This article will not show you how to get the magical thousands of hits from StumbleUpon. It will, however, show you an unusual way to improve your daily hits, pages per visit, time per visit and subscribers, while performing a public service.

Improving these statistics will increase the value of your ad space, raise your RealRank and increase the sale value of your blog.

History

Two weeks ago I posted this article in response to a personal attack I witnessed on StumbleUpon. The article received several "Thumb Downs" and negative reviews on StumbleUpon from friends of the original offender. While studying the analytics of that post's traffic, I noticed some interesting facts I had never heard anyone talk about before.

The Observation

The traffic stats revealed the post was receiving very few direct referrals from SU but was receiving quite a bit of indirect SU traffic. This indirect traffic was coming from Stumblers checking out the negative reviews by members they were fans of or from the negative reviewers using the "Send To" feature to spread the article.

Every negative review would send a wave of new traffic, some of which would leave negative reviews and/or send it to their friends who would come leave a negative review, etc., etc.

The viral nature of social media wasn't really surprising, even in a negative context. What was surprising was these were "quality" visitors. They were staying longer than normal, viewing more pages than normal and subscribing to my feed. They were boosting my stats!

The Experiment

I could not bring this to you without first discovering if it was just a one time thing or if it could be repeated. In order to try to duplicate the results I wrote this follow-up article and linked to it at the bottom of the original article. It worked better than I had expected it might.

The Result

Right off the bat, a troll helped me out by "Thumbing Up" the article and burying it in The "AIDS" category. This made my job considerably easier because I didn't have to filter out any regular StumbleUpon traffic.

Just as I had expected, the negative reviews started coming and with them, the steadily increasing traffic. The more vicious and personal the attack, the more traffic it sent.