StumbleUpon for fun and profit

For the past few months, I've created a couple of websites made purely for putting adsense adverts on. My first site was a bit of an experiment, and has been pretty successful (for what I wanted anyway - I doubt others would class it as a success) by making a quid or two a day in advertising which is exactly what I wanted.

So I thought I'd start a new site to get some more money as its so easy. As is often the trouble though, getting it noticed and getting people to visit it can be a problem. With the first site I traded a link or two, sneaked a link into Wikipedia here and there etc. Its only getting between about 50-100 unique visitors a day which is pretty crappy really, but the click through rate is amazingly high (we're looking at anything in the region of 5-25%!) so it works.

But with the new site I've not really done what I did before. I was getting a small dribble of search engine traffic, but it was only about 10 uiques a day. So I decided to submit it StumbleUpon to try and get some more traffic. That was a day or two ago now - today I checked on the site's webalizer stats and was pretty damn surprised by what I saw:


As you can see, thats some pretty mental growth in hits. Yesterday I got 1277 uniques; so far in the first half an hour of today I've got about 40 uniques which works out at about 1900 uniques multiplied up. But is this ethical? Well who knows - I'd argue that its more of a "grey hat" method - I'm not gaming the system, the site is genuine and there is no hidden tricks or anything.

I've got no idea how long this will last - will it just dribble off into nothing after a day or two, or will it carry on? I'll post an update on this blog at some point in the future when something interesting happens!

Update: I have blogged about the outcome and side effects of a StumbleUpon "stumbling".