No, that's not a typo.

In November 2009, I had 1,508 unique visitors.
In December 2009, I had 22,507.

And I did it with just one poem: How To Greet Death.

I published that poem sometime in late October, and to be honest, I kinda forgot about it. I thought it was a good poem, but certainly not one of my best.

Fast forward to the first week of December. I'd published a half a dozen more poems, but otherwise, I hadn't done much with the site. I was talking with a friend, weblit writer Travis Martin about our respective websites and he asked me something about my traffic. I remember telling him I didn't get very much -- a couple dozen views a day -- but near the end of our conversation, I decided to check my stats, since I hadn't checked them in over a week.

I had to do a double-take, because my stats were telling me that my site had logged 7,000 unique views over seven days. Two days later, I was over 10,000. And my traffic kept growing from there.

So What Changed?
Sometime in the first few days of December, someone found How To Greet Death through StumbleUpon and gave it a thumbs-up. StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking website where users can browse random websites based on their interests. When StumbleUpon directs the user to a website, that user can give the page a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, or simply move on. When that first user gave How To Greet Death a thumbs-up, StumbleUpon put that poem in front of every one of that user's subscribers.

Some of them liked the poem enough to give it thumbs-ups, feeding the poem out to their subscribers, and some of those users gave it thumbs-up, feeding the poem out even further. In just a few days, How To Greet Death had accrued more views than this entire site had earned in the previous six months.

You've heard the term "going viral"? This is what they mean.

It Snowballs From There
A few days later, I started noticing something else. I was starting to get more and more referrals from StumbleUpon -- but they weren't pointing to How To Greet Death. They were pointing to other, older poems like Human Noise, Amorphia, and Soldier's Love Song.

People that were discovering my site through StumbleUpon were clicking through to the rest of my poetry, and some of the pieces were earning thumbs-ups of their own. It's a little like watching small fireworks explode all over your website -- one day, the traffic to a specific poem would barely break out of the double-digits, and the next, it might be receiving hundreds of views.

The Long Term
It's mid-January, and StumbleUpon is still my biggest source of traffic, pulling in several hundred unique visitors per day. Many of them probably look at the site for a few seconds and then click elsewhere -- such is the fickle nature of the Internet -- but several of them have stuck around, becoming fans of my Facebook page or following me on Twitter, and that tells me something: they liked what they saw and they want more.

For a writer, there's no better compliment.

How Can Other Weblit Writers Use This?
I'm really not sure. I don't know what it was about How To Greet Death that resonated so well with people, and there's certainly a bit of luck involved in getting the snowball effect to start. I think if there's any lesson to be learned, it's that a single piece of content can change everything, and when it does, you want to capitalize on it.

I think my site's structure helped a lot with the success of my poetry on StumbleUpon. This site is built to dynamically show a list of links to other poems in the sidebar whenever one of my poems is being read -- that gives users a convenient way to browse other pieces in the collection, and the Facebook fan box in the right sidebar makes it easy for someone to become a fan without ever leaving this site.

There's also something to be said for the nature of the content -- most of my poems are fairly bite-size. How To Greet Death is only 36 lines long, and many of the poems on this site are even shorter. Most StumbleUpon users probably decide within the first few seconds whether or not a piece deserves a thumbs-up, so small pieces of content fit well with those sorts of snap-judgments. I'd imagine self-contained short stories would do similarly well.

Of course, most weblit still falls into the realm of long serialized works. I don't really know how well those types of pieces would do on a site like StumbleUpon. I'd imagine a snappy first chapter could do well, but later chapters probably won't get many thumbs-ups, since users will be finding them out of context. That said, stories like The Peacock King that frequently produce self-contained shorts and mini-series might find those pages doing well on StumbleUpon.

If you want to try to capitalize on StumbleUpon's viral capabilities for your own serial, I'd suggest writing a handful of self-contained short stories that can serve to introduce readers to your world without requiring them to get bogged down in the primary story-arc. Keep these stories short -- 1,000 to 2,000 words max, and make sure that they're linked in such a way that it's convenient to get from one to another. Don't forget to include a link to the main story for the people that want to read the whole thing.

Obviously, you'll need a bit of luck for the snowball to start rolling, but be patient. I firmly believe that talent always get recognized -- if you write well, and many of you do, you'll get picked up.

Tell Your Own Story
I'd love to hear some other weblit writers' stories about their experiences with traffic from StumbleUpon or with other social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, or Reddit. Got something to add? Drop me a comment.