Let me show you some little comparsion to Digg. If you get dug, maybe you can do it to the front page. Maybe not. But whatever happens, you will be popular for no more then day or two. Your article will appear on main pages of Digg, but this so called dig effect is just temporary. There is plenty of articles about this effect and always one conclusion: this traffic can only harm your website. Hosting providers are usually not prepared to provide sufficient traffic for so many visitors and your site will be probably down. This is like a thunderstorm. But we would prefer just some weak rain, which would persist for some longer period.

And this rain is Stumble. What I usually do is that I stumble my own articles. But my site is quite new and I wanted to observe the stumble effect a little bit more in detail. I signed up to Subvert and Profit, where you can buy stumbles (and diggs as well). I decided to buy 30 stumbles (for this post). It took about a week to get them, but after that period I can’t stop wondering. I had about 50 to 80 uniques per day before. After my small investment I already have 200+ daily. And your question is obvious: will this trend continue or stop the very next day?
To answer this question we have to compare Digg and Stumble Upon more in detail of how visitors come to your site. Digg.com is a great website where all visitors can choose what articles they are interested in and they click only those which are considered to be interesting (title of the article is the key). On the other hand, Stumble users install a plugin to their browser and then click so called “stumble icon” to show next interesting page. But they never know what will appear – they can just choose the appropriate category. And that’s the difference. With Stumble you don’t have to have some amazing title of your story. It’s all about content – if the first visitors – users of Stumble- come to your site and find it interesting, they will stumble your article. Content is the key.
What is the lesson of this article:

If you want the thunderstorm, use Digg stimulation, you will get more than 20 000 unique vistitors per day, but after day or two, this will be over. It is one time business.

If you want the permanent rain, use Stumble upon. Invest some money to get required stumbles (thumbs up) and enjoy the coming visitors for a long long period.

Warning: Stumble and Digg visitors are certain group of internet users who don’t click on ads. If you want to spend for example 100 USD to promote your website via Stumble or Digg, your returns will be no more then 10USD. Social traffic are often webmasters and they really know that it is just an advertisement. Don’t expect any profits.

The last and very important question: Is it better to buy Digg (or other social things) or to buy backlinks? If you want tons of traffic immediately, buy social traffic. But for your permanent growth, it is better to buy quality backlinks and get traffic from Google. It is all about time. In long period, backlinks are more precious. Some people may like digg effect and stumble effect when they sell ads impressions. For all pay-per-click oriented webmasters I have only one advice: Invest to backlinks and create unique and quality content for a long period.