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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.

A year or so ago, I was totally focused on becoming Top Stumbler. I was in the third position, behind two veteran stumblers, Wiggy (who has since left StumbleUpon) and Starspirit (who has been one of the very top stumblers as long as I have been on SU).

Thanks to a friend who noticed I was getting too caught up in being at the top of the list, and called me on it, I seriously cut back on my Stumbling activity for a while, and when I came back to StumbleUpon, I noticed I was having fun with it again, instead of stressing about always finding good articles to post.

So, here are my top 5 reasons you might not want to push to be Top Stumbler:

It doesn’t really bring you that much more real StumbleUpon traffic. It might bring visitors from outside SU, but it doesn’t bring loads of new SU visitors. In fact, many times I’ve written to friends to congratulate them on being a top stumbler and they hadn’t even realized it.

If your goal is visitors, your time would be better spent in more community involvement on SU instead of striving for Top Stumbler.

It does increase the amount of spam that you get though. Thankfully with the way SU works that’s still not a lot, but I did get requests to thumb up pages (which were usually ignored or thumbed down, depending on how I was asked and what the page was) and the occasional job offer.

If you hope to do more than appear at the bottom of the list occasionally, you need to be consistently thumbing up new and interesting discoveries. This can become as much work as a regular job if you’re not careful. There were many days when I’d thumb up more than 100 pages a day (sometimes more than double that) and times I’d post 40 - 50 reviews in a day.

You need to focus on finding undiscovered material. Each time that you give a thumb up to a page that someone else has already discovered you’re hurting your chance to become a top stumbler. I can’t say for sure, but from my own experience and reviewing the Top Stumblers on the list now, you probably want at least 50% or better of the total pages that you liked to be pages you discovered.

It discourages mutual sharing of web pages among friends. When your friends send you pages, they are usually hoping you’ll add a thumbs up and maybe a comment, not just read and forget about them. Since these pages are almost always already thumbed, giving them a thumb up hurts your percentages. Unfortunately, it can be a source of lost friendships.

This one is a small one, but probably drove me up the wall more than any other. Not thumbing up already discovered pages means you can only thumb up the pages of brand new stumblers, and not stumblers who’ve been around a while. I knocked myself off the Top Stumbler list one time because I finally got so frustrated with this and gave a thumb up to all the stumblers whose pages I liked. Eventually, for my own happiness I decided that I’d thumb up stumblers I like regardless of whether it affected my being on the list.

So there you have it, my top 5 reasons to think seriously before you try to get on the Top Stumblers list. Now I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you think being on the list is worth it? Why or why not? (LOL that sounds like a high school essay question. )