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Stumble upon Stumbleupon Tutorial

Hi Empath ! Here is the promised post on Stumbling. The following is a collection of text of some 60 posts of various blogs. One month ago, I put it together in order to print it for offline study.

Actually the help function of Stumble Upon should be sufficient. However nowadays (2008 January) in blogger circles big traffic hopes are rising and they see SU mainly as a purpose to get traffic.

I personally stick to the rules of SU and found SU as a source to find blogs, sites and infos I would not have found with Google for instance. Because sometimes you know, what you are looking for, but at other times you only know, that you miss something and don't know what it is, and then this is the point when stumbling becomes a real great tool. Surfing with Stumble Upon develops quality of surfing, you make new friends, get votes (reviews) on what you 'stumbled' and on your profile. And it's addicting ! (Warning :-)

So, I do not take blame or glory for the following written stuff. Sorry, the collection might be a bit lousy and messy. It's supposed for offline reading, so maybe you too might just copy it and print it, to read it more easily.

Wish you well !

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Posted by Neena on 10/28/07 in Social Networking, Traffic:

When I first started blogging I had no idea what StumbleUpon was. I quickly learned the basics, installed the toolbar, “stumbled” a few articles, and had a few of my articles stumbled. Sure, it was fun. And the spike in my blog traffic was great when my articles got stumbled. But beyond that I didn’t see much potential to gaining consistent blog traffic, so the novelty slowly fizzled.

But, I discovered that Fred at Newest on the Net is compiling an Ultimate List of StumbleUpon Articles. So, this was a good reason to give StumbleUpon a second look. And, boy, am I glad I did. There is so much potential there that I did not see the first time around!

The Basics:
I am not going to delve into the basics of StumbleUpon. Much of this you can find out on the site in their help section. After you install the toolbar, you can start stumbling. Every time you hit the stumble button, you will be taken to a new page in the categories that you defined when setting up your profile. You then rate the page with a thumbs up or thumbs down. The more you stumble and rate, the more personalized your stumbles will become so you should find your stumbled content to become more and more interesting. This is where I stopped previously. Fun, yes. Increase blog traffic - hmmm.

Harnessing the True Power of StumbleUpon
The true traffic power of StumbleUpon lies behind the “friends” function. I never thought of StumbleUpon as a traditional social networking site - but it really is just that, with a twist. In StumbleUpon you can add friends just as you do on other social networking sites, But choose your friends carefully - the maximum you canhave is 200. (Of course, you can add and delete at will.)

Picking similar minded stumblers as friends is important to success with StumbleUpon. When you choose someone as a friend - you will see an updated list of all their stumbles. This gives you a pool of articles and new blogs that you may find to be interesting. You will also get that person’s attention, and they may come over and check out your site. If you stumble some of their articles, hopefully they will take note, read your blog, and stumble something of yours. This is where the viral nature of StumbleUpon takes hold. The more you stumble, the more attention you will get.

As with anything else, this process takes time. You cannot expect overnight results. Focus on StumbleUpon for a set amount of time everyday. Do this for a month. Be generous with your stumbles. Anytime you read a post that you like on any blog, use the social networking/share this button at the end of the post or the thumbs up (or down) button on the StumbleUpon toolbar. If you are the first to submit the article you will have the opportunity to tag it and write a short review. Take the time to do this and do it well.

When the author sees that his/her article has been stumbled, he/she will most likely press the infobutton.gif (infobutton) on the StumbleUpon Toolbar. Here he will find the identity of the person that submitted his article, as well as others who have stumbled it. He will then probably click over to your site and possibly reciprocate.

The result: Your traffic is sure to increase.
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Your Responsibility to Your StumbleUpon Friends

Posted by Neena on 11/8/07 in Social Networking, blog

Ever since I wrote my Using Stumble Upon to Increase Blog Traffic Article, I have made a conscious effort to make the most of the StumbleUpon service.

Recently as I was happily stumbling through the blogosphere, I had a moment of uncertainty. You see, I blog in two different niches. Over here I blog about blogging. And at my other site - A Mom’s Life at NeenMachine.com - I blog about parenting stuff.

Now, most of my StumbleUpon friends are bloggers, but only some of them are parents. My non-parent StumbleUpon friends would not be interested in an article on say, potty training. I certainly did not want to send unrelated stumbles to my StumbleUpon friends.

Thankfully, StumbleUpon has thought of this issue and (see the highlighted text below) will only send your friends pages that you have rated that are FILTERED according to shared topics. Whew! That is a relief.

According to the StumbleUpon help section:

What are friends? (and do they influence my Stumbles?)

To quote the devs: “Adding a friend is essentially subscribing to their content. You will stumble upon pages they have rated, filtered according to the shared [topics] displayed on that person’s profile.“

A friend is someone whose pages you like. By adding them to your friends list, you will start to receive pages that they like when you Stumble!

Note that it is not necessary to actually like a person in order to make them your friend! Neither is it considered necessary to ask their permission when adding them to your list of friends.

Whether you choose to make their acquaintance, on the basis of your shared interests, is entirely up to you!
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I’m sure many of you enjoy the benefits of large volumes of traffic from StumbleUpon, but do you take the time to find out who gave you those thumbs up and stop to thank them? If not, then read on to discover why you should.
Basics of StumbleUpon Traffic

There are a number of factors that determine how much traffic is sent to any particular submission. It goes something like this:

* More thumbs up votes = more traffic
* More thumbs down votes = less traffic
* Thumbs up from new stumblers (to your domain) = more traffic
* Thumbs up from non-friends = more traffic
* More reviews = more traffic

There’s a couple of things to note here. Firstly, the StumbleUpon algorithm takes into account the ‘friendship’ factor. If you have the same people stumbling your stuff every time, while that will still drive traffic, over time it will diminish. What really seems to send the avalanches of traffic are a large number of thumbs up votes from people that haven’t voted for pages from your domain before.

Secondly, when people review the page that helps too and of course that also shows that the person has not only clicked the thumbs-up button but taken the time out to write something special.
Why Thank Stumblers?

Well first of all, it’s just a nice thing to do isn’t it? But there are other self-serving benefits also:

* Not many people do it, so you’ll stand out
* It reminds people that you exist
* It encourages repeat visits to your site
* It could transform a one-off visitor into a long term one

I receive very few thank-you emails from Stumblers so I am pretty sure that I stand out simply because I do it. A large number of the people that I thank email me back. Now I don’t know about you but quite often when I’m stumbling I tend to be in a very trigger-happy mode and it’s click-click-click-thumbs-click-click-click…
Stumblers are Trigger Happy

Even if I stumble across a really good blog post, rarely do I stop and take a look around the rest of the blog. I do at other times, but not often when I’m stumbling. If other people do that too, then think of the potential readers that are being lost. I’ve said before that large spikes in Stumble traffic do not result in a similar spike in RSS subscribers so I know that I’m not the only one who stumbles in this manner.
Bring Those Stumblers Back to Your Site

But by sending a simple thank-you note it gives you the opportunity to make a direct connection with that stumbler. Now I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the people I thank look at the note and scratch their heads wondering who on earth I am!

That can trigger a guilt reaction and they may then feel compelled to check me out to remind themselves just what it was that they thumbed-up. Putting my url as a signature in the email helps with this.
But Why Bother?

It seem like overkill, after all it’s just one person right? True but it is a very special person…

* Somebody who has already demonstrated that they like your content
* Somebody who is willing to vote for what they like!

Wouldn’t this person be very valuable as a regular reader? I have been thanking my new stumblers on a regular basis for weeks and I know it pays off because I get more stumbles to my posts as time goes on and the traffic from StumbleUpon just keeps getting higher.
How to Identify Your Stumblers

I have a simple daily routine which goes something like this:

1. I use analytics to check if I got Stumble traffic the previous day
2. Assuming I did, I check which pages had the most views that day
3. I visit each page, click the “Reviews of this page” button and look at the Stumblers
4. I scan the avatars, and pick out the ones I don’t recognise
5. For each one, I look at their profile (here’s mine), I send them a message, and if we have similar interests I add them as a friend.

Note, that I only thank my new stumblers. Some people vote for me a lot and I really appreciate that but I’m sure it would get pretty annoying if I sent them an email every time! So I only do it once.
How to Identify the New Ones

The human brain is a remarkable thing. Our brains work in images, not words, not names. Studies have shown that you can be shown thousands of images very quickly and them some days later be able to identify which images you had seen before. In other words, I recognise the avatars of people who have stumbled me before and a new one will stand out.

It’s not fool proof of course but here’s a tip - look at this picture:

past messages

This is what you see when you click the “Send a Message” button. See that link that says “past messages”? Click that and it will show you a history of any messages you have sent to that person before.

Sometimes I’ll find somebody who I thanked several weeks earlier and I didn’t recognise the avatar so by checking this I can be sure not to annoy people.

I don’t manage to catch them all using this method. Somebody could arrive at my blog, start looking through the archives, give an old post a thumbs up and I’d never know about it. However a lot of the time that thumbs up to an old post can start sending a fresh stream of Stumble traffic which triggers more thumbs up and suddenly this old post is appearing in my Top 5 posts in Google Analytics. Then I take notice and can thank those people.

It’s the 80-20 principle at work here. This method takes me around 5-15 minutes a day depending on the amount of StumbleUpon traffic in any given day, I probably reach 80% of my stumblers and I am rewarded by a constant stream of new Stumble friends, subscribers, thumbs up and traffic.

So, do YOU thank your stumblers?

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1. Boost Your StumbleUpon Traffic With Outbound Links

2. 5 Essential StumbleUpon Power Points

3. 7 Reasons Why StumbleUpon Traffic is the Best on the Planet

4. Who Else Wants to Learn an Advanced StumbleUpon Secret

5. The Ultimate Guide To Leveraging StumbleUpon

6. Choose Your Audience: The Uncaring Social Media Crowd or Your Loyal Readers?

7. 9 Things Wrong With StumbleUpon

8. StumbleUpon for Computer Dummies

9. A Comprehensive Guide To StumbleUpon

10. Using Social Media Arbitrage to Drive Traffic With StumbleUpon

11. Build Super Links and Traffic With StumbleUpon

12. StumbleUpon Addiction for Business Research

13. A Quick Traffic Driving Tip With StumbleUpon

14. A Definitive StumbleUpon Guide: Driving Traffic to Websites

15. How to Use StumbleUpon Like a Pro

16. StumbleUpon the Best Pages on the Web

17. How to Draw StumbleUpon Users Into Your Blog

18. Building Your Blog With StumbleUpon

19. StumbleUpon Traffic Bounce Rate is Amazing

20. Getting Started With StumbleUpon - Using the Toolbar

21. How Important Is StumbleUpon?

22. Rethinking Links

23. Using StumbleUpon to Increase Blog Traffic

24. 5 Top Resources for Stumblers Outside of StumbleUpon

25. 3 StumbleUpon Traffic Myths Debunked

26. StumbleUpon is a Goldmine For Writers

27. The Magic of StumbleUpon’s Recent Reviews Page

28. StumbleUpon Gamed By Paid-To-Stumble Service

29. StumbleUpon Optimization: Leveraging Photo Stumbles for More Traffic

30. How to Increase StumbleUpon Traffic?

31. Building a Large Audience for Your StumbleUpon Account

32. Don’t Buy Traffic, Use StumbleUpon

33. Lingering Taste of StumbleUpon Traffic

34. Is StumbleUpon Traffic Worth Getting?

35. Revealed: 16 Different Personality Types of StumbleUpon Users

36. StumbleUpon Mathematics for Stumblers

37. 25 Reasons You Get Thumbs Up

38. StumbleUpon Launches Stumble-Thru Site Specific Stumbling

39. Before Submitting Your Story Make Sure That…

40. The Secret To Massive Digg/StumbleUpon Traffic Without Spamming

41. Why StumbleUpon Sends More Traffic Than Digg

42. The Why, How and Who of Marketing on StumbleUpon

43. StumbleUpon vs. Digg - Sharing Traffic

44. My StumbleUpon Friend

45. How Important Is StumbleUpon?

46. Centralizing Your Social World

47. How Do You Become A StumbleUpon Power User?

48. StumbleUpon Quintuplet From The king Of Blogging Gobshites

49. Claim Your StumbleUpon Blog Through Technorati

50. StumbleUpon Is Your Trump

51. Making a Power Account On StumbleUpon

52. 8 Reasons I Prefer StumbleUpon

53. StumbleUpon’s Fantastic Ability to Drive Traffic

54. Increasing Your StumbleUpon Audience

55. Beginner’s Guide To StumbleUpon

56. How To Run A Successful StumbleUpon Advertising Account

57. The Secret Features of StumbleUpon

58. Increase Your StumbleUpon Network

59. Writing For StumbleUpon

60. 5000 Stumbles And Counting

61. How to Get StumbledUpon

62. StumbleUpon Visitors Not Identified By Analytics

63. StumbleUpon: Exposure That Lasts

64. How To Set Up A Domino Effect of Traffic

65. The StumbleUpon Experiment

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1. Boost Your StumbleUpon Traffic with Outbound Links

It is well known that StumbleUpon can drive a huge amount of traffic to your website and there are numerous posts in the blogosphere about writing for StumbleUpon, ensuring you get plenty of thumbs up votes, and ideas for post topics that are sure to get stumbled lots. What I haven’t seen mentioned is the value of using outbound links to increase your StumbleUpon traffic.
StumbleUpon Tricks for Savvy Bloggers

In my links roundup that I posted over the weekend, I highlighted a StumbleUpon tips post from Big Bucks Blogger. The first tip in that post is to stumble the pages that link to you. In this way you drive more traffic to the page containing your link and thus you hope that some of that traffic comes back to you via the link on that page.

Therefore it makes sense to me to make a point of linking out to other blogs in your post. If the blogger that you are linking to is a savvy StumbleUpon user who uses the above technique, then they may well see your post come through their analytics program as an inbound link and then stumble it for you, to get more traffic for themselves.

Making the Most of this Technique

1) Link to People Who Use StumbleUpon
Linking to Wikipedia may be great for your visitors but that’s not going to get you any extra stumbles! Make a point of linking to sources who stumble. Who is that? Bloggers for a start. I’ve seen a great many posts about StumbleUpon from all over the blogosphere and anybody that makes such a post is probably a StumbleUpon user themselves.

2) Make Your Post Stumble-Worthy
It’s no good just dumping a load of links on a page that offers little else of value. For example, I have started posting a weekly favourite links page and that might be useful to my visitors but in itself, that not does constitute a high value post that is worthy of a stumble. These outbound links have to be intertwined into your best quality material for the technique to work. This analysis of top stumblers gives some interesting insights and what they like and don’t like.

3) Create LOTS of Links
If you have a choice between posting 5 articles with 2 links each or one article with 10 links, go for the latter. You might be thinking that it’s better to spread those links around several posts in order to get traffic to more of your articles but that won’t be as effective. Much has been written about the possible ways on which the StumbleUpon traffic algorithm works.

Nobody really knows but one thing we do know is that every thumbs up that a page receives leads to more traffic. The more thumbs up you can get to a single post the better that post will do. The reason this is important is because if you get enough popularity on a single post, you might hit the buzz page which can then send floods of traffic your way, far beyond the normal levels.

More Reasons to Link Out
Aside from the potential traffic that you can get from StumbleUpon using this technique, linking out has other benefits too. This technique advocates linking to people who are likely to check their stats and notice the link. Even if they don’t stumble that particular post they may well come and check it out to see who is linking to them. If you have posted some good quality content then you might just pick up a new reader.

But there’s more! It’s great to have other bloggers as readers because they can do what you are doing - linking! You never know when somebody that you have linked to may just link back to you in the future. The more blogs you link out to, the more you get yourself out there into the blogosphere and the greater chance you have of getting noticed.

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Using StumbleUpon To Connect With People In Your Niche

Recently I introduced the idea of connecting with people in your niche and one of the avenues that I suggested you explore was Social media. I did not mention StumbleUpon in that post as I wanted to dedicate a little more time to it.
Using StumbleUpon as a Social Networking Tool

A lot of people use the SU toolbar just as a discovery tool, and that is of course what it was designed for so there’s nothing wrong with that. But behind the toolbar lies a Social Networking tool that sometimes goes unnoticed.

The toolbar offers a number of ways in which you can find people directly interested in your niche. Before I get to the people part, first let me show you just how you can Stumble upon just the topics that relate to your niche, rather than all the interests that you may have signed up for.

Channel Based Stumbling

Every submission to StumbleUpon is categorised in a number of ways. Firstly it is sorted by type - pages, videos, photos etc. Secondly it is assigned a channel which is a choice of the interests that StumbleUpon allows you to pick and lastly, it is tagged by users.

By default, when you click the stumble button you can get any kind of submission that matches your interests. The default is set to ‘All’:

stumbleupon channel all

The first thing you can do is change the channel. If you click the little triangle next to the ‘All’ you can select a different channel. You can filter on the type of submission and you can select from one of the interests you have chosen. So for example, I have chosen the Entrepreneurship channel in the screenshot below:

stumbleupon

So the very first thing you should do is look through the available topics to see if any of them directly relate to your niche:

This then allows you to select that topic as the channel and every time you hit Stumble you will be presented with something from that topic.
Keyword Based Stumbling

Not all niches correspond neatly to a StumbleUpon topic but you can also do a keyword based Stumble. Drop down the channel menu again and look for the search option:

Click that icon and you’ll get a popup dialog into which you can enter search terms. Now your channel is changed to the phrase you typed in:

I’m not sure if the results are based on tags or on a general search of the content of the page. Both I should imagine. So now you have a way of using StumbleUpon to look for all sorts of content based around your particular niche. Now let’s dig deeper and see how we can reach the people who are interested in these pages.
Reaching the People Behind the Stumbles

First of all, every page has been submitted by a StumbleUpon user (at least I think that is the case - not sure how that works for paid Stumbles). As you stumble, the toolbar will change to reflect the user who submitted that page. Here we can see that somebody called ‘ghelms’ submitted this page about sausage making:

Click that user’s profile. If they took the time to submit the page you can be sure of their interest in the subject material. In actual fact you could skip this step and instead, just click on the icon that shows you the reviews for the page:

Now this takes you to do the all important StumbleUpon submission page for the content you were looking at. There are several important pieces of information to look at here:

* Who Submitted the Site - At the top right of the page is a box showing who submitted the site.
* Who Liked the Site - The bulk of the page is dedicated to showing you who gave the site a thumbs up. All of these people are saying ‘yes, I’m interested in sausage making’!
* Reviews of the Site - Anyone who submits a review will also appear in the thumbs up section but this section highlights those people who take the time to leave a review rather than just clicking the thumbs up button.

The submitters and the reviewers are your key people - these are the people who not only use the toolbar but actually use the site as a networking tool. If you can connect with these people and provide them with content that they like, they are likely to give your content the same treatment.
Making the People Connection

So now you have a way to find the people who have shown an interest in your niche. StumbleUpon allows you to add friends like many other social networks but unlike most others it has a restriction - you can only have 200 friends. That does not limit the number of fans that you have - but you personally can only befriend 200 others which means you need to choose wisely.

When you click on somebody’s StumbleUpon profile you’ll see something that looks like this:

Examining The Tag Cloud

Look over to the right and scroll down to the tag cloud. This is a great way to get a good feel for what this person is about. Most people have a wide variety of interests. What you want to figure out is if this person just happened to have a fleeting interest in your niche two years ago or if it is a major interest for them.

The tag cloud will give you an idea of this. This cloud shows all the tags that this stumbler expressed an interest in. By clicking on a tag you can see just what they thumbed up that fell into that category. Take note of how many there are and most importantly - the date. If the stumbles are recent that’s a good sign but if they are from a long time ago this user has probably moved on.

The About & Friends Tabs

When you first click on a user profile you are on the Favourites tab. An often overlooked part of the profile are the About and Friends tabs.

Many people forget to update their About page and they have nothing but a profile picture. Those that use SU properly may have a link to a site they own and show any StumbleUpon groups that they are a member of. This gives you a better idea of what they are about.

Next click on the friends tab. How many friends does that person have? At the time of writing I have 44 mutual friends and I’m a fan of 44 other people. So I still have room for over 100 more friends. You are looking for people who have some friends but are not yet at their limit.
To Friend or Not to Friend?

So why add people as a friend on StumbleUpon? When you click on your own profile, your default home page shows you all the latest stumbles from your friends. If you select friends with similar interests to yourself then this page will become a nice source of interesting content for you.

When you are mutual friends with a StumbleUpon user you can send pages directly to them. By carefully selecting your friends and limiting them to only people who are interested in your niche you can be more confident that they will be interested in your content.

Personally I dislike this feature and I wish I could turn it off because it tends to get used mainly by people asking me for a vote on something.

Here is something else you can do - remember the channel surfing feature I mentioned earlier? You can select the ‘Friends’ channel and then you will only be shown sites that your friends liked. This does two things - firstly it brings you more great content related to your niche but secondly it allows you to give thumbs up to your friends submissions.

If they check who stumbled their submissions (I check all of my blog posts for stumbles daily) they will start to see your name popping up - this alerts them to your presence which is the whole idea of this post.

If you happen to be in the Internet marketing niche, check out my profile and add me as a friend :-)

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5 essential StumbleUpon power points

Tuesday, 21 August 2007

I really like StumbleUpon. So much so, I thought I’d make a list of 5 essential things you ought to know about StumbleUpon…


I’ve only been on StumbleUpon since may 2007. And in that time, I’ve attracted some interesting friends and reviewed some interesting, funny, informative and sometimes amazing websites and ‘blogs.

What makes StumbleUpon unique amongst the other social bookmarking services is the extended dialogue you’re able to create out of reviewing a website or ‘blog.

By joining StumbleUpon and committing to making the effort to vote and review stuff, participate in forums and exchange personal messages with others, you’re able to do 3 amazing things: build trust, build reputation and build respect.

Yes, you can do some of that with Digg, maybe. But on StumbleUpon, there’s so much more you can do. So here’s 5 essential things you ought to know about StumbleUpon:

1. The sense of community is a real draw. There’s so many ways to connect with people, and the way in which people are matched by tastes is just great.

Not only can you just idly browse from one person to another, but you can use the People tab, or the Browse People button. And then there’s the Forums, where you’re drawn together not just by interest, but specific topics, too.

If you’re active in the Forums, then there’s added exposure to be gained. By picking Forums that either just interest you, or you’re a specialist on the topic of, you can gain some traction and become a voice of information and authority.

Don’t waste this opportunity. Go find those Forums that suite you most and join them!

2. Reviews are like a currency as well as being an endorsement. If people like you, they will Review you. So you can Review a person the same way you can Review a website or ‘blog, which involves adding some Tags.

Think of Reviews as being Testimonials, which are a brilliant endorsement, often used in the business world to great success.

If you’re found under a Tag, chances are, the person looking for stuff under that Tag will at least be interested in your stuff. If they see that you’ve got Reviews and they include that Tag and other related Tags, you’re more relevant to their needs.

Providing these personal Reviews is a sign of friendship. That’s not always the case, but in general, that’s what you’re going to see, even if it’s just a simple: “Hey, this guy rocks!!!”

If you’re going to Review anyone, do it with style and make it count. When I provide a Review, I make sure I’m actually saying something about that person. I also take a look around to see what their top Tags are, or I ask which Tags they’d like me to add into their Review.

This way, you’re adding a huge amount of specificity. And a key peripheral advantage is that if you’re providing a quality Review, you’re also saying a great deal about yourself, too. Principally, that to get your trust and respect will be paid in dividends.

3. Building trust and reputation is an integral part of the StumbleUpon experience.

Right now, I’m staying quite focused on SU’ing (voting on and StumblingUpon) websites and ‘blogs that are related to the themes of my own ‘blog. The advantage to me is that my Profile becomes a good source for strong, related content, which I’ll be linking through to my ‘blog at some point.

There does seem to be a vague correlation between the number of Fans and the number of Reviews, but this doesn’t always hold true. In some cases, the ratio is deeply skewed one way or t’other.

What is known is that those people who have hundreds of Fans are the kind of people than can bring considerable volumes of traffic to a website or ‘blog.

The reason for this is that on your personal web page, you have four tabs, the first of which is What’s New, where you’ll find what your Fans are adding Reviews and Tags to. Here’s where the influencers get their Reviews seen and than shared.

By voting on and adding Reviews and relevant Tags to the websites and ‘blogs your Fans are adding Reviews to, you engage in an indirect dialogue. You’re essentially agreeing with their choices and actively endorsing them.

But this isn’t to say you should provide positive Reviews for the sake of it. This is about respect and trust, not eliciting favour and fawning adulation.

Additionally, if you’re gunning to build and manage Personal Brand, you could do much worse than StumbleUpon.

4. Making a Vote count is what StumbleUpon is all about, and in the main, most people will either Vote thumbs up or thumbs down. Only a few will elect to add a Review, and even less will add Tags.

If you Vote a website or ‘blog down, there’s got to be a reason, so write a Review. If you’re able to articulate your reasons clearly and in an informative style, you’re doing other SU’ers a great service.

This is another essential building block of trust, reputation and respect — what you don’t like can be as important and telling as knowing what you do like.

5. Spammers beware! ‘Coz within the cogs & wheels of the ever-moving StumbleUpon machine are the hooks, snares and traps that catch the people foolish enough to try gaming the system.

If you try submitting your own content, you’ll get a surge in traffic once or twice. But after that, the traffic you get will diminish and eventually, you’ll just get nothing.

The algorithms employed by StumbleUpon are smart enough to see what’s going on and will eventually work against you.

However, none of this precludes you from SU’ing your own stuff from time to time. But if you’re posting stuff every day, you will not benefit from this practice.

Being nice and playing by the rules is much more beneficial than looking for ways to cut corners to drive traffic to your website or ‘blog.

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7 Reasons why StumbleUpon Traffic Is the Best on the Planet

27 Comments Filed Under: StumbleUpon, Social Media, SEO 2.0, Web 2.0, Google

Do you think Digg or Reddit is the place to go nowadays? Never used StumbleUpon until now? You should, both as a user and a webmaster. Users get highly relevant content that matches their preferences, that’s the way of social browsing. Webmasters get substantial and steady traffic. Especially new and small non-profit blogs like mine can get a regular, even daily traffic boost. That’s not all though to say about StumbleUpon, it’s not just any traffic, it’s the best and most targeted traffic I have ever seen!

Let me present 7 reasons why StumbleUpon traffic is the best traffic out there:

1. Lowest bounce rate on the planet! The bounce rate (you can check it in Google Analytics) tells you how many users just ran away instantly after landing on your site. Even very targeted Google traffic has a bounce rate of 70, 80% which means that 4 out of 5 users won’t read your page and hit the back button. The bounce rate of StumbleUpon: Approx. 30% !!!
2. New visitors: StumbleUpon traffic means over 95% new visitors, new visitors that are really interested in your topic not just any visitors.
3. Most pages/visit: This number tells you whether a reader just clicked on a post and then went ahead somewhere else or if s/he just kept on reading more on your site. StumbleUpon users visited 2 pages per visit. That means they read the article that was stumbled and then clicked on the homepage for instance to read more or at least to check what this blog is about. Other traffic sources reach 1,5 pages/visit.
4. Steadiness: There is no server outage caused by StumbleUpon! Digg can mess up your server, cost you much money and damage your reputation. StumbleUpon traffic comes in steady recurring bursts, SEO 2.0 has been stumbled several times by now, 5 articles have been submitted by users, but one particular post has been stumbled repeatedly. It means that every time a user decides to “like” this post you get a burst of traffic, which in my case is 100 - 200 visitors, not much you might argue, but for a new blog like mine that counts 200 visits without social media it’s substantial.
5. No flames: Digg and Reddit users hate you for no apparent reason because those services force topics upon people whereas StumbleUpon just sends you those who like your topic anyways. I noticed that I was dugg by the stupid flame comments “you suck on the internet” on my post. StumbleUpon users in contrast behave like surprise guests because they stumbled into your party in a way. So they don’t offend you. On a side note: I was submitted to Reddit and was buried in an instant, probably for being a SEO.
6. International traffic: While Digg is predominantly white, middle class Americans and Europeans StumbleUpon even brought me some of the rare users from Africa. This is a truly varied international community.
7. Instant traffic: While new blogs and sites won’t get any significant traffic from Google, StumbleUpon can jump start your blog. My blog was stumbled on day two of SEO 2.0 at a time where Google sent 2 visitors per day. The first significant traffic from Google began to pour in after two weeks but still amounted to 20 - 30 visits. After a month I received more traffic from StumbleUpon alone that from Google’s organic search.

Conclusion: If you set up a new blog or site that targets a niche, you are on shared hosting and you do not want your hosting bill to skyrocket or you are non-profit anyways try to target the StumbleUpon audience and skip the “you suck on the internet” mobs of Digg and Reddit.

Also do not concentrate on Google. Google does not send any significant traffic to new sites to prevent spam. So only older authority sites can built upon organic Google traffic.

If you rely on commercial success concentrate on StumbleUpon first and then go on to other social media when you can afford the 300$ hosting bill and your success makes you immune against flame comments of the mob. Instead of the mob following the lowest common denominator choose the smart mob of StumbleUpon and other social browsing services.
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.


stumble upon traffic is great, but I can see it being abused by some people. on blogcatalog there are people who ask for stumbles from other bloggers just to generate more traffic. If people just stumble a blog or website without actually reviewing it, this can hurt the way that stumble upon (and social bookmarking) works. if enough people do it, it could become disastrous. but I agree, stumbleupon is great!! I just don’t want to see it getting abused

turtie, you are right that with success every platform also faces abuse. fortunately SU has some basic and advanced checks and balances to render those abuse attempts useless.

In fact a blog like mine that is successful on SU without any asking for votes is the proof that with the current SU ranking those sites get popular which truly deserve it.

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4. Who Else Wants To Learn An Advanced StumbleUpon Secret
Date September 5, 2007
One More Black Hat Stumble Technique

Did I catch your attention yet? I sure hope I did, especially if you happened to stumble upon this page (pun intended). If you’re still catching up on the basics of making the most of the wonderful service that is StumbleUpon, read up on my Ultimate Guide to Leveraging StumbleUpon.

Now that you’ve done that, It’s time to play with the big boys and talk about an advanced stumbling technique that involves Technorati and Stumbling other people’s blogs. Confused? Wait…wasn’t I supposed to get other people to stumble my blog to get more traffic? Theoretically, yes, the more stumbles to your landing page, the more traffic you will get. However, traffic garnered from Stumble Upon is usually inconsistent and comes in gradually decreasing waves. For example, you may get 1000+ visits the first and second days of your flagship stumbled post, but the traffic decreases dramatically to 50-100 visits at best, by the end of the week.
Necessity Is the Mother of Invention

One of the things that I love about humanity as a race, is our ability to create ingenious situations to problems we face. In that spirit, I’ve expanded on a technique first mentioned by Loren Baker of Search Engine Land. It takes only 3 steps, and should give you a consistent stream of traffic till you rinse and repeat.

If you’ve written linkbait worthy material, it’s very likely that you’ve already got other bloggers commenting or referring to your post on their own blogs. These posts often are not ‘discovered’ as being stumbled, and there is a good opportunity to maintain downline stumble traffic to your blog, by stumbling those of other bloggers that have written about you.

* Go to your Technorati reactions and sort by ‘authority’ to order the list of blogs that link to you in descending order of linkbacks.
* Visit the appropriate post that mentions something about you or your blog and ‘discover’ it via the ‘thumbs up’ button in StumbleUpon.
* Insert appropriate tags referring to the main keywords used by the blogger that’s referred to you or your blog, and proceed to submit your stumble

Continue to promote the newly stumbled page to your friends and you will see a stream of downline traffic coming from the referring site for another week!

That’s it - I hope the technique works out for you, and do let me know what results you achieve after implementing it. You can also add me as a friend on StumbleUpon in the meantime

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5.Ultimate Guide ot Leveraging StumbleUpon
Black Hat StumbleUpon Tactics

I’m not going to argue about ethics in stumbling here - how you get your traffic is up to you in the real world. That said, if you already have a successful blog or website, stick to white hat promotion methods. Black Hat Stumble Upon strategies come in 2 flavours: Instant Traffic and Residual Traffic.

There are three methods that currently work to influence (or game) StumbleUpon votes

* Digital Point Stumble Forums - This should be your first stop towards getting instant traffic to your posts. Simply start a thread or participate in an existing one to exchange a ratio of stumbles. For example, you can stumble 1:6 - meaning that for every one stumble you do for another user, he or she will return six for your posts.
* StumbleXchange - Aiming to increase the efficiency and equity of voting for stumbles, StumbleXchange provides a bartering system for users. You return someone’s stumble and get your posts stumbled in return.
* Avuw - A similar system to StumbleXchange that provides an equitable system for stumblers to exchange votes.
* Authority Site Stumbling - If your post has been linked to by an authority site, stumble their post regarding your’s as well and get thousands of visitors from referral traffic. Props to Loren Baker came up with this awesome sneaky tactic

I’m afraid I can’t link to StumbleXchange or Avuw, so I’ll leave it up to you to search for them through Google.
How to Build a Power Stumbler Profile

The strength of each of your StumbleUpon votes works in the same way exponential math does. StumbleUpon uses a couple of factors in its algorithm to determine the value of each stumble, but there are two main factors that users can influence.

* Reciprocal Addition of Friends - Adding friends to your StumbleUpon profile increases the power of each stumble. Participate in friend exchange requests on Digital Point to build up a significant group of friends, that you can rely upon whenever you are in need of stumbles.
* Personal Profile Reviews - Positive reviews of your personal Stumbler profile can reflect positively to the quality and quantity of traffic that is directed to your website or blog post. This is especially important in establishing residual traffic, which can trickle in weeks after your post has initially been stumbled.
* Contact Top Stumblers - Getting in touch with the Top Stumblers in your niche can be very advantageous in driving massive amounts of traffic to your site. As your authority increases with the number of reciprocal friend additions and profile reviews, you will also find other stumblers contacting you for exchanges, as you become one among the Top Stumblers.
* Provide a Stumble Button for Each Post - It’s simple to do and your readers won’t thank you enough if they’re accessing your post from a computer without the StumbleUpon toolbar.

Viral Tactics to Increase Stumble Traffic through Wordpress

With over 3 million users using StumbleUpon worldwide, sometimes you cannot afford to not show-off your stumbles with pride.

StumbleCrumble is a Wordpress plugin that allows bloggers to show off their latest stumbled posts in their sidebar. Popularity breeds popularity, and this may lead to even more stumbles for your post inventory.

The improved Share This plugin modified by Ian Fernando adds support for Stumble Upon for your blog’s readers. Given that most stumblers have a severe case of ADD (I know I do), the easier you make it for them, the better :)
On a side note, StumbleUpon also offers a Facebook application that shows the most recent stumbles on your profile. You can check it out here
Mistakes You Should Avoid When Using StumbleUpon

Stumblers are a like the “channel surfers” of the web. If they don’t like the design or content of your website immediately, they’ve got a trigger happy clicking finger that’s itching to stumble the next random site. When you have such fickle traffic, you have to ensure that you’ve got your bases covered, such that you don’t turn potential subscribers or repeat visitors away:

Here’s a list of easy to follows Don’ts of using StumbleUpon:

* Don’t lead stumblers to your blog or websites main page! This is akin to committing Stumble Suicide - Instead, direct them only to the relevant post you would like a massive amount of traffic for.
* Plastering your landing page with Adsense and other advertising units is not recommended. Stumblers will only perceive your website to be spammy, and will not contribute a single cent to you. You can kiss that low bounce rate good-bye if you do choose to employ Adsense with StumbleUpon.
* If you’re expecting a significant amount of stumble traffic, clean up the look of your blog and make sure that it is visually appealing. Always position content that has ‘call to actions’ above-the-fold.
* Don’t rely on buying stumbles to gain traffic. If you are buying stumbles through StumbleAds or Subvert & Profit, position your strategy to only provide the initial momentum your campaign needs. Rest assured, natural stumble traffic will bring in the rest.

How to Win Friends and Influence Stumbles

Notice the catchy sub-title? Building a Stumble Team involves some hard work and diligence in finding individuals that are relatively in the same niche as you are. The Digital Point Forums are always a good place to start in finding individuals that are willing to have a mutually beneficial stumbling relationship.

Of course, if you want to befriend with Top Stumblers you’ll need to do a little more than ask for a friend exchange and a review. Following the same rules as asking for link bait will give you good leverage for establishing a relationship with Top Stumblers. Be respectful, do not beg, and provide value back to them by stumbling topics that they are already interested in. Provide real feedback and genuine praise by writing them a stumbler review, and you’ll be sure to catch their attention.
Closing Comments on StumbleUpon

When leveraged correctly, StumbleUpon can easily become a killer source of traffic to your website or blog. I love using the service daily, and it has helped me promote this blog very well. While I don’t make any real monetary gain off StumbleUpon traffic, I gain in other aspects such as Alexa Ranking, Brand Promotion, and Reader Retention. That said, I hope you’ve enjoyed my complete and ultimate guide to leveraging StumbleUpon - Please spread the word about this post by stumbling it now.

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6.Choose Your Audience: The Uncaring Social Media Crowd Or Your Loyal Readers?

A brainchild of Mohsin, born on September 13, 2007
bookmark this on del.icio.ussaved by 2 other people

If you are new to bogging, you know the pains you take to get others to respond to the content you create with so much love. The lack of audience is sometimes discouraging and makes you wonder why in Holy Ghost’s name did you start a blog?

Although, the audience builds up in due course if you persist long enough, sometimes targeting your content at a particular group of your audience does pay off.

I have noticed that the visitors coming from social media sites are very unhelpful and unresponsive. They are a mean lot. They consume the content and leave without so much as leaving an encouraging comment, subscribing to your feed, or er.. clicking on your ads. While it’s good to welcome any kind of visitors in a hope that your content gets more exposure and more people benefit from it, your first priority must be to identify your real audience and write particularly for them.

You know who they are. Your subscribers, your readers, and your commenters are your community, and they deserve the best you can offer to them.

When you slowly build a community, you naturally realise the needs and demands of your community. But, do you make a special effort to keep your community happy for what it gives to you?

I’ve seen blogs (won’t mention which) that, after having hit the Digg front page, completely ignore their readers and put all their energy into creating more Digg bait to get to that magic spot one more time, while their readers wonder what the hell happened.

It’s devastating for a blog to forget its readers in its selfish expedition to gain top spots on social media sites. When a blog loses its community, it goes crashing back to where it started.

Just to put everything into perspective, I get a high dose of StumbleUpon traffic every day, but it hardly helps my blog move a single step forward. Stumblers never subscribe, or even leave a comment on any of the posts. One of my posts got a thousand stumbles in a day, but this landmark didn’t affect my subscription statistics and total comment count one bit.

On the other hand, yesterday I got five visitors from Authority Blogger forum, and two of them left a comment on my posts.

And guess what? My subscription count was up by five!

If even the ten percent of stumblers had responded at all, they would have left 100 comments, and umm.. how about all of them subscribed?

Sounds unreasonable, no?

If you are on the verge of making a vow that you’ll never again write anything to attract social media traffic, STOP! That wasn’t my intention. You can write Digg bait, Stumble bait or whatever bait as often as you want, but don’t overdo it. Don’t fall in love with the huge surges of traffic. They are temporary, and will be gone before you blink. Focus, instead, on your readers and continue to deliver the quality you are known for.

Your community is the backbone of your blog, and helps you achieve your goals. While social media traffic is just a glimpse of the bright future that stretches ahead of you.
Related Posts


Actually, this is what I’ve been telling myself. I’ve read from everywhere that we should subscribe to SU because of the more than decent traffic it brings, but so what? What I want isn’t just traffic from one-time-only-VISITORS. What I am trying to achieve is a community of loyal READERS.

But I guess there’s really no short cut to that :) And, argh.. Don’t even talk about the ads! LOL.


CHESSNOID, I am myself a stumbler and I know I don’t stop long enough on a page to comment, and so do other stumblers. It’s not like SU traffic is useless. But considering the huge numbers it comes in, only very small percent of SU traffic ever comments or takes the time to explore other pages on a blog.

If you are new to bogging, you know the pains you take to get others to respond to the content you create with so much love. The lack of audience is sometimes discouraging and makes you wonder why in Holy Ghost’s name did you start a blog?

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7.9 things wrong with StumbleUpon

Thursday, 23 August 2007

So I thought to myself: now that I know 5 good reasons why StumbleUpon is pretty good, maybe there’s some stuff they’ve got wrong? And like most Social Networks out there, StumbleUpon isn’t flawless…

The problems with StumbleUpon aren’t too deeply ingrained or self-defeating, like those 17 things wrong with Google’s Blogger.

I tend to fling myself around the web, looking for the best Social Networks. So after many near misses, I signed up to StumbleUpon on May 19, 2007.

9 things wrong with StumbleUpon

1. So we have comma-delimited Tags, but then if you add in a Tag made up of more than one world, the tag becomes hyphenated. Sort of like del.icio.us Tags, only marginally better. Either the Tags are comma-delimited or they’re hyphenated. Having both doesn’t seem to make sense.

2. Are they Groups, or are they Forums? Well, from the look of things, they’re neither. In fact, they’re more like ‘blogs. If they’re intended to be like forums, then they have a lot of features missing. Anyone who’s on the likes of SitePoint forums, Digital Point forums, or even SlashDot know what forums should look like.

For example, there’s no pin posts, you can’t reply to a post, there’s no proper threading and no WYSIWYG editing. All of which are staple features of any fora. The weird thing is, WYSIWYG editing is to be found elsewhere within StumbleUpon, but just not in the forums.

3. So I’ve clicked the People tab and I see a bunch of people listed with those geographically the closest first in descending order. Now what? Surely there are more people? But where are they?

I’m pretty sure there are, but there’s no pagination, so I’ll never know. The same happens when you click on the: “Browse people” from your Profile page. There’s no option to view more.

4. Where’s the preview option for emails? Where’s the preview option for anything, for that matter? Since there’s no global WYSIWYG editing, you have to type in links as HTML within the message. And if you get your code wrong, you’re stuck.

5. How do I see how many people have voted for something I’ve submitted to StumbleUpon? I can see the Reviews, but I’d like to know the number of thumbs up and thumbs down those articles get.

I did ask about this, but the the short answer is, there’s just no way to know. I suspect that such features are reserved for the paid-for StumbleUpon Ads service.

For those like me who probably won’t run a serious-minded advertising campaign on StumbleUpon, but do like to keep a track on what succeeds and what doesn’t, this is a real bind.

6. Why tell me how many recent Visitors I’ve had if I can only see the last 10? Why can’t I see the full list of most recent Visitors? Sometimes, I like to thank them, or go see what they’re up to. But because the 11th visitor onwards is out of the list, I’m out of luck.

7. The weird character encoding often seen in titles that include apostrophes, double angled quotes et cetera. A minor issue, some might argue, but it’s just intensely annoying and makes titles almost illegible. Annoyingly, there’s no option to edit the title after submitting.

8. I’m probably singling out StumbleUpon a little unfairly here, because others make the same amazingly annoying mistake. From inside Preferences, there’s the Country option. Why can’t I see England in that list? I assume UK is the option I’m supposed to choose. Sadly, there is no such Country as UK.

I’m not UKese, I’m English and I want to choose England as my Country because that’s the country I’m from.

9. Pictures of ‘cute’ cats. To be banned with immediate effect. Not strictly a problem with StumbleUpon, but lamentable none the less.

And finally, as fellow SUer Kate pointed out in a late night Skype chat: there’s no such thing as the perfect system.

And by extension, there’s no such thing as a perfect Social Network. But with the likes of StumbleUpon around, we’re getting closer…

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8. StumbleUpon for Computer-Dummies

If you still don’t understand how and why joining StumbleUpon is a critical social bookmarking network site after you’re done reading this post, please share your comments, questions and issues below! I’m learning along with you!

My quest to learn more about SU started last month, from the post introducing our $200 Free PRWeb.com Press Release. My stats showed a dramatic and immediate new #1 top referrer. Stumble Upon…and, I had no idea how and where that came from. So, I asked and found my answer (in the comments). My very first vote/positive website review and brand new spanking friend Mark who literally ‘Stumbled Upon’ EmpowerWomenNow.com. I actually never knew Mark before than, and now we’re good friends.

But, this whole social bookmarking stuff blows my computer-dummy brains out of wack!

So, I asked some dear colleagues and friends, and go figure Dan and Jennifer of AskDanandJennifer.com came to my rescue with the most simple, cut and dry instructions, and explanations that got me started.

[Side note: Yes, it’s ironic that I ask my dear blogging friends/turned mentors about this internet marketing technique, since you can “Ask Dan and Jennifer” literally anything and they will answer! Check out their tagline: “Dating, relationships, love and great sex…get Your Questions Answered!” Oh, BTW, here’s some shocking poll results you *have* to check out. And, look at how many people entered the poll!! They have a huge following and StumbleUpon is only one of their many internet marketing techniques they utilize on a daily basis. Thanks guys!!]

So how does StumbleUpon really work?

* You basically join and download the StumbleUpon toolbar.
* Then, you hit the stumble button, which will show you a random site that someone gave a “thumbs up” to.
* If you like the site, you give it your own “thumbs up” with the ‘thumbs up button’
* Or, you can thumbs down
* The webpages will ultimately adjust to what you like, and don’t like according to your past stumbles. So, the more you stumble and rate different websites, the more relevant your options come up.
* When you browse any website on the Internet, you can vote with a thumbs up or down. If nobody voted it yet (submitted it to the StumbleUpon database) then it’ll pop up and ask you about it. This is how you submit your own stuff or your friends’. [Just like Digg or Netscape…which I haven’t really tried yet…one at a time].
* Stumbling your own site is futile in the beginning, because you can potentially get a few hundred hits, and then a few over the coming months.
* Just like my MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, you browse each community, and “add friends” to start giving them a ‘thumbs up’ or “stumbling upon” them.
* By creating a network, and actively stumbling others, they will begin to take notice and ’stumble upon’ your stuff too.
* Your account gains “street cred” the more you stumble, vote, and have more friends in your network.
* THEN, your votes count a lot more (Get a lot more traffic from StumbleUpon)

Critical StumbleUpon reading materials you must read for a complete understanding:

[Note: It’s taking me almost a month to finally feel confident of posting about StumbleUpon now, that I “get” it, so, please be patient with yourself.]

* This comprehensive tutorial from Maki at DoshDosh.com

* John Wesley of PickTheBrain.com has been using StumbleUpon as a power user for some time and shares some great insights

* And, just when John learns how well StumbleUpon can work, be aware because you can lose your ‘Top Stumbler’ status if you do and share something extraordinary. A must-read warning post!

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9.

A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon: How to Build Massive Traffic to Your Website

I’ve been experimenting with StumbleUpon for the past few months and have had several pleasant experiences. It’s simply an incredible viral means to drive a large amount of sustained traffic to any website over a period of time.

I wrote this mini guide on StumbleUpon because I thought StumbleUpon had enormous potential in maximizing brand exposure while fitting nicely with a long term site building strategy.

Included are some personal observations on using StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your website, as well as some strategies you can adopt to retain StumbleUpon visitors while monetizing your website.

What is Stumble Upon?

Stumble Upon is a social website which allows its users a new way to experience the Internet. Instead of searching for specific items on search engines like Google, Stumble Upon users only have to tag specific personal or professional interests and then ‘channel surf’ the web by simply clicking on a button on Stumble Upon tool bar.

Upon doing so, they will be randomly directed to specific websites which adhere to their lists of interests. Users can then choose to tag the webpage they are on or give it a ‘thumbs up‘ or ‘thumbs down‘ to indicate if they want to see it again.

Users can also use the Stumble Upon toolbar as a form of social bookmarking. By surfing the web and tagging or submitting specific websites, each user can keep track of which websites they like and share it with others.

How do I get started with Stumble Upon?

You can get started by installing the toolbar, which is compatible with I.E. and Firefox at Stumble Upon’s website. After which, you can check to see if your website is already listed on Stumble Upon. You can do this by visiting this page and typing in your site’s URL.

sureviews.jpg

If your website is not listed, you can start using your newly installed toolbar to tag and review it by clicking on the blue thumbs up symbol which has “I like it!” next to it.

This will open a pop-up panel which allows you to categorize your website, write a short description and tag with specific keywords. Following which, your website will be included in Stumble Upon’s database and will show up when other users with interests similar to your tags use the Stumble Upon toolbar to surf the internet.


Why should I use Stumble Upon?

Stumble Upon is known for its ability to generate massive amounts of traffic to a specific webpage or website that’s been stumbled. If you just wrote a great article or created a website which offered creative and useful content, you’ll want as many eyeballs on it as possible.

Once your website gets stumbled, it’ll usually start to immediately receive visitors from all over the world.

This allows you:

1. Generate rapid exposure for a specific website, brand or concept.

2. Establish a reader base for your blog very quickly.

3. Gain numerous backlinks from StumbleUpon visitors with websites.


What type of traffic can I get from StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon is different from a search engine, which offers very targeted traffic that matches keyword searches with the content on your blog.

On the other hand, the very nature of Stumble Upon invites open exploration of various websites which are loosely tagged by other users and hence may produce weak targeted traffic with specific characteristics.

My experience over the past few months has led me to the following conclusions on traffic from StumbleUpon:

* Diverse demographic. Visitors from StumbleUpon come from many countries from all over the world, though 40% of my traffic came from North America.

* Very low Adsense or contextual CTR. Why click on an ad when you can stumble to the next site in a few seconds?

* Good web design is important for StumbleUpon visitors. The average time spent on a web page can be less than 10 seconds. They tend to look more than they read.

* Fickle RSS subscribers. My feed subscription doubled when certain posts received a lot of traffic but 50% of the readers unsubscribed over the next few days. This will vary depending on your website.

* Not all websites are made equal. Video, Humor, Web 2.0 and eclectic websites do extremely well with SU. Some friends with video websites and Boing Boing-ish blogs usually retain at least 25% of Stumble Upon visitors after a spike in traffic.

* Traffic is long-term. I’m still continuing to receive traffic for specific webpages that I’ve stumbled several weeks ago.

How can I ensure repeat visits to my website?

The very nature of channel surfing is to assess with one glance and determine if the channel is worth watching. Similarly, Stumble Upon visitors are people who will evaluate your website instantly and decide to either continue browsing or stumble ahead to the next site.

Stumble Upon users are generally attracted to interesting news, good site design and unique content/concepts. Making sure that these elements are all present can ensure that you receive a thumbs up as well as repeat visits to your website.

Here are some points which may help you to improve the rate of repeat visits from Stumble Upon visitors.

* Content Depth. Your website should be full of content that cannot be digested in one single visit.

* Ad Saturation. Your website should not have too many poorly blended ads, which makes it look amateurish.

* Site Design. Your website should be visually appealing, with an attractive site design.

* Exclusive on-site materials. Your website should offer tools or in depth material which can only be accessed from your website.

* Feed/Newsletter Subscription. Your website must prominently ask visitors to subscribe to your blog feed or newsletter for updates.

* Branding. Your website should have memorable branding or an easy to remember URL.

How can I use Stumble Upon to increase my blog feed/newsletter subscribers?

It’s very likely that your blog will experience a mini spike in feed subscription, which may decrease gradually with time. Your goal is to retain these subscribers and make them a part of your reader base and community.

While there is no definite method that guarantees success, here are some ways which will increase the likelihood of converting Stumble Upon visitors into feed subscribers.

* Ensure content quality. Try to only stumble the best content available on your website.

* Enable and offer email subscriptions. Providing an alternative subscription option can be very helpful for different types of visitors.

* Offer subscriber-only benefits. A classic trick to use if you want to build up your marketing list or feed subscribers. Give away free videos, eBooks or other materials that are only available to subscribers.

* Welcome new visitors. You may want to include a welcome message to all stumblers if you notice that your web page is being heavily stumbled. Wordpress users can install the What Would Seth Godin do Wordpress Plugin which encourages all new visitors to subscribe to your feed.

* Use signature links. Include links at the end of your post which push for readers to subscribe for updates.

* Produce great content after stumbles. It’s very important to put out great content after you’ve been stumbled. Perhaps something similar to what received a large number of stumbles will be appealing.

* Increase the comments on your blog. A blog with a large community will encourage participation, which motivates a reader to return to your blog.

* Hold a contest. Everyone loves winning free stuff or money. By offering tangible benefits, you can convert one-time traffic into a continuous stream of repeat visitors.

How many visitors can I get from Stumble Upon?

Expect an average of 100+ to 8000+ daily unique visitors for a specific web page that is stumbled. I’ve stumbled several post pages on Dosh Dosh as an experiment and the best performance was 2000+ visitors in 6 hours for a very short post on Dovetail.

The number of visitors slowly petered out as the day went on. I’m actually amazed that it received so many stumbles because the article in question was only a short news piece. Perhaps this indicates that brevity appeals to Stumble Upon visitors.

According to this article at SEOmoz, Stumble Upon outperforms Netscape and all other social networking websites by sending 12000+ visitors to a specific webpage in one day. The article in question was buried in Digg so there wasn’t a way to make an actual comparison.

A graph of the number of visitors to SEOmoz in the early half of 2006.

stumbleupon.gif

What determines how much traffic I receive from StumbleUpon?

There are so many factors which may have an impact on the number of visitors you receive from Stumble Upon.

StumbleUpon does not openly reveal the traffic algorithm they are using and these are just some factors which I think will positively affect the amount of traffic you receive.

* No. of StumbleUpon users who thumbed up or tagged your webpage. This is by far the most important factor, in my opinion.

* No. of users in your network. A wider reach might translate to more influence when it comes to tagging or thumbing webpages.

* No. of StumbleUpon friends you have. Perhaps this increases the authority or strength of your stumbles.

* No. of profile reviews and thumbs up you currently have. May legitimate you as a user.

* Types of users who tagged or submitted your website. Are they power users with a lot of Stumble authority?

One can assume that the easiest way to increase the number of visitors you receive Stumble Upon is to exponentially increase all of the above factors.

Here are some of my observations following various experiments on several websites.

* You need other Stumble Upon users. The traffic you receive partly depends on other users submitting and reviewing your website. I’ve noticed that when other users review or submit a specific post, it usually receives traffic immediately.

* Self-submission and review does not necessarily lead to SU traffic. A blog of mine did not see enormous traffic until it was thumbed, reviewed and tagged by other users as well.

* Your Stumble Upon profile plays a role. Hypothetical, but perhaps the number of SU friends, the range of your network, the number of stumbles you’ve done and the number of profile reviews you’ve gotten determines how much traffic directing authority you have.

* Broad tagging helps. Try using tags that are more general and less specific. For example, some tags which have worked for me are ‘weblogs‘ , ‘internet‘ and ‘money‘.

The fact that you’re limited to five tags per submitted item suggests that you should use terms that are more general, and hence more likely to be searched for or stumbled by SU users. Very unique tags may work but I’ve not gotten much success when I used them.

Are there any ways to game StumbleUpon and increase the traffic I receive?

Update (October/07): I have used StumbleUpon extensively in the months after this guide was written and I would like to announce that I no longer fully endorse the tactics listed after the dotted line.

Although some of them may still work to get you some visibility or traffic, they are limited in many ways and do not fully utilize StumbleUpon’s potential.

Instead, I highly recommend reading my article on why it’s not important to become a top stumbler along with my piece on StumbleUpon networking to learn how you can more effectively use StumbleUpon for your personal or professional needs.

Always remember that focusing purely on getting traffic out of StumbleUpon is a limited perspective. It is enormously powerful networking tool. Also, instead of trying to game StumbleUpon, focus on how you can create content that works well with it.

Wanna find out what I’m stumbling these days? Here’s my StumbleUpon profile.

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Tactic #1 - Building your network, personal and site profile.

One way of doing this easily is to use StumbleXchange, a website that allows users to exchange stumbles for each other’s websites. You’ll need to sign up and stumble other member’s websites in return for other members thumbing and tagging your website.

stumblexchange.jpg

This expands your reach and social profile on StumbleUpon and number of reviews for your website. I’ve noticed that this can help to increase the number of visitors to your website, but the effects may die down after some time and so the benefits of participating in StumbleXchange are not consistent.

Do note that StumbleXchange’s model potentially violates StumbleUpon’s TOS. It has also been said that StumbleUpon is aware of users exchanging stumbles and has oddly enough, approved of the StumbleXchange website.

For references on this issue, see here and this Digital Point thread for more info on StumbleXchange and StumbleUpon.

Do also bear in mind that StumbleUpon explicitly forbids reciprocal stumbling (stumble me to get a stumble in return) or incentive-based stumbling of any sort.

More details from their Help FAQ:

StumbleUpon does not allow personal accounts to be used for the purposes of incentivization or promoting sites. This would be considered a breach of our Terms.

The practice of sending PM’s encouraging or inviting other stumblers to rate/review sites in exchange for reciprocal reviews/ratings, monetary, or any other form of reward is strictly forbidden.

The practice of actively soliciting a rating or review for a site is also forbidden. Should you receive a PM, or encounter forum postings that breach this rule, you are encouraged to report this via feedback.

Accounts participating in such practices will be deleted and banned, and the related sites deleted and banned from the system.

A cleaner and simpler alternative would be just to network with high profile StumbleUpon users by adding them as your friend or reviewing their profile. This can help you win a few friends while increasing your social profile on StumbleUpon.

Tactic #2 - Collecting Stumbles and getting listed on Stumble Buzz.

Another point to consider is that you want to get your site on the Stumble Buzz webpage, which is something like the Digg homepage. Websites which consistently receive positive stumbles will move onto this homepage.

Here’s a screen grab of Stumble Buzz:


To get on this homepage, you’ll roughly need around 300+ positive stumbles. Here are two ways which might help to increase the number of visitors you get.

* Form a Stumble team. Get fellow bloggers to seed your webpage by stumbling, tagging or reviewing it. This is more focused and faster than using StumbleXchange.

* Include a Stumble Upon button on your webpage or blog post and encourage your users to use it. Like the smart Digg buttons, visitors can choose to stumble the webpage if they like it. Might be redundant because most stumblers will surf with the toolbar on.

Tactic #3 - Stumbling websites that link to you

Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal wrote about how to build super links and traffic with StumbleUpon and mentioned this very cool trick.

Let’s take a recent example. Say someone like John Chow linked to me yesterday in a post, what I’ll do is that, I’ll visit his website and stumble his post and get other users to do the same.

Thousands of StumbleUpon visitors will visit his blog and read the specific post. They’ll then visit my blog through the link in his post. The end result is that I’ll eventually get traffic by pushing stumbles towards his website. Sweet.

How do I monetize Stumble Upon Traffic and make money from it?

From my experience, Stumble Upon visitors are known to be averse to contextual ads, hence the low CTR and ad earnings. There are however, a few other ways which you can monetize the massive amount of visitors.

* CPM advertising. Idiot-proof and easiest way to monetize your website. Get a good banner company that pays you a good CPM rate. Also try private ad arrangements and negotiate for specific CPM rates.

* Use affiliate banners or affiliate text links within content. I would suggest cloaking the links to improve your CTR.

* Video advertising. Revver allows you to put up videos and get paid whenever anyone clicks on ads within the video. GUBA will also pay you money if anyone signs up with their website through your embedded video. These are just two examples of numerous video-based affiliate programs you can use.

* Monetized image hosts. Several image hosts allow you to earn money whenever anyone clicks on a thumbnail which leads to the full image on their website. Great for picture intensive sites or blogs. Here’s a list of image hosts that pay.

* Use subscription based monetization. An example of this is an online magazine, business networking community or forum which offers a premium section for paying members.

* Buy sponsored stumbles. You can run an advertising campaign with StumbleUpon and pay 5 cents for every targeted person they send to your website. You can target according to personal interest, history of rating similar sites, location, and demographics such as age and sex. Very useful if you’re focusing on long-term monetization strategies and plan to build a community such as a social networking site or niche forum.


One should also take note of StumbleUpon’s suggestions on content monetization in their advertising FAQ:

Some content doesn’t work well with StumbleUpon. A hard-sell offering little introduction or supporting information will seem out of place to StumbleUpon’s community members. Remember that they’re using the service to find something new, something different. Pages that contain little more than a list of ppc or affiliate links also will not perform well.

What are some other essential resources on StumbleUpon?

I have written two other articles that will be useful if you’re interested in using StumbleUpon for your website. I highly recommend that you check them out:

Five Ways to Grow Your StumbleUpon Network: An Ode to Altruistic Stumbling

The number of StumbleUpon users who stumble your webpages has an effect in how much traffic you will receive in the long run.The other obvious benefit to having many friends is that your StumbleUpon experience will be enriched and more fulfilling.

StumbleUpon Optimization: Leveraging Photo Stumbles for More Web Traffic

This article on photo stumbling will offer some detailed tips on how you can use and optimize your images in order to increase the potential of receiving more stumbles and hence, visitors to your website.

The internet marketing and SEO community have come up with a steady collection of great articles about StumbleUpon. Some of them focus on how to increase traffic through StumbleUpon and others have examined how StumbleUpon’s sponsored stumbles compare to Pay Per Click campaigns.

Randy Fish on Stumble Upon’s Fantastic Ability to Drive Traffic.

Stumblers tend to have accounts at Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and others and more than once, I’ve seen Stumble traffic lead to a re-surgence of traffic to a particular site or page that Stumblers have given high marks.

Garrett French has a post on The Why, How and Who of Marketing in StumbleUpon:

If you're launching a site and have invested in branded content that's intended to convert viewers into linkers, subscribers or buyers then SU should ABSOLUTELY be on your list of places to advertise.

Allen Stern from Center Networks made a short study of StumbleUpon Sponsored Stumbles vs. Google AdWords:

I think StumbleUpon is a great alternative to click based traffic in the sense that you get a continuous stream of interested visitors. The traffic is qualified in the sense that the visitors said they were interested in your topic or category.

Tamar from 10e20 writes about How to Use StumbleUpon for Your Business: The Definitive Guide

Why should you look at into directing StumbleUpon traffic to your site? Beyond the obvious benefits of extremely targeted traffic, the traffic doesn't come all at once compared to a site like Digg. There's the inherent benefit of having that 15 minutes of fame? on Digg until it crashes your server. StumbleUpon traffic is generally much more gradual.

Neil Patel has a short post on Increasing your StumbleUpon audience:

Each user is given an audience number. The number could be 1 or it could be in the thousands. The overall goal is to get your audience number as high as possible because then when you stumble stories more people will see them, thus increasing your traffic.

Dan Grossman writes about his experience buying sponsored stumbles on The StumbleUpon Experiment:

The results? No sales, 96% of the visitors only viewing the landing page for the campaign, and none of them rating the site positively or negatively with the toolbar. That says to me that most people that see a commercial site, or a site that isn’t immediately interesting to them with StumbleUpon will simply move on and click the “Stumble!� button again.

Muhammed Saleem tells us that what content works best for StumbleUpon in I Wouldn’t Submit That to StumbleUpon:

While Digg, Netscape, and Reddit are socially driven news and content sites, StumbleUpon succeeds more in delivering content (i.e. media) than it does in serving important news items. The news items that I StumbleUpon are often old and outdated..

What I learned from this, and from my own voting habits on the content that was displayed to me is that photography, videos, humor, and other types non-temporal content generally tends to do better and has more of a chance of creating long-term traffic

Mike Bogo has created an Ultimate StumbleUpon resource:

Since Stumble has been sending many of us a huge amount of traffic, I thought it would be useful to find some resources on how to best make use of this traffic. This list will be kept updated with the best articles found.

Final thoughts on StumbleUpon

I love Stumble Upon for what it’s worth and it’s really the easiest way anyone can get hundreds of new visitors who are eager to learn more about your website.

While monetization is something that I am concerned with, I think StumbleUpon works best as a brand and link building tool. It’s ability for exposure across a wide demographic can also help to build online communities or a blog’s reader base.

Remember to stumble the websites or blogs you like because it’s a great way to help them get some much needed exposure.

Have fun stumbling!

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10.Use Social Media Arbitrage to Drive Traffic with StumbleUpon
April 18th, 2007 by John WesleyPrint This Post Print This Post

Everyone knows social media sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon can drive massive amounts of traffic to your website. IF you can get on the front page.

The problem is that most submissions drop like an anvil through the new queue without getting more than one or two votes.

I can’t tell you how to become a power user on Digg or Reddit. I’ve had some luck with those sites but no consistent success, and I have a feeling it takes more effort and social networking than most webmasters want to do.

What I will tell you is how I’ve used StumbleUpon to drive nearly 80,000 visitors to this website without dramatically changing my web browsing habits or pestering people to vote for me.

Although StumbleUpon doesn’t create peaks as high as Digg or Reddit, it does offer two significant advantages:

1. Consistency - When you make the front page of Digg or Reddit you get a huge surge of traffic for about a day with some lingering effects the day after. Three days later you wouldn’t know it ever happened (aside from the wonderful incoming links). StumbleUpon continues to drive traffic to your site for days, even weeks, after the initial surge.

2. Pageviews - Digg and Reddit users generally read an article and leave your site immediately, viewing an average of 1.20 pages (according to my stats). The average Stumbler views a significantly higher 1.80 pages. Apparently those curious stumblers read more articles and are more likely to become regular readers.
Social Media Arbitrage

Now that I’ve told you why you should want use StumbleUpon to your advantage, here’s how to do it. The method is relatively simple and I’m sure many others are using it. It stems from two observations:

1. The Social Media Snowball - I noticed that when a post becomes popular on Reddit, it is basically guaranteed to take off on StumbleUpon as well. When a post becomes popular on one social site, it’s odds of doing so on another site dramatically improve.

2. Great Content Gets Around - All the major social sites have unique communities with varying tastes. But that doesn’t stop them from loving the same content. An interesting article is an interesting article. If you can find a post Digg users love, there is a great chance Reddit users will love it too, and vice versa.

These two observations led me to the strategy of Social Media Arbitrage. Arbitrage is defined as, “The purchase of securities on one market for immediate resale on another market in order to profit from a price discrepancy.” For social media, this means going to the popular pages of Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, and submitting popular stories to other social sites where they haven’t been submitted yet.

It sounds too easy to work and this is partially true. It doesn’t work well for Digg or Reddit because 1) there is too much competition to submit to these sites. Most pages already are already submitted. And 2) the number of incoming submissions is so massive that even great submissions (from average users) are often ignored.

But fortunately, it does work well for StumbleUpon. If you always wanted to become a respected user but had no idea where to find great content to submit, this is the answer.
Becoming a Power Stumbler

I wrote this post because today I became a newly minted Top Stumbler. If you go to the Top Stumbler’s Page (as of 4/17/07) you’ll see my ugly mug, probably on the bottom half of the page (username: pickthebrain). All I did to get there is submit newly popular stories from Digg and Reddit as well every great post I find during casual feed reading. The StumbleUpon toolbar makes this incredibly easy.

To drive traffic, I also Stumble many of my own posts. Without fail, StumbleUpon sends at least a few hundred visitors over the course of the day. My friends with blogs have reported similar results.

Most people view social media as a form of entertainment and not much more. But if you’re already using it, why not expend a bit more effort and use it to drive traffic to your website?

Now that you know how it’s done, get out there and take away my competitive advantage!

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11.Build Super Links and Traffic With StumbleUpon
January 31st, 2007 by Loren Baker, Editor | 13 Comments

StumbleUpon, the web surfing social network, is hands down a long term traffic builder for blogs, online businesses, and Web 2.0 services.

For a quick overview of SU:

* Sites or users submit their URLs to StumbleUpon.
* StumbleUpon members can find these sites via random yet targeted web surfing called “Stumbling”, clicking on the suggestions of their SU friends, or via StumbleUpon Search which matches user generated tags and search queries.
* StumbleUpon users then vote on the sites or posts they find, with a thumbs up or thumbs down.
* The more thumbs up, the more people who see the site via StumbleUpon.

I make it a point to submit what I feel are some of the more original posts here at Search Engine Journal to StumbleUpon and let their members decide on the value of the posts. Usually, such submittals to StumbleUpon result in 400-1,000 referrals.

On occasion, the referrals hit the 2,000 or 4,000 mark, over the course of a couple of days, depending upon the voting by SU members.

The slower drawn out traffic is a nice alternative to Digg, as a top story on the front page of Digg can result in server overload as sometimes up to 10,000 Digg users could click over in the course of 15 minutes.

As a StumbleUpon member myself, I don’t only submit my own properties for reader review. I also submit blog posts and new sites which I feel are of interest to me and my StumbleUpon friends.

But why stop there?

One form of social media marketing which I’ve found to be quite useful is submitting the sites which link to Search Engine Journal posts and other properties to StumbleUpon.

Example:

1. TechDirt links to Search Engine Journal post
2. I see traffic coming from TechDirt
3. I go to TechDirt post and submit it to StumbleUpon with lots of good tags and info
4. SU users find that TechDirt post
5. SU users click on the link from that TechDirt post to SEJ
6. More traffic to SEJ

It’s a form of rewarding or surprising those sites with some extra traffic, perhaps some links which will help with SEO, and the end result is more referrals to my site from the site which originally linked to me.

In such practice, by submitting sites or posts which link to your site to StumbleUpon, you are supercharging those links by adding more value to your incoming links and the sites which link to you.
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12.Okay…I’ve promised at least 3 2 1 0 posts by weekend’s end, but I can’t get away from my StumbleUpon, after yesterday’s post.
Curious, who’s StumbleUpon your website or webpage/blogpost?

Mark of MBlair.net shared some quick notes to help us out once again:

he link format to check your pages in StumbleUpon is this: http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/

For example, I added the full URL of yesterday’s post at the end of the above URL, like this:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/empowerwomennow.com/news-women-

entrepreneurs/index.php/stumbleupon-for-computer-dummies/
StumbleUpon Research to reach your targeted “Friends”

I look at the bios, then briefly at their likes and preferences (I haven’t even filled my out completely yet).

But, the most “telling” aspect of a potential “Friend”, is taking a look at all their Stumbles.

In the drop-down box of suggested search options are:

* Entire Blog
* Pages I Like
o Pages We Both Like (if you are a Sponsor)
* Discoveries
* People I Like
o People We Both Like (if you are a Sponsor)
* Stumbles
* Tag Clouds
* List of “keywords and phrases” each webpage is categorized in

StumbleUpon is a networking haven for Business for the following reasons:

* You can develop critical joint venture partnerships.
* You can view trends and interests in your potential clients, by seeing what webpages they feel worthy on ’stumbling upon’, for example a great “how-to” guide, or a service catering to their needs,
* You can find matches on dozens and dozens of topics, such as “Entrepreneurialism”, age range, gender, or city and state. I can’t believe how many Toleodoans I found!
* I’m actively stumbling anyone I found who likes my resources, and finding that in my targeted searches, those I’ve stumbled are visiting.
* To learn how to attract a bigger network specifically for business purposes, read the Definitive Guide to using StumbleUpon for Business.

Aww…I’m blushin’ While writing this post, I got my own personal review, by a gentleman with thought-provoking questions…go figure, his ID: TheReporter reported nicely.

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13.A Quick Traffic Driving Tip With StumbleUpon

By Matt Jones on Sep 23, 2007 in Blogging Tips

stumbleupon_tip.pngI have been using Google Analytics to find out which source of traffic brings the highest quality traffic to Blogging Fingers and I discovered that it was Stumbleupon… but not from pages that are being Stumbled. This small amount of very high quality traffic came from the link to Blogging Figners which I put in the introduction on my public profile.

This link doesn’t send bucket-loads of traffic, it is only my 16th biggest referrer but the traffic quality makes it well worth the 1 minute of effort it took to add it. These are the stats from that traffic:

A very low percentage are new visits, suggesting these visitors are a small group of stumblers who visit Blogging Fingers repeatedly via that link. The important word being Stumblers. Forget the long time they stay on the site and PVs they create, Stumblers are the most valuable visitors a blog can have because of the traffic they can bring.

If you haven’t done this already, go to your StumbleUpon profile page and click “edit preferences” then “edit public profile” and add a link to your site.

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14.A Definitive StumbleUpon Guide: Driving Traffic To Websites
Sep. 4th, 2007 by Shaun

What is StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon is a social networking website that allows users to share and recommend sites they find around the internet. To get started using StumbleUpon you need to first install the toolbar on your internet browser which is currently only compatible with Internet Explorer and FireFox. Once you are signed up and have the tool bar installed you can begin “Stumbling” which is the term used for surfing the net using StumbleUpon’s tool bar. Stumbling is different than using any other search engine such as Google or Yahoo to find a website because the user is randomly brought to websites which complies to their lists of interests. Once the user arrives at a site they stumbled they can give the website a thumbs up which notifies (SU) StumbleUpon that you want to see more of this site or a thumbs down.

StumbleUpon can bring websites massive amounts of traffic and allows for your site to gain rapid exposure. Writing great content is key to getting more SU traffic, the better the article, the more thumbs up your site will get which results in more traffic. This massive traffic will allow you to gain a large reader base to your blog quickly and will help build some incoming links to your site.

What can I do with StumbleUpon?

I love the simplicity of StumbleUpon, click “Stumble” until you find a good site, read up on it for a bit then stumble again! It’s a simple wash, rinse, repeat process that can amuse anyone with half a brain for hours! Beware StumbleUpon is highly addictive :) .

StumbleUpon

-Conduct Research. Anyone who is conducting research or even just interested in learning more about a certain topic can leverage StumbleUpon to gain insight to anything that interests them. The sites included in StumbleUpons have gone through many levels of screening and have been filtered by thousands of info savvy nerds on the internet. The content found on StumbleUpon is normally high quality traffic. You will easily be able to find high quality content on any topic you wish!

-Entertainment. StumbleUpon will keep you amused for hours on end. Just make sure your settings are set to the topics that interest you and stumble away. Some of the popular topics around the StumbleUpon society include: humor, technology, videos, internet, business, health, movies and more.

-Produce ideas and content for your site. Simply type in a certain topic you are interested in and within seconds you will find information related to the topic you are searching for. This is a great way to come up with more content for your website or blog. You can use the snowball effect on this to, just start with one idea and branch out to many more using StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon will bring you to amazing sites that you didn’t know existed and will enlighten you on topics that weren’t even under your radar.

Traffic Analysis

Unlike Google, StumbleUpon will drive traffic to your site based on users who have interests loosely similar to the categories your site falls under. The users that stumbled upon your site weren’t originally looking for something in particular so the way that the visitors interact with your site will vary. If the content on your site sparks the attention of the stumblers then you can expect they will interact with your site. If your site is filled with dull meaningless content, you can expect the visitors to be leaving your site within the first 20 seconds or less. Here are some things that will help make your site more “sticky” for your SU readers:

* - Great site design. StumbleUpon users are instantly turned off by ugly, tacky, and confusing websites. Make your site easy to navigate, use a readable font, and visually pleasing colors.
* - Great content. If your site isn’t useful or worth reading you can expect the time visitors spend on your site to be minimal.
* - Great post titles. Make the title of your posts eye-catching. You have about 5 seconds to grab the attention of the stumblers and there is no better way to do this than using good titles.
* - Offer full feeds that can be accessed from anywhere. Make your RSS subscription clearly visible from all pages on your site.
* - Keep your ads minimal. StumbleUpon users are turned off by sites that are over-saturated with ads.

How much traffic will StumbleUpon Bring?

This all goes back to quality content, the better your article, the more thumbs up you will get resulting in more traffic. You can expect anywhere from 50-50,000 visitors per stumbled post. I know that’s not a very good estimate but it is really dependant on how many thumbs up you get which is the beauty of SU. I have had my site submitted to StumbleUpon a few times and I have had over 5,000 visitors from one article while a different article has received only 75 StumbleUpon visitors.

What determines how much traffic I will receive?

Well just like Google, StumbleUpon does not disclose their traffic algorithm they are using. We can make some simple predictions of what plays important roles in determining traffic levels. Here are some factors that most likely affect traffic levels to a site:

* - The number of StumbleUpon Users who gave your site the thumbs up. This is really obvious and probably the most important factor of determining traffic levels.
* -The more reviews a post has the more traffic it will receive. I have had posts with 10 thumbs up and only 1 review and got about 300 visitors. I have had posts with 3 thumbs up and 3 reviews and had over 500 visitors. I think it’s safe to say more reviews = more traffic.
* - The number of StumbleUpon friends you have. The more friends you have might increase your authority.
* - The activity of the StumbleUpon user. What I mean by this is how interactive the SU user is with his account, I’m guessing the more stumbling, the more sites rated, and the more sites submitted to SU the better chances your account will have greater authority.

None of these factors are guarnteed but we can assume they play some part in determining traffic levels.

How will StumbleUpon visitors interact with my site?

So far from all of the StumbleUpon visitors this site has seen the average time each visitor stays on the site is just under 2 minutes, (1:57). The average SU visitor looks at 1.79 pages per visit with a bounce rate of 32.77%. These are half decent numbers considering all of this traffic was free.

Increase in RSS subscriptions. The more traffic you have to your site the more subscribers you will get. If a post receives heavy traffic from StumbleUpon you will notice a mini spike in your feed count. After a few days your feed count might drop back to it’s normal numbers so the challenge isn’t getting more feed subscribers but to maintain them. If you wrote a post that sparked the interest of your readers then try to replicate that success the next day with another great post. This will help you keep your feed count up.

Increase of comments. More traffic means more comments. Follow this mini tutorial for more tips on increasing comments on your website.

People who found your site via StumbleUpon probably won’t be clicking on any ads on your site because they already use the SU toolbar therefor they don’t need any direction to finding a new site, they will just click the stumble button again. So don’t expect to make any extra money from Google Adsense if the majority of your traffic comes from StumbleUpon.

If StumbleUpon users don’t click on my ads how can I make money from StumbleUpon Traffic?

Like I said StumbleUpon users won’t need any guidance for finding any new websites so they probably won’t be clicking on your ads very much. This doesn’t mean you can’t make money from StumbleUpon traffic, here are a few ideas to get your income rolling in combination with your SU traffic:

* - Use cost per impression advertisements. This is basically the easiest way to ensure you are maximizing your advertising income in comparison to the StumbleUpon users who don’t click on your Google ads. CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) guarantees that you are making money with every SU user that visits your site.
* - Use affliate links in some of your posts. Your users won’t click on your ads but they will be interested in links within your post.

How Can I Increase My StumbleUpon Athority?

* -Get as many friends as possible. Don’t max out your friends list by adding random people, (SU only allows for 200 friends on your profile), add friends you actually have some sort of relationship with. Add fellow bloggers who know you and will add you to their friends list as well.
* -Get more reviews to your profile. Ask friends to review your profile. Another good way to get more reviews is to simply review other profiles. A lot of the time you will find that they will return the favor and review your profile.

5 Evil StumbleUpon Traffic Generating Tips

Note: I am not sure which of these tactics are against StumbleUpon’s TOS (terms of service) so participate in these activities at your own risk.

StumbleXchange Logo

1.StumbleXchange.com. This is a website that allows you to sign up, start stumbling other sites that have signed up as well, and in return you get stumbles from other members of StumbleXchange. I believe you build up credits in your account with this site; the more websites you stumble the more thumb’s up you get. I am not entirely sure how this system works because I don’t participate in it but I’m sure it won’t take you long to figure it out.

2. Scratch my back i’ll scratch yours. This applies in the stumbleupon world, stumble one of your friends pages and simply let them know and ask them to return the favor. This will generate a lot of traffic to your site.

3. Submit your Own content. If you think you are writing valuable content but it’s not getting the credit it deserves then submit your own stories to SU. You will get traffic and depending on the quality of the post you might get a lot of extra visitors.

4. Make several stumbleupon accounts and submit your own articles. If your worried about geting banned then have 4 or 5 accounts and take turns using them to submit your own stories. Doing it this way will make it decrease your chances of you getting banned.

5. Start your own network of friends who stumble eachother’s posts. This is probably the safest method on the list. Doing it this way will make it hard for StumbleUpon to detect your ring of friends stumbling each others posts. And best of all you never have to submit your own stories!

4 Simple (legit) ways to increase SU traffic

1. Send your content to your friends. The StumbleUpon toolbar comes with the option to send a certain page to anyone on your friends list. Maximize option by actually using it. Your friends will come across the content you sent them. This will lead to an increased chance of more reviews on that page and more thumb’s up.

2. Add tags to your pages. Tags are basically another word for categories. File your site under broad categories. Use one word tags like: humor, internet, blog, computer etc. This will maximize SU traffic.

3. Stumble any incoming links. If any website links to your site just simply stumble that page and you should get a few extra visitors to your site. More information on that topic here.

4. Be generous with your stumbles. The more sites you rate, vote for and comment on the higher the chances these website owners will return the favor and stumble your content.

3 Easy-to-make StumbleUpon mistakes

1. Improper categorizing. If your site has been submitted and is filed under the wrong category or tag you that’s an easy thumbs down for your visitors.

2. Using SU to only pitch your product or service. The moment your readers realize your websites only purpose is to sell a product or service they are already on to the next site.

3. Stumbling the home page. This mainly applies for blogs, if your readers are brought to your home page and not a specific post there’s a good chance your home page won’t capture their attention. Specific content-rich posts are what captures your readers attention.

2 Ways keep your visitors on your site longer

1.Offer subscribe-only benefits. For example, ” Subscribe to my daily newsletter for secret tips on increasing traffic”. This means the newsletter you have on your site offers special information only to those people who sign up.

2. Give your readers a place to go when they are done reading. For blogs the solution is simple: use the related posts plugin.

1 Thing to remember when using StumbleUpon

Not all of your content will get stumbled and drive tonnes of traffic to your site. If you are continually submitting your own content to SU on a daily basis you can expect your account and site to get banned. I have read countless times of users getting banned from SU for abusing the system.

Advertise With StumbleUpon

Possibly the only downfall of StumbleUpon is the ability to use SU to advertise your site via paid inclusion. StumbleUpon makes it incredibly easy, maybe too easy, for websites with a small budget to advertise using StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon only charges a fee of $0.05 per visitor. This works out to an amount of $50.00 CPM or (Cost per 1000 impressions). I have read about a few blogs and websites that have piggy backed on StumbleUpon’s campaigns to successfully launch their blogs or websites.

Advertise With Stumble Upon

$50.00 CPM isn’t incredibly cheap if you had to pay for every single one of those visitors, but if you remember what I talked about above and StumbleUpon’s ability to go viral by setting off a huge surge in traffic to your site this $50.00 you paid might result in tens of thousands of visitors to your site depending on the quality of your content.

For more information on advertising with StumbleUpon go here.