June 15, 2007

Harnessing Significant Traffic with StumbleUpon: Things You Should Know

StumbleUpon can be a great way to pull in a good amount of visitors if you know how to utilize its capabilities. Here are a few tips and recommendations that have helped me significantly improve my traffic here at Startup or Bust. In addition to the following tidbits, definitely head over to to DoshDosh for A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon. It’s a fantastic read on how to get started with StumbleUpon.

Marketing Pilgrim on appealing to stumbler’s interests:

• “If you’re looking for widespread popularity, appeal to stumblers’ interests. The most popular tags and subjects currently include animation, bizzare, blog, cyberculture, design, funny, games, Google, humor, illusions, Internet, multimedia, photography, photo, photos (yes, separately), science, stumblers, technology, videos, video games and war. Remember, however, that there are subscribers to every category and tag, so you’ll get traffic no matter what. It’s probably better to create an awesome, informative page that’s on-topic to your site than a completely irrelevant article just because stumblers (Diggrz?) might like it.”

10e20 on labeling your submissions properly:

• “Label and tag your submitted pages appropriately. When you tag your new submissions, be relevant. Pertinent tags will bring you the most targeted traffic from the users who specifically have expressed an interest in the topic you are serving content for. If you cover all the keywords (and tags) that you could possibly think of that don’t relate to your site, your popularity (if any) will be short lived when the thumbs-down button is pressed. Bear in mind that once the page is submitted, tags can be added and removed by the community members (which is a definite indication that they’re visiting the site!)”

Marketing Shift on how StumbleUpon sites are now ranking in Google:

• “I maybe late to the train on this one but it is the first time I’ve seen StumbleUpon among the Google results pages. In fact, it is ranked above the YouTube page it links too. Between Digg, Wikipedia and now StumbleUpon the top 10 is getting a little crowded if you ask me.”

Linkrain on catching the Big Stumbler:

• “If a “Big Stumbler” comes across your website and he finds something interesting like it happened for me today (it’s not the first time this happens) you can get an incredible traffic boost. Just imagine that only 1 stumbler referred by the “Big Stumbler” starts to browse your website and finds an interesting article. He will probably stumble it and send it to his network. Now it could be that a friend of the referred stumbler also finds some interesting content on your website and starts stumbling it.”

DoshDosh on adding friends:

• Practice Reciprocal Befriending. This involves adding someone as a friend in return for that user to add you as a friend. While this is a very fast way to build up a network of friends, it is purely a short-term method because StumbleUpon has a restriction on the number of friends you can add. 250 is the maximum figure and obviously reciprocal befriending cannot move your network beyond this point. I also believe that users who befriend you naturally because of similar interests, instead of a reciprocal arrangement, are more likely to interact with you and your stumbles in the long run.

Link Building Blog on communication:

• “Communication is the key to success - So now that you have some friends you need to start communicating with them. Message them every once in a while and make sure you send them e-cards during the holidays. Once you have built a strong relationship with your friends you need to figure out which stories you want promoted. Once you find a story submit the URL and then message your friends telling them about it. By doing this your friends will see it and vote on it, thus causing the story to get more StumbleUpon traffic.”

Search Engine Journal on submitting sites that link to you:

• 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.”

So there you have it. If you’re not already working on gaining traffic from StumbleUpon, definitely go ahead and give it a try. With a little effort, you can start bringing in a quite a few visitors.