Want to get more readers from StumbleUpon? Don’t do this!!!

 

About 5 months ago, we published a post about how to get new readers from StumbleUpon  . At the time, every post we were putting on Stumble Upon was bringing in a few dozen visits with minimal efforts. This was the results of a few months of patient stumbling of various interests, where our pages were initially gathering a paltry 0-5 views before getting to the double or triple digits number of pageviews.  Then, we got lazy and selfish, and, while continuing to put all our posts on StumbleUpon, we neglected promoting other webpages altogether.

Well, selfishness is not an appropriate behavior on community based services such as StumbleUpon. Lo and behold, we got spotted as selfish bastards and duly chastised. Suddenly, about two months ago, our posts stopped getting any StumbleUpon traffic whatsoever.

So, we plunged into StumbleUpon various help pages and TOS to find out what might be the problem.

Their TOS clearly states that

Can I use StumbleUpon to promote my web page?

StumbleUpon was created to help people share and discover interesting content, so if you have a personal, non-commercial web page that you’d like to share with others, you are permitted to add it to StumbleUpon. There are limits in place regarding how many times you can add a page from a single domain – if you approach or reach that limit, you may be identified as spammer.

Surfing through various forums dedicated to using StumbleUpon, it appears that their way to punish selfishness is to penalize offenders’ pages or domain by lowering their prominence in their algorithms.

The result is that the offender’s posts get to the bottom of the viewing order, effectively making these pages invisible on StumbleUpon.

After two months of dutiful reposting of webpages not related to us, such as those we visit while performing research on the Internet, we are slowly seeing some positive results and traffic from StumbleUpon is beginning to flow in again.

Yet, let this be a warning to all: selfishness on the Net does backlash. So, effective selfishness means generosity in sharing, a living embodiment of “What comes around goes around…”

Well, we hope that our mistake will help you falling into the same trap and cordially invite you to follow our StumbleUpon account and let’s Stumble together….