The Power Of The Stumble

Okay, so the other day, I wrote about how hard it’s been starting over with a new blog trying to get my following built back up.  I talked about a number of things I was going to try, then went to bed with 4 visitors for the day.  When I woke up the next morning, I’d had 156 as an ending total for the day.  Lord have mercy!  I couldn’t figure out what I’d done that was so effective.  Well, right before bed, I stumbled my main page, just to get it into their system for writing.

For those of you who aren’t aware, StumbleUpon is this nifty site that “discovers web sites based on your interests. Whether it’s a web page, photo or video, our personalized recommendation engine learns what you like, and brings you more.”  I’ve wound up finding some really interesting stuff that way.  There are social groups set up on other blogging sites like Blog Catalog where people agree to mutually “stumble” each other (i.e. vote for each other’s sites to get them higher into the Stumble system).  I’ve never done much with them because I don’t generally have enough time to make all the reciprocal visits to people.

Well just a bit ago, I decided to surf to a couple of my more popular posts from the old site and stumble them individually, just to see what it would do.  That was about an hour ago.  I went from 3 visitors for the day to nearly 400.  HOLY MOLY!  Clearly this is a powerful tool for getting exposure for your site.
Now I suppose there are some ethical issues to stumbling your own site (of course you like your own site).  But I can’t see how it would be harmful to anybody to maybe pick a single back post (out of 800 or so) that was really popular a day to stumble for the next month, just to get it out there.  It certainly seems to be having an enormous impact on my traffic.  I don’t know.  What’s your take?  Is it unbearably tacky and rude to stumble some of my own posts?

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