Autostumble Review
Quite a while back, Mark from digeratimarketing.co.uk asked me to review his software autostumble. In the meantime I’ve been messing with it and seeing what it can do. WARNING: Mark didn’t pay for this review so I’m gonna be totally honest 
So to start…
What does it do? It’s a database of stumblers who exchange stumbles with you without you begging them for a stumble, kidnapping their close relations, or manually stumbling at a stumbleexhcange place. It sits in your **windoze** task bar. (And yes that does mean it refuses to run in Linux) It’s a ridiculously light program though so you can run it in a vm fine.
Unfortunately I haven’t actually used stumbleupon before because it doesn’t make sense to me. I can understand how digg works, and sphinn, and del.icio.us. But stumbleupon has a toolbar, and I don’t normally trust anything with a toolbar 
. So in the course of using the software I fecked it up because I hadn’t reviewed my URL and my votes went into the void of cyberspace. The software doesn’t check or notify you if you make a stupid mistake like that. On the other hand there’s only a few of boxes so there’s not many places you can screw up. I just managed to find probably the only one. To be honest if you have half an idea about stumbleupon it’s easy to figure out, just make sure you submit your url to stumbleupon before exchanging stumbles with the program. Doh!
So the page I promoted. Well it has days of nothing and then all of a sudden traffic in a couple of days, but that’s probably explained by my complete screw up. I stumbled the same URL after Mark fixed the database up so it was getting old as an entry and I don’t know if that counts for anything.
You also have to tailor your content for the audience. It’s an obvious one but you’re not promoting to your normal website audience, it’s got to really hit a nerve with the stumbleupon crowd. Now I have yet to discover exactly what makes them tick and I think my page may have lacked something in that direction.
Worth £10/$20 soon going up to £20/$40? I never reached the full potential of this program. I plan to have another go mind you. I’d say it’s definitely worth the price of what is basically a quarter of what you might spend filling your car up for something that will still be there whenever you have an idea and want another way of promoting it.
I reckon if it does gain a *lot* of users over time that could increase your competition, and stumbleupon may notice that their algorithm is being subverted and change it. So I’d recommend buying it early now before he promotes like a madman. That way you get the bonus of being in early and if it does continue to work you don’t pay anything extra.
Saturday, May 31st, 2008
