Your blog was stumbled? Twice?!
Coincidences are a funny thing. Just few days ago I decided to revive my blog and start posting on a regular basis. After I had upgraded the blog to the latest nightly version (yes, living dangerously) and posted my first post in a few months, I had a look at my blog AwStats.
At first I thought it was some sort of bug, or mistake, but it was trying to tell me that I had more than ten thousand unique visitors last month. Usually it’s somewhere between one and two thousand, but November had ten thousand. Upon further investigation, it turned out that two of my posts had been stumbled without me knowing about it.
How did it happen?
To be honest when I look at those two posts that got stumbled, they aren’t really that special and in my opinion I’ve written and/or posted more interesting things in the past. So the first conclusion that I draw is that StumbleUpon users are quite random, and one can never really know what will get stumbled or when.
How well did the blog/server perform?
Traffic wise, and generally as far as the server performance goes (I’m hosted with site5.com, and have been for years now) I can’t really say anything, as it all happened without me noticing, and I wasn’t using the server enough to really notice if there were any slowdowns, or even if the server went belly up. I guess I’ll have to wait for the next time to see how well the server performs.
Did it make me rich?
Ah, before I forget, another interesting thing I noticed is my Google AdSense statistics. Last month I still had my old theme for the blog, and that had three AdSense blocks, two in the navigational bar and one in the footer. AdSense panel tells me that I had thirteen thousand page impressions in November, and zero clicks. So the next conclusion is that getting stumbled won’t generate you AdSense profit.
I’ll admit that I’m no good with ad positioning, but I’m pretty sure what happens in most cases is that the users don’t even see the ads, be it because of browser extensions or an innate ability to ignore ads. And of course what you don’t see, you can’t click on. So yeah, AdSense and StumbleUpon won’t make you rich. At least it didn’t make me rich.
Aftermath and conclusion
It’s great being stumbled. Lots and lots of people will see the website. Sadly, there really isn’t any recipe, or formula on how to get stumbled, other than posting something that has a wide appeal and is just awesome. The only thing that I can suggest is that you should become an active StumbleUpon user yourself.
Use it often, stumble other websites, post/create something awesome of your own and you’ll be stumbled yourself one day.