Blog Fiction and StumbleUpon

If you've never heard of stumbleupon(SU), think of it like flipping through your 400+ TV channels, except you're doing it on the internet. If you're a user of SU, here's how it works. You tell SU what you're interested in. Then you install their toolbar into your web browser. Then you press the Stumble button and it takes you to a random website. You can continue doing that until you find something interesting. Then for better targeting you can rate whether or not you liked a certain website. Supposedly then, it'll narrow your stumble websites down to just what you like.

How does this work for driving traffic to your blog fiction? Pretty darn good. The only tricky part is getting several people to rate your site positively. The more people that rate your site positively, the more people will get sent to your site. It's a pretty good system. I've had a couple people "stumble" my website. Everytime they do that, my web traffic has a small spike that lasts 2 or 3 days.

If no one has stumbled your website, you can get your own account and then stumble your own site. Note however that it probably won't get as much new traffic to your site as older accounts would if they "stumble" your site. The older a stumble account is, and the more "friends" that person has, the more important that person's opinion is.

Bottom line, if you're looking for free promotion, StumbleUpon is going to be worth your time.