Mike Cornelison

This week I had the unique opportunity to see the combined power of Stumbleupon and good content. A friend had recently launched a website, and it had the predictable number of visitors. Zero.

Well, maybe not zero, but close enough so that you know it was only a few friends and family reading the site. This is a pretty typical scenario with a personal blog launch.

I’ve known Mike for 25 years, and I know he’s a gifted guitarist and that the music community would enjoy his site, so I submitted it to Stumbleupon with the following comment:

This is a great site for any music lover, particularly for guitarists, maybe bass guitar?

And then I tagged with the following: cyberculture, guitar, music, weblogs. Apparently the folks in Cyberculture enjoy Mike’s site. It’s been about 23 hours since my original stumble and approximately 13,000 views for Mike.

It’s great to be able to send traffic to a friend, and 13,000 views is nice, but it’s not the most traffic the web has ever seen. What’s nice is that Mike sent me a graphic of his web stats, and you can really see how Stumbleupon has clearly been the driving force of traffic to a new site.

Keep in mind that as of this writing another 200 people have thumbed the site up, which means that there is good content. I can submit sites for days, but if the content is missing then no one’s going to care.

If you’d like an introduction to Stumbleupon I wrote one that you might enjoy, but if you’re already using Stumbleupon you might want to hone your skills with this post.