I always make it a priority to monitor all the different sources i get traffic from on all my websites everyday and on numerous occasions StumbleUpon seems to be right up there.
What is StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is a Social Bookmarking website with over a million users and generally refers a lower (but still significant) amount of traffic at a more consistent rate, whereas sites like Digg can send thousands of hits in the space of a few days for promoted stories which have made the frontpage.
How does StumbleUpon work?
Here is the definition of how StumbleUpon works but basically it’s users have a Toolbar which allows them to “Stumble” a website which is of interest to them and they can Like it, give it a Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down and Share with friends.
StumbleUpon Toolbar
To begin receiving traffic from StumbleUpon you must have at least one of your webpages submitted. You can add this yourself by downloading the toolbar and browsing to your website, selecting the thumbs up ‘I like this’ button will add this page to StumbleUpon.
How to increase StumbleUpon Traffic?
The main methods i use to increase my StumbleUpon traffic are:
Rating other Websites
Getting involved in the StumbleUpon community by sharing websites with other users increases your “rank”, especially if you submit new unique content that no one else has submitted. The more websites you rate increases the chance of your own submitted websites appearing to other users who share the same interests.
Adding Friends
The more Friends you add/follow the higher chance you have of your submitted pages being viewed and given a “Thumbs Up” by these friends which increases your Stumble ranks thus increasing traffic substantially.
Submitting Unique Content
Whenever you create a new blog post or page that contains some useful information you can submit it straight to StumbleUpon using the Toolbar. It is absolutely fine to promote your own websites with StumbleUpon just as long as you don’t overdo it. The more pages you submit the higher chance of people seeing them and the higher chance of them being “stumbled upon”.
Choose Topic Titles Carefully
The more relevant a Topic is on StumbleUpon will give you better results as it will be easier to find on StumbleUpon and will also relate to what specific users are interested in.
Tag it up!
The more relevant tags you use the higher chance you have of attracting a much wider range of StumbleUpon users to your content.
StumbleUpon is great way of generating lots of free traffic and i suggest you look a little further into it if you want to increase your websites traffic.
