After reading Kris Jones’ summary of Neil Patel’s presentation of Social Media sites like Stumble Upon and Digg at the Elite Retreat, I thought I’d share some data on my first experience with the Digg-esque Stumble Upon network that seems to be growing increasingly popular.

While I was at Affiliate Summit West (2007), I noticed one of my main sites got a burst of nearly 1,100 uniques more than usual (in one day). When I went into my analytics, I was surprised to find that this traffic was coming from Stumble Upon. I had never used Stumble Upon myself, but was vaguely acquainted with it because of some discussions on the Digital Point Forums.

Anyway, I have no ads on this site and don’t monetize it in any way at this point, so I can’t share any data on CTR or conversions, but what I have found interesting is the fact that I am still getting traffic from StumbleUpon today, two months after the big burst. It’s nothing major, but on some days it’s about 150 uniques which is pretty cool. Furthermore, I didn’t Stumble Upon my own site nor submit it in any way–it was all natural, which was also very cool (in fact I wasn’t even registered with Stumble Upon when the traffic first came).

In case anyone’s interested, here’s a graph showing my traffic from Stumble Upon alone over the last two months:

Just thought I’d share this experience so others know Stumble Upon might be worthwhile. Of course the cool part isn’t the traffic itself, but the links these visitors have added to their blogs, etc.