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Ask HN: We are gaining some momentum from Stumble Upon, how do we keep it going?

4 points by cannuk ↗ HN
Our startup, nosweaters.com (Better gift ideas through Q & A) is experiencing a good traffic boost from stumble upon. It feels like a "foot in the door" kind of moment. My question is, what should we be doing in order to keep the traffic coming? Should we be looking into supplementary adwords campaigns? Should we use the traffic spike to convince bloggers we are relevant now? What is the next step?

3 comments

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djb_hackernews
Do whatever it is that got the users to your site in the first place, only better.

Probably not what you wanted to hear, but I'd take this time to learn what your users like and what they don't and make improvements.

And maybe email/tweet at influential bloggers.

dholowiski
What is the quality of the traffic from stumble upon? One of my sites gets about 80% of it's traffic from stumble upon but it's terrible traffic. Nobody goes past the front page and nobody registers. In my case, it's nice for vanity (higher visit count) but useless otherwise.

However, if you want to boost that traffic, the best way is with stumble upon paid advertising. I'm sure they will say it doesn't, but running a paid campaign greatly boosts your 'organic' stumble upon traffic, in my experience (I've done several experiments with several sites). Plus, it's really cheap.

cannuk
In our case the users have been pretty engaged. Our bounce rate is around 40% with 99% of that traffic being stumble. We started with a paid campaign and that is how we got this far. Have you had experience with running one again to further increase traffic?