Around 4pm on December 30th, I woke up (I work nights for those who don’t know) and went into my normal routine. I jumped online and was surprised to see that my e-mail box had a lot more mail than normal. Once I checked it, I noticed I had an unusually high amount of comments and contact requests from RoleplayingPro. So I logged into the site’s administration dashboard to start replying to some of the comments, when lo’ and behold the explanation came to me. StumbleUpon had dropped a traffic bomb on RoleplayingPro.

For those of you who aren’t aware, StumbleUpon is a pretty cool website that allows users to discover other websites based on their personal interests. Being a newer blog, RoleplayingPro gets around 100-250 hits per day. Although the numbers have been increasing, the holiday season has actually been pretty slow as far as traffic goes. Our article “How to Prepare For a Gaming Session as a Player” got stumbled and dropped over ten times the amount of traffic we normally get in a 24-hour period.

Although this type of traffic has a pretty high bounce rate and is sometimes less-targeted than other traffic, it definitely increased my responses on the website since the StumbleUpon incident began. I also received some e-mail responses from gamers who had never been to the site before. So in that respect, it has the potential to expose your roleplaying blog to an entirely new set of readers.

I wish I had some super secret social marketing technique I could give to other bloggers. In reality, I’ve tried a few times (unsuccessfully) to get this type of social marketing to work. I’m sure our veteran roleplaying bloggers are already well aware of the power of social websites, such as StumbleUpon and Digg. For those who aren’t, consider investigating these sites as a potential method to bring your roleplaying blog more traffic. And thank you to the StumbleUpon users who have given us props!