Hands up those of you that have heard of StumbleUpon. For the uninitiated, it's a social bookmarking website, designed to use collective visitor opinion to help interesting websites and blogs get noticed.
Over in the sidebar to the right of this blog, you may have noticed a 'Share' button. This makes it easy for people to share or 'vote' for a page across lots of different social media websites by using a service like www.AddThis.com - a great long term way of building traffic.
I say long term because up until this week, the blog was only really receiving a trickle of visitors from social bookmarking. Yet for some reason, over the last couple of days, traffic referred to this site from StumbleUpon has really taken off. Yesterday it accounted for nearly 35% of all visitors. The day before some 19%.
Seeing this, I signed up for the StumbleUpon toolbar, which you can use to 'Stumble' through random websites according to your preferred topics. And you know what? It's a really great way of finding some interesting sites - some of which I've noted down as inspiration for future blogs.
I also found that StumbleUpon have an advertising scheme. It turns out that only some of the sites that you 'Stumble' through are ones that have been voted popular. A percentage are also driven by pay-per-click advertising - for just $0.05 per visitor (just over 3p), similar in price to the very cheapest Google AdWords traffic.
You can setup campaigns to target visitors by country, region (although to be fair that doesn't work very well for the UK yet, other than with the major cities), interest and age.
For me, the interesting thing about this was that I imagine most 'Stumblers' are not aware of this - and wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a popular site and a paid link anyway. And the more people that vote for your site, the less of the delivered traffic you have to pay for.
We've signed up with $50 to try it out with PropertyADD and I will let you know how we get on in a future blog.
To paraprhase the 1980s film, Field of Dreams, "write it and they will come". Pay for it and they will come faster and in greater numbers!
Martin