Last week during the session I hosted with Brian, I mentioned that StumbleUpon was the only social bookmarking site that I’d ever had any luck using to drive traffic to my articles.

As if on queue, this week StumbleUpon delivered more than 500 visitors to 4realz. For a new blog like this one, that could easily translate to a few new regular readers!

Until this week, I hadn’t done anything to attract traffic from social bookmarkting sites. But when I noticed the spike in traffic that I got thanks to a Stumble by Ines and a digg by Steve it got me curious to play around a bit more and I started to digg/reddit/stumble/tag a few different articles. The results were fairly predictable in that StumbleUpon sent hundreds of visitors while no other site sent more than two dozen all week.

I think the success of StumbleUpon over the others is that they have an explicit category of “real estate” whereas the others do not. This means that people who self-identify as liking real estate articles are more likely to end up “stumbling” across your site and being happy with the results… thus continuing the positive reinforcement and sending more “like” readers.

And while a few examples do not make a rule, I’d say that if you’re looking to use a social bookmarketing to drive some traffic to your real estate site, then don’t waste your time on any of the social bookmarketing sites save StumbleUpon and even then I think you’ll likely lose all effectiveness if you stumble all your articles, so save up your stumbles for the best of the best.

Also note: if you want to get a good reputation in the world of StumbleUpon, it is my understanding that you’re best off if you stumble articles for a variety of domains… So search out other people’s great articles and stumble those as well! 🙂