Is StumbleUpon a Scam?

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If a website promises you something in exchanging for doing “nothing more than” installing a toolbar, run far far away and don’t look back. Toolbars are the devil’s spawn and will cause you untold nightmares. You can’t possibly have enough skepticism for someone who wants you to install their toolbar (or anything else, for that matter).

Because of that, StumbleUpon was a very hard sell to me — not only because they require you to install a toolbar (warning! warning!), but also because of something I saw a few months ago.

I was looking at who was referring traffic to Nursing Voices, and I saw a flood of it from StumbleUpon — so much so, in fact, that I immediately wrote it off as referer spam. There’s no way that a site that I had never heard of could be sending so much traffic legitimately.

Oops.

Turns out, the traffic was genuine and StumbleUpon was something well worth looking into.

I only discovered that this week, though, after reading several articles about how cool it was. Those articles ganged up and finally pushed me to the tipping point, and so I went to the site and held my breath as I installed the toolbar.

So far, so good! I’m really liking it. It is sooooooo easy to use, and so useful — an unbeatable combination.

(Now, I still half expect to wake up one morning and find that they’ve siphoned the money out of all my bank accounts, but for now I remain very blissfully ignorant )

So what does all this have to do with getting more visitors to your blog? Well, for starters, it’s just one more way to get out and meet your neighbors. For another, if you faithfully StumbleUpon good stuff, the stuff you Stumble can end up getting a lot of good traffic — that includes the blogs of you and your friends.

Now, I’m not at all advocating that you spam StumbleUpon. In fact, if you spam, I bet you’ll find yourself booted right out. I’m just saying that if you make good faith use of the service, it looks like everyone wins.

Try it out and let me know what you think!

(By the way, installing the toolbar is a breeze if you’re using Firefox — and if you aren’t you really should be )

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