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School Boy Error With StumbleUpon

Posted by Paul B | January 10, 2008 .

Yesterday managed to finish on a bit of a high, I was very excited to see my first amount of real traffic from one of the popular social bookmarking websites, StumbleUpon in this case. Nearly 200 visitors and I can’t think what I wrote to deserve it. I must admit that I really should start doing more with Digg, Stumble and the rest as so many people rave about the amount of exposure they can give. I don’t even submit my own content so what are the chances of a random stranger being the first to submit something I’ve wrote, not very high I would guess.

So today I’ve decided that from now on whenever I think I’ve wrote something interested I’ll go through the whole process of submitting to as many social bookmarking websites as possible. This is where I discovered the fatal flaw. It looks like my Stumble button on this blog doesn’t work, bugger! I can only assume that it’s always been that way and that I’ve no doubt lost thousands of visitors because my regular readers haven’t been able to stumble me :)

There is something a bit strange about this in that I use one of the most common social sharing plug-ins for WordPress (Sociable by Peter Harkins), surely somebody else must have this problem as well (The problem being that StumpleUpon reports a bad URL when you try and use it).

Anyway I’ll get on with fixing it today so from now on if anybody spots anything interesting in the garbage I spew out can you please add a stumble for me?

Update: All fixed now, for anyone interested changing the StumbleUpon url in sociable.php to

http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=PERMALINK&title=TITLE

does the trick

Social Sharing: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
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  • StumbleUpon

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4 Comments so far
  1. SEO Optimization ITALY Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11  January 11, 2008 3:52 am

    Hi Paul,
    StumbleUpon it does indeed send a flood of traffic, but from my stats and from the biggest amount of traffic stumble has ever sent to me was 744 unique visitors, and the average page view per visitor was 1.78 per visitor and time spent was 1.20 min. From those stats I can tell that stumble sends a flood of traffic, but it hardly converts and it works pretty much as search engine algorithms and backlinks, i.e. votes, the more votes the higher are the probabilities to gain more traffic.

    I still have to taste that Digg effect and see my server crash LoL

  2. Paul B UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11  January 11, 2008 9:08 am

    Yeah that’s where my interest is, not getting the traffic spike but gaining a few more subscribers and the opportunity of a few long term links.

    I made the front page of Digg once for some mail forwarding software I wrote a few years ago. I should write about it one day on here but the traffic was amazing and the benefits lasted for several months afterwards. I know people are disappointed with the page views/time on site from social bookmarking traffic but it’s free traffic at the end of the day. My server didn’t carsh though, it was ony shared hosting at the time but the company were great, all they did was charge me for the extra bandwidth I’d used. Would be interesting to see how some of my current shared hosting providers stack up.

  3. SEO Optimization ITALY Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11  January 11, 2008 2:46 pm

    Thats good, I love social media sites such as digg or sphinn, the readers are oriented to the same niche and they are more likely going to write about it, and of course they have the ability to click-to-read rather than as from stumbleupon clicking the stumble button and you got no clue where you end up (this might be the reason of the different visitors?).

    Thats a nice (rather smart) host you had, I bet it costed you an ear the extra bandwidth as it usually companies charge “extra” price per gig. Yeah let me repeat, I want the digg effect (but it requires to play nasty a bit).

  4. Matt Ellsworth UNITED STATES Windows 2000 Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11  January 11, 2008 6:55 pm

    Thanks for the fix. that one fix on sociable is the reason why I don’t use sociable…