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People seemed to like the post that I wrote a couple days ago, Five Reasons Why You Might Not Want to be Top Stumbler. (Said in a Sandy Field tone…You liked me, you really liked me!)

Traffic poured in without slowing down for almost three days. This was a good thing since my youngest came down with a cold and this is the first real time I’ve had to write in a few days.Its fun posting something on SU and having it make the Buzz, StumbleUpon’s listing of the hottest posts in the most popular topics.

This was the first time I’d ever had a post from here get buzzed, and watching the buzz effect behind the scenes (through a stat reader) is nothing short of addicting.

(From your SU page, click on Websites to see the most recent Buzz posts.)

So what did I learn? (aka Where’s the beef?)

For one thing, I learned just how important my friends are. Not in my own valuation…my friends already mean the world to me! I mean in the StumbleUpon scheme of things.

I’ve written before about StumbleUpon’s Recent Reviews, one of my favorite parts about the new format. When you post a new review to your SU page, that review goes out to ALL your friends. And, as long as each person doesn’t have 10 other friends who post after you do, your review will stay on their page.

I wasn’t thinking about the Recent Reviews page when I checked my stats Monday evening. In fact, I kept trying to figure out how I was getting links from anyone.stumbleupon.com/home when I knew that clicking on that would take me to StumbleUpon’s main page. (It was late, I was tired…do either of these excuses work for not figuring it out quicker?)

On Tuesday, I when I noticed I was still getting a lot of these /home pages, I finally realized that the first ones I’d seen had all been from my friends.

That’s how I discovered that what I was watching was the power of the Recent Review page at work. When my review first went out, some of my friends saw it and were interested. They visited SU Com by clicking on the link provided. Then they wrote a review about it, and their friends saw that review and visited. Unlike the Buzz, where only the first review can get posted, with the RR page, anytime a stumbler writes a review, it gets sent out to all their friends. Wow!!

From InfopreneurBlog, a heart surgeon for children, social entrepreneur, and Chairman of the Dr.Mani Children Heart Foundation.

The other things I’ve noticed have been visits directly from stumbler.stumbleupon.com. These are where someone was viewing a stumbler’s page and decided their review or my page title or something sounded interesting. Where the RR pages would generate just a couple of views per each individual listing, some of these reviews brought in a nice number of visitors.

I haven’t mentioned the stumbleupon.com/refer numbers, although they were the highest numbers. The refer numbers are the direct result of the page getting thumbed up, and another thumb up, and another one, etc. Outside of showing me that the page itself is listed on StumbleUpon, how many people bopped through my site, and why my bandwidth usage shows a jump for the past few days, I really don’t know of any other information to gleam from those links. Although it is nice to know the page has been listed on SU if I haven’t given it a thumb up myself. Is there any other information you gain from these?

There’s one final source of stat information that I haven’t mentioned. And it’s available for anyone to see. The Website review page is the page that everyone goes to if they want to leave a review. Here you can see all the reviews that people have written, and the last 50 people who gave the page a thumb up (you’ll see 10 on the main page, and another 40 if you click “Show me more”). The people shown on the Website review page, are the stumblers who were interested in what they saw. At least some of them likely wanted to preserve the link to revisit another time. All of them were interested enough in the page that they took the time to rate it.

I’ve read several articles where people fuss about the kind of traffic that StumbleUpon brings in. Everything from complaints about stumblers spending no time visiting a site, to SU users ignoring insta-ads (see my article The AdSense Dilemma for more about this), to disappointment that stumblers weren’t visiting other pages.

Perhaps because I didn’t expect much (before Monday, the most visitors I’d had in a day had been 2100 and I thought that was great), I was pleasantly surprised looking over the past 3 days.

I’m not saying that out of almost 20,000 visitors, everyone added my RSS feed (which was unfortunately hard to find until late on the second day), read every other post I’d made, or clicked on a link. Being a relatively unknown blogger, I didn’t expect a large turn around. But yet more than 10% reacted with the blog in some shape, whether by visiting more pages, subscribing to the RSS feed, or clicking one of the links. To me, that seems pretty good.

If you’ve been using StumbleUpon for a while, you’ve probably fussed or heard fussing about the new format. If you’ve just joined SU, then you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, but the layout of your SU page is quite different than it used to look. In a lot of ways, the old page was more intuitive. It was easier to figure out how to get started, if you were new to stumbling.

I’m guessing that the guys at SU headquarters are figuring if you’re new to SU, you’re going to depend on the toolbar to learn your way around the site, since to me, the new pages seem more like they’re made for people who have been stumbling for a little while. It’s easy to find “people like you,” not too hard to find the top ranked sites of the day (although it’s harder to find the Buzz, a daily list of the instant hit sites, pages that were discovered and became popular in a matter of hours) and it’s easy to see what your friends have stumbled on.

I LOVE the Recent reviews section. It’s probably one of the main things that keeps me from switching back to the old layout. It’s really nice seeing the most recent items my friends have posted:

Okay, lean in close everyone, I’m going to share a secret. Are you listening? Okay, think about this. If you are getting the most recent posts from your friends, what are they getting???

Yep, they’re getting your most recent post. Without you having to lift a finger to suggest it to anyone. Just by posting it on your blog, you’re sending it out to as many people as you have befriended.

Now, there are a few things I still need to check and if anyone reading this knows, please share your findings. I know you don’t get pages from your fans, but I’m not sure whether your pages go out to people who are fans that you haven’t befriended. Either way, it’s still a powerful marketing tool, whether you’re blogging for a business or just wanting to move up the ranks in SU. Having the Recent reviews page set as your default SU homepage doesn’t hurt either.

Any questions?