Oct 10 2008
Building Traffic Using Stumble Upon
StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking website that discovers other web sites for you based on your interests. StumbleUpon categorizes sites into one of nearly 500 topics, and serves them to visitors based on their own indicated preferences. This enables the site to offer visitors only pages that are relevant to the topics they have chosen.
The StumbleUpon Toolbar
The StumbleUpon Toolbar is a downloadable add on to your web browser that allows them to “stumble” through web sites with a single click of their mouse. As a user chooses the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” button on the toolbar, the StumbleUpon database learns more about their interests and caters the content it sends to the viewer based on that information. While this is useful to viewers, it also makes the StumbleUpon Toolbar exceptionally useful to the blog writer.
Once you have installed the StumbleUpon Toolbar, you can visit your own website and give it a “thumbs up”. This will bring up a window that allows you to tag and review it by clicking on the blue thumbs up symbol which tells the database that you like it. It will in turn send the page out to other Stumblers who have selected to view sites in the categories you have indicated that your page falls under.
This site is known to generate huge traffic bursts to specific pages within web sites that have been stumbled. It is important to note that every individual post in a blog can and should be stumbled to receive the maximum benefit, and that the more people who stumble your pages, the more times it will appear to StumbleUpon users. The traffic boost is immediate and it can continue infinitely. I still receive massive traffic from pages that were stumbled weeks ago.
On average you can expect anywhere from 100 all the way into the thousands of new visitors per day depending on the topic and category of your stumbled page. Because the tagging program is limited to only five, it is best to use general category tags so that you receive the maximum amount of visits per stumbled page. Encouraging your viewers to stumble your pages will also increase your visibility.
One final note and a word of caution: Always tag and review your pages accurately, as to do otherwise can constitute spamming the system and it can and will backfire on you. Other than that, the process is quite simple and you should have no trouble at all!
Best of luck using StumbleUpon to bring your web site tons of new visitors!
13 Responses to “Building Traffic Using Stumble Upon”
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Michael - does the toolbar interfere with the operation of my browser? Awhile back, Google toolbar was installed on one of our computers, and we eventually had to uninstall it because of all the problems it caused.
And does it play well with Vista?
Oh - and can I sign up multiple blogs under one toolbar?
Thanks!
Tracy,
I haven’t had any interference with my browser (Firefox) whatsoever and I have run it on both Vista and XP. It isn’t like the Google or Yahoo! toolbars at all. As for signing up blogs, the toolbar is there for you to use to Stumble sites, so it is associated with your Stumble account, not a particular blog in that regard.
Ah - okay. Thanks!
Well that is interesting I definitely have to check that out! Thanks.
I will definitely check that out. Thanks!
Thanks for this. I checked out their website a couple of days ago but it was confusing. Now that you’ve explained it I’m going to check it out again.
I had though about stumbling every page, but I hadn’t got around to it. So yesterday I did and I just wanted to let you know that yesterday instead of my whooping 15 UV I got 104 and so far today I’ve gotten 134 UV. I should have done this a while ago. Thanks for the tip.
Stumbling is a bit hit and miss but good overall. I think it pays to do stumble exchanges and target particulalry appealing posts. When I do that i can get 2-300 hits in a day. Stumbling everything probably gets filtered out by their algorythms.
Tracey,
Clicking on the ADD THIS button gives you a choice of quite a few web sites like StumbleUpon and DIGG.
Michael, When you say, “Because the tagging program is limited to only five, it is best to use general category tags so that you receive the maximum amount of visits per stumbled page.” Do you mean that we can only Stumble our own blog up to 5 times total, ever? Or, 5 times a day? Not sure what you mean, and I couldn’t find the rule on the site. Thank you.
I’m referring to the tags that you use when you are stumbling a page for the first time.
Hello when you mean generic is it like as I have environment bog..would it be for example..environment, green blogs, green living etc? Is that what you mean? I am a bit technically impaired and an Seo virgin lol.