I don’t very often talk about numbers when it comes to my sites, mainly because like the majority of bloggers they aren’t anything to write home about. Also like the majority of bloggers out there I make as much use of social media type buttons to help spread the word about my posts; and again, like most of you, they help a little bit.

However, in light of recent events this past week I have come to one firm conclusion. Any blogger that doesn’t include StumbleUpon as an integral part of their social media outreach they are making a huge mistake.

How big of a mistake?

Well take the following graphic of my basic stats for the month of June to date. That huge hockey stick you see there in the graph .. that’s a StumbleUpon run on one of my posts.

June stats to date for WinExtra - click for larger image

But here’s the pretty incredible part – the post that sparked this run is over a year old, and it isn’t the only post on WinExtra that has had the same loving from StumbleUpon.

None of the other social media related mediums like Twitter or even Facebook come close to producing the kind of traffic that StumbleUpon has. Sure Twitter and Facebook might, and I say might, bring you a surge of traffic during the first couple of hours of your post hitting the web; but the beautiful thing about StumbleUpon is that it really seems to love the long tail.

Not only does StumbleUpon love the long tail but you can have it keep coming back again and again with whole new runs. I have had this happen with a couple of other post where I will get a good solid run and then a couple of months later it will happen all over again.

Of course, as with all the other social media outlets, you have to be careful and not flood StumbleUpon with pointless content, and it is always better if someone else “stumbles” your posts but as long as you are judicious and also spend time stumbling other really good posts from other site StumbleUpon will reward you.

Personally if I had to pick just one of the social media call to action buttons I would have to go with StumbleUpon because as you can see when the StumbleUpon loving starts it can be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Oh and this newest run .. while it has slowed down somewhat today it is still going, now on its fifth day.