone gets hyped up chasing or discovering the next big wave they can jump on before anyone else?
Sorry, I’;m a philosophical, well-meaning Brit. I don’t want to spoil the party, just wondering if we’re at the wrong celebration?
Yup, very true, Stumble still produces way higher amount of traffic. I dont even rely on fark at all.
cool to see the stats for what the produce. enjoy that beach man, enjoy that beach. sip some corona while your at it.
how did you get so many hits?
what do you mean?
what you have done sounds commendable, but i think you are reading or trying to read too much into this whoel thing. just take it for what it is.
Interesting statistics! Thanks for sharing. I will focus more on stumble upon now instead.
Have a great time on the beach!
If you have a new site or new page I can look at it. If I like it I’ll give it a ‘thumbs up’ and help to seed your site. Of course, o thers will have to like it as well for it to do well. if enough people give your page a good rating, thumbs up, that page will get shown to many SU users.
I didn’t do anything, stumblers took care of that. If you’ve got good content, stumblers will stumble your posts. That’s all there is to know!
Damn, those are some sweet looking stats, I need to resurrect my Adwords account just for the analytics I think.
Stumbleupon measures how many friends you have, so 100 stumbles from a 0 friend account will not help you very much. Sure, you will come across some spam once and awhile, but generally the good stuff shows up way ahead of the bad.
You can buy traffic from them too at a nickel a pop.
Enjoy the beach man!
I just gave you a free stumble from my ‘super affiliate’ stumble account. You should be getting 250-400 free unique visitors today.
Enjoy the beach
Doesn’t surprise me about the high bounce rate with Fark. They are a bunch of young males looking for instant gratification. There are usually 50+ daily links on Fark to go through and they want to see them all.
Most of them are looking for some shocking or funny story. Your “office story” wouldn’t have much interest to them since they don’t know who you are.
They are entirely sustainable but like all things you have to adapt, if you dont you will fail.
Whats a “super affiliate” stumble account?
With a wheel mouse you can scroll upwards and downwards and see a pattern in this comments section.
The pattern is simple for people like me.
Most comments are short. They are a line or two and simply reflect the original article with a throw-away comment reflecfting the original post.
One of those comments are approximately 2 or maybe 3 inches longer. My own.
The quality or content of the comments is not in question. The consideration is though.
Do we really think deeply about stuff like this? And admitedly, it’s stuff I really don’t understand.
So I’m already wrong in my thoughts and opinions.
But what about sprouts? Those little known vegatables that are an absolute delicacy in the UK yet scorned or amazingly discriminated against the world over?
And why don’t we ever take time out from statistical analysis of site stats to look inwardly. Admitedly, we may only discover some fluff in our navel, but what would that introspection reveal if we found a small garden pea singing loudly about the evils of inappropriate hat-wearing in shopping malls?
These issues are clearly debated too infrequently in forums like this.
Perhaps they should be?
Perhaps we should all stand tall and rebel against our inner callings to stand aloft on the nearest table and shout “SEO” (or perhaps “Affillitate rewards”).
Deep down we are all God’s creatures. And we all fart.
Finally it was time for you to take a vacation. I never missed one in the last 5-6 years, so this means that you deserve it!! Enjoy the beach and stop thinking about all the problems/stress related to business. This kind of things are always welcome after working hard for a long time.
interesting – I never really used fark – but i love stumble…
What does that mean?
Hi Ian – thought I probably should explain, as I think I may have been responsible for sending you to Shoe’s blog via my blog anyway.
Shoemoney isn’t just famous for having this blog. He already made a heap of cash from internet business before this and he has worked really hard. This blog has become popular, but he doesn’t make heaps of cash from it.
This year, Shoemoney and Dilsmack also created AuctionAds and sold it for an undisclosed amount.
I think blogs are probably here to stay, as they’ve become so popular, but they’ll obviously get more sophisticated in the future.
As for affiliate marketing – it really is just a way to market your products online – a bit like having an army of sales people who work on commission only. As for affiliates, like in any other business, they’re not all going to be successful, but some are hugely so. I don’t know if you read my post on Money Super Market on my blog in June or July, but they actually sell other people’s stuff on their site through an affiliate program and they floated on the UK stockmarket for around $2 billion dollars. And I checked out the figures and investors weren’t just putting their cash into a pie in the sky low profit business. So, I definitely think affiliate marketing is here to stay.
Now as for the commenting bit, as Shoemoney pointed out – with some of these social bookmarking programs, folks aren’t even doing any reading before commenting. But, some, including myspace are definitely more community like.
Ive actually never heard of Fark.
Ian let me introduce you to my friend Chef Brian, I think you’ll get along.
Never heard of Fark?…Famous French Canadian athletic.Or maybe not.
Fark is the oppsite of a Qark. Used in nuclear research.
)
Move office = more traffic…hmmm…
damn… one of my posts got 200 stumble hits, but 100000!? sheesss nice
StumbleUpon always sends decent traffic if u have some quality content on site.I never tryed frank, i will soon test it.
that sgreat , you are not happy with traffic u got?
The maximum amount of hits from stumbleupon for me is 60 in a day
Fark me, they’re some good figures!!!
oh ! that is really great i don’t think stumbleupon has this much traffic….
oh ! stumble upon is great…iam very excited with this post…….
yes ur right stumbleupon has very good traffic it is really great…..
After being on Slashdot and Digg multiple times I’ve found that Stumble traffic is the highest quality.
The other ‘social’ sites (fark etc included) give a huge spike, but very little residual traffic.
Stumble gives more traffic over a much much longer period, if you have a good page you’ll keep getting traffic consistently, and if you have good content it will gain momentum over time.
Also if you have an interesting site the Stumblers are more likely to browse through and add your RSS or bookmark the site as they are specifically using SU to find interesting sites to surf.
That’s what I’ve found in my experience anyway.
If any of you super stumblers want to add some stumble juice to my site, please do as well
The traffic is decent in terms of quantity but not in terms of quality …
Congratulations!! Hopefully my blog’s authoritative enough some day to actually MAKE it to the front page :p
Indeed, a big difference of bounce rate. But this is not just between stumbleuppon and fark, I see you have high bounce rates from other sources too. So I would say that you have a good (read: small) bounce rate for stumbleupon comparing to other sources.
Thats more like it.. I also got about 30% of my traffic from StumbleUpon. A great alternative for google seach =) you think?
StumbleUpon is a class source of traffic. Never even heard of fark.. Well, it rings a bell but I have never used it or visited it and given those results I wont bother either.
@nick
well its really a good source for traffic
Frank is one of top Sb this days.Frank also sends good traffic if we manage article on homepage.
Stumble Upon is great for sustainable traffic once you get the initial burst of visitors. I had a post go popular on Digg, del.icio.us, and got onto the Stumble Upon Buzz page. That was about 2 months ago, and I still receive more than 100 visitors a day to that post from SU.
You just can not compare stumbleupon to google search, there is a 100 times difference in the conversion ration of traffic from google and stumbleupon. If you are in actual E commerce market traffic from google can do wonders for you but you might not get one sale from 100k stumbleupon visitors.
$2 billion dollars is really great that shows Affiliate marketing is very good in fucture too.
Dan – great point. The growth in Internet ad spending is passing TVs growth. It’s amazing, but it shouldn’t be I guess because the Internet is the perfect medium for advertising dollars. If I’m bored and watch TV I find whatever. When online I usually look for something specific so I am a better audiance for a specific ad. SU changes that some and makes the Internet more like TV and it’s clear with the lower click through rates on ads.
I think there is an interesting study comparing SU, TV, and ad spends.
Fark is a bunch of lamers, bottom line
I had a lot of stumble traffic, but they all left very quickly.
Hey Jeremy,
After submitting my posts to Social Marketing sites, I have stumble upon driving the most traffic to my blog, four times more than any other reffers.
Good Post.
Cheers,
Carlo Selorio
I got also some stumble hits few times but not so much as you…
Loving the Stumble Upon!
hahaha…. i’ve just checked out your post (evolution of my office)… and yeah.. i am one of the prospective visitors wanting to comment about… f.a.t ..there…. heheh.. i didnt… but just want to let you know my urge.
i guess traffic from stumbleupon are people who really interested to find out interesting sites but traffic from fark is very very visual and with different intention…… Fark visitors just wanna see and fark off… hahahah.
Everyone is in love with stumbleupon
Stumbleupon is a good source of traffic but you have to have really good content for it to send you traffic.