The Science of Marketing

If you haven’t added the StumbleUpon toolbar to Firefox (or, God forbid, Explorer), you gotta do it – now.  StumbleUpon is the web’s equivalent to channel surfing, a "lean back" experience that  – with a click of a button – delivers interesting content to you without searching.  You never know what you’re going to get, but 99% of the time you’ll like it.

StumbleUpon is simple to use, just go to their web site, register and choose categories of interest (e.g., hiking, cooking, pets), and download the tool bar.  You’ll then see a button on your browser that says "Stumble!".  Click it and a random page is served up based on your interests and its popularity with users.  You can then rate the page with the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons on the toolbar.   I can Stumble for hours.

So, what does this have to do with your blog?  Well, just like other rating sites, you can take the pedestrian approach as in the eHow.com article "How to Use the Stumbleupon Toolbar to Increase Website Traffic.", which basically says vote for your blog and blog posts. And that’s OK, but it takes time.

I stumbled upon another method that resulted in periodic order-of-magnitude increases in traffic to this blog. One day, while I was Stumbling, I found a great blog on pricing anchors and wrote a blog post about it.  One day that week, the visits to this blog increased 10X and have continued to jump up to that level for few days every month.    I will continue to note any relevant content that I StumbleUpon to see if I can recreate the increase in visits.

Has anyone had a similar experience?

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