Shaun Low

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 .

-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.

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.

$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.

Other great StumbleUpon articles for more information on this topic!

How To Use StumbleUpon To Gain New Readers by You Need To See Dot Com

StumbleUpon is a very underestimated source of, not only good content, but new readers for your website. StumbleUpon is a relatively new service compared to Digg and Reddit, but it’s growing at an extremely rapid rate. In April they had 2.1 million users, today they have almost 3.2 million. That’s about 250,000 new users every month with 4 million websites stumbled every day.

StumbleUpon’s Fantastic Ability To Drive Traffic by SEOmoz.org

While these numbers are by no means overwhelmingly large, my impressions of StumbleUpon is that the traffic is fantasticaly well-targeted, savvy and looking for viral content. 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.

The Why, How And Who Of Marketing In StumbleUpon by Search Engine Journal

I’ve extended my research to include current blog thought related to marketing in SU, added my own meager experience and chopped up Camp’s suggestions for marketers to bake up this scrumptious guide to marketing with Stumble Upon.

My conclusion on StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon drives massive traffic to many websites and blogs. We all know how easy it is to generate some StumbleUpon traffic but the real challenge lies here:

-Triggering an organic StumbleUpon traffic surge. What I mean by organic is free (no paid advertising). If you write high quality unique content you will reap the benefits of these organic viral traffic surges.

-Converting your visitors into long term loyal readers. Anybody can get some traffic from SU but only the people who put effort into their site will keep these visitors as long term readers.

-Increasing your RSS subscription rate. This can only be achieved through high qaulity content and great site design.

-Encouraging reader interactivity with your site. This includes commenting on a blog, participating in polls on a site, purchasing a product or service and subscribing to a mailing list etc. A well designed site that is easy to navigate can accomplish this.

Now that you know how StumbleUpon visitors interact with your site make sure you monetize your site accordingly. Please feel free to add me to your StumbleUpon friends list, my account name is Shaunlow69. Keep in mind I try my best to return the favor for all people who stumble my posts

About The Author

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 12:15 am and is filed under The Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.