How I hit 5000+ visitors in 72 hours with StumbleUpon.

I have always wondered how many blogs sites really create a significant visitor traffic and create revenue through advertising posted on them. I tried several suggested techniques to create traffic such as: improving design, submitting sitemaps to search engines, joining social bookmarking and some other stuff. I also experimented on different social sites to promote my blog and there are quite a handful of them like: Digg, Technorati, MyBlogLog, Delicious and none did stood up to its promise until I began experimenting on StumbleUpon and hit 5000+ visitors in only 72 hours!.

How it started

• The Posting: Last August 24, I posted on my blog site a news article taken from another site which has inspired me so much an decided to copy and use it for my future reference.

• The "Thumbs-up": Since I'm a registered member of StumbleUpon, I clicked on "thumbs-up" recommendation on my own posting and forgot about it since most of my own StumbleUpon recommendations didn't help in the past anyway.

 

• The Traffic: Immediately after that, traffic increased quite consistently until after 24 hours it hit 1,103 viewers. The following day, it still continued to increase and reached 2,461 visitors and finally on the third day a whopping 5,018 visitors! I know this may not be much from professional bloggers but it is to me specially since I'm quite a newbie on this thing.

 

• The Surprise: What is even more surprising to me was, a week after it's first peak, visitor traffic peaked again but this time the traffic was even better than the first. So, it wasn't just a one time thing after all.

 

Observation: What went right?

• The Post: The post's title was "Do what you love doing. - Jobs says". It's a very inspiring speech delivered by Mr. Steve Jobs about his life's challenges and successes.
• The Category: I tagged or categorized this post under Lifehacks. Take note, I has another original post under this category that also made significant traffic.
• The Source: Among all social media sites that I joined in, only StumbleUpon has referred a significant number (93% to be exact) of people to my blog and majority of which came from the United States.
• The Recurrence: This totally caught me by surprise but the recurrence of increased traffic was due to my accidental mistake on resubmitting the same post after the first peak has subsided six days after.

Lessons Learned: My Analysis

• Search engines don't help. So don't bother submitting your site map to major search engines because they only bring in 1% to 2% of your total site traffic.
• People like to be inspired. Inspiration spans nationality, race, age, gender and even time. Blog postings that make people inspire will surely be a hit and it is never seasonal. If you want to appeal to a greater mass, then inspire them often.
• Focus on the 'Stumblers' and drop the rest. Focus only on things that matter to you and forget everything else. If it's traffic you want, then just use and be involved in your network of StumbleUpon users. If you don't have one, register. I guarantee it works, at least for me.