How well do Stumble visitors convert?

My previous post about the importance of connecting with your readers caught a little wind in the sails over at StumbleUpon, one of the most useful social sharing services, especially when it comes to promoting and sharing your own content. Since the blog hadn’t had any traffic from Stumble earlier this month, I thought that it would be a nice opportunity to take a look at the numbers and see how well the visitors that Stumble send you actually convert.

What I will be looking at here is the direct influences the influx of visitors through Stumble has had on my feed subscription numbers, so this little experiment is hardly scientific, and there is plenty room for erroneus conclusions. On the other side however, my subscription rate had been more or less stable for over a week before the Stumble influx, varying with no more than a couple of subscribers from day to day.

So what are the results? Well, I’ll start with the numbers. Since the article first got picked up by Stumble on Friday, it has sent 1540 visitors to this blog. Not too bad at all. By yesterday, the traffic slowed down and went back to normal, so it is fair to say that those that would be subscribing to my feed after finding the site through Stumble would have done so by the time Feedburner calculated the stats for Sunday. By then, the number of subscribers to my feed had increased with a whopping 10 subscribers! Yes, it’s true, out of 1540 visitors, 10 of them decided to subscribe. If we break it down, it means that it would take me 154 visitors from Stumble to gain one new subscriber.

Of course a wide variety of things will affect these numbers. The first impression of the blog counts of course, the quality of the article they are sent to will make a difference. If they like it, they are obviously more likely to subscribe, and vice versa. Another thing that can matter greatly is whether or not the actual article they are sent to matches their interests (which is where the importance of accurate tagging comes in).

Overall, the conversion numbers are a little disappointing, but around what I expected. The most important question however, is it worth trying to bring visitors in from social media sites like Stumble in order to boost a blog’s popularity? Absolutely, especially if you’re in the early stages of promotion. Just remember what I mentioned in my previous article about connecting with your readers to quickly build a following, and if you are persitent and do it right, you can be on your way to success within no time with the help of social media and some good old fashioned networking.

And just as a little PS at the very end for some extra motivation, remember that this little experiment does not take into consideration those people that don’t necessarily subscribe to the feed, but still return to read new articles. Of course this brings up another interesting question, which visitors are more valuable to you as a publisher and a blogger, those who subscribe to your feed, or those who visit your blog directly? Well that is something I will be discussing in my next post, so be check back for that.

Update: I just noticed an interesting article relating to this subject, how to capitalize on StumpleUpon traffic over at ProBlogger. Take a look, it’s well worth a read!