Welcome to my Stumbled Brethren

Yesterday, somebody submitted all of my one-hit wonders posts to the social sharing site StumbleUpon. It's a site, like Digg, where you can share stuff that you find on the web with others.

When you create a StumbleUpon account, part of your profile that you create is a series of interests. Then you can submit sites that you think others would find interesting as well. You can find people on there who share interests and follow them, so you can see what they share.

But one thing that's unique (in my limited experience, anyway) is that you can "Stumble" your interests by clicking the "Stumble" button. This will take you to a random site that has been submitted to StumbleUpon by other users, a site that will match one of the interests that you stated in your profile.

I'm not sure how the algorithm works for determining what web site to take you to. I'm sure it's in the back there, silently plotting world domination.

What I didn't know is just how much of an impact that site can have.

My blog usually gets 30-50 hits a day, and many of those are family/friends or image searches.

Yesterday?

6615

My free StatCounter only logs the last 500 page views, so I have no idea whether there were visitors who were not brought by StumbleUpon yesterday. I do know that every time I looked at my StatCounter, every visitor had come over from StumbleUpon.

That's a lot of influence.

I was gratified to see that a number of them at least took a tour through the rest of the one-hit wonders posts, even if they didn't read anything else. And some people did read posts that weren't in that grouping too.

I was sad that it only got me a couple of comments, but you can't have everything.

One thing I did notice this morning is that my Feedburner subscriber count was the highest it's ever been. While it can fluctuate, it's been averaging around 100-110 over the last little while. Today, it was at 126.

It's a start!

So, to those of you who came over here via StumbleUpon, I welcome you! I hope you stick around and check out the rest of the posts. I am a bit eclectic, but I hope you find something that will interest you.

I really should have posted this yesterday. Oh well. Late to the party, as usual.

As always, I'd love to know what you think. Please leave a comment or send me an email.

And the Share button at the bottom of each post does include StumbleUpon, so please feel free to share anything you like.

My ego could use the boost.