10 Simple Steps To Increase Your Traffic Via StumbleUpon

I did some experimenting on StumbleUpon last couple of months and I find it a very good traffic source for my site. Here is the full article that I posted on my HowToMakeMyBlog.com earlier today about how I use StumbleUpon to build traffic to my blog. I hope it is useful...

10 Simple Steps To Increase Blog Traffic Via StumbleUpon

When you create new online blog, writing quality articles and getting inbound links is a must to build your traffic and search engines rankings. If done daily in the first few months of your blog’s life, it will help your blog grow, but it may take several months before you start seeing the results.

One of the ways of getting initial traffic for a new blog is writing useful comments on relevant blog posts and discussion forums. The other way is to join social media networks. This article will focus on StumbleUpon and how you can use StumbleUpon to build your personal network, your online profile and initial traffic to your new blog.

StumbleUpon is one of the leading bookmarking and sharing sites on the web. It is a database of web pages, videos and other online content submitted by users. The primary way of getting around is the Stumble button in the StumbleUpon browser toolbar. When clicking that button, you are taken to a random website that was “stumbled” by other users and that falls within the areas of interest you have defined in your profile. By using StumbleUpon’s browser toolbar, you can connect with other bloggers and readers that share your interests.

Following are 10 simple steps you can do today to build your StumbleUpon profile, your personal network and traffic to your blog.

1. Register your account at StumbleUpon. Create your public profile. Include personal information, include a picture, choose your interests, and write a short bio about you and the blog that you are writing. Do not forget to include a hyperlink to your blog in your bio.

2. Submit your RSS favourites. Download the StumbleUpon browser toolbar and start adding your personal bookmarks to the Stumbleupon database. Go through your RSS newsreader, go through your browser bookmarks and submit all your favourites.

If you are the first one to submit a page, then you will get a box saying that you discovered the website. You will need to write a quick review and a series of tags which best fit the site. The site is then available for other StumbleUpon users to surf into using the toolbar.

For already submitted sites, just give your thumbs up, or write a short review if you prefer. These submissions will be a good backbone of your StumbleUpon profile.

3. Make new discoveries daily. Be a part of the community. In order to achieve success with StumbleUpon, you have to become a part of the community. In your daily RSS newsreader reading/blog surfing, make sure to give thumbs up and write reviews for quality articles that are relevant to your blog content. The more people that like articles that you submit / review, more people will subscribe to your favourites, more friends requests you will get, and then your future stumbles will have potential to generate more exposure.

4. Make friends. StumbleUpon is a social media site and the point is to share great content with people who share similar interests. Take a look at the StumbleUpon review page of the other blog articles you submitted/thumbed up/reviewed. Notice which user discovered it, which users wrote reviews for it and which users liked it. Take a look at their profiles, add them as a friend and subscribe to their favourites.

Check the “How Similar Are You?” section of the user profile. There you can see if the user has similar interests as you. Also check out the “suggested friends” list in your own profile. You will get suggested friends based on your interests and you can add them as a friend at the click of a button.

Networking is an important part of StumbleUpon if you want to get exposure for your blog posts. You may have great content, but if you don’t have a large base of friends you will find it hard to get the votes needed to get the traffic. Befriend active StumbleUpon users and stumble and review some of their content if they have a blog or website.

5. Participate. Be an active stumbler yourself. Don’t just submit your own sites. Get out there and vote on other people’s sites as well. You need to recommend sites to your friends, you need to make friends, and provide well written reviews of relevant sites. Just like you want your blog readers to value your opinion, you need your StumbleUpon friends to value your opinion to increase your profile.

Make sure to check out the pages that your friends send to you. Write your comments back to them, thumb up the site, write a review if you like it. This way you will be seen as a valuable member and people will start subscribing to your favourites and making you a friend.

6. Invest your time. Be consistent and invest your time in your network building. Do the steps 3, 4 and 5 consistently every day and you will soon find yourself in a network of people that are interested in the content of your blog, and that are active StumbleUpon users as they have recently submitted/reviewed/thumbed some relevant articles to your content. Active users command more traffic and they’re more likely to take an action because they’re stumbling actively anyway.

7. Send your new article to your friends. When you have a new blog article send it to your friends to check out. As you have a lot of active stumblers in your network and they all are interested in the content of your blog, you will likely get friends that will like to submit your new article, that will like to review it and that will give it a thumbs up. You can submit your article yourself but you will see much greater results if other people submit your content for you.

8. The snowball effect. It all starts with somebody stumbling your article. When one friend discovers or thumbs up your article, this sends a message to StumbleUpon that the page is popular so it sends it out to more people. The more people that give it the thumbs up vote, the more people see it. This creates a snowball effect and gives exposure of your blog article to new stumblers.

9. Onsite exposure. Do some onsite exposure as well. Put Stumble button onto your articles to remind people to vote for your blog article. Link to your StumbleUpon profile on your About page and encourage your blog readers to add you as a friend.

Install Referrer Detector plugin to your blog. This plugin displays a greeting message to visitors that come from different referrers. For example, you can welcome your StumbleUpon visitors with following message:

“Hello fellow Stumbler! Don’t forget to give me a thumbs up if you like this page!”

10. Analyse the performance. Do some analysis on the exposure and performance of your articles at StumbleUpon. Check out the review page of your article and see who discovered it, who reviewed it and who gave it a thumbs up. Friend those who stumbled your article, subscribe to their favourites and thank them. This way you might create another snowball effect as the more popular your articles are, the more new friends you will be able to find, which will then help the exposure of your future articles.

All in all these 10 simple steps will help you grow your professional network, educate you and increase your blog traffic via StumbleUpon. Go on, start stumbling now!

Source: http://www.howtomakemyblog.com/stumbleupon/10-simple-steps-to-increase-blog-traffic-via-stumbleupon/

 

Nice Post. Thanks for the tips.

What kind of traffic do you get though is it short term or have you seen long term traffic gains because of your stumbleupon work?

I might try this out properly and see how I go.

 

Thats a nice article I must say.
Though SU traffics sucks at monetizing, but it surely improves your Alexa Rank.

 

Great info, I've been doing this same experiment on StumbleUpon for a while now, since you've done all the work already I don't have to do it too.

 

Nice Article.

Thanks a lot !

 

Really nice and informative article.
Thanks mate.

 

Cool - ive never really fully utilised the power of traffic from SU. These are great steps, which i will try and work on myself !

How quickly are you able to gain friends on SU?

 

Hey!!
Great tips thanks for sharing,
and no doubt stumble upon is a great
Social Bookmarking site and mostly i
get very good traffic on my websites through
Stumbleupon
===================================
Student Loan Blog
Best mortgage

 

It is short term traffic so you must be consistent and publish new articles regularly. I give it some 48 hours in between articles to get the full exposure.

Work on getting these visitors to subscribe to your site while on your site. Plugins like Referrer Detector or What Would Seth Godin Do are very helpful. If they subscribe to your RSS feed, they can turn into a loyal visitor.

It depends on your strategy. If you follow my steps and contribute to the community you will gain some friends daily. Do it consistently day after day and in couple of weeks/months you will have a great network of like minded people.

If you just spam submit links to your own sites, you will have hard time getting any friends or any exposure.

 

hey. Wanted to comment on your article. Great post, if i may add
It is all true - participation is key and content is king!
And one more... there are rumors that SU algorithm has changed.
For example, few months ago when one of the top users discovered site, site went popular... it had cca 50 likes and 15 reviews and went popular... but now, when top user discovers it and despite the fact there are lots of thums up and reviews, there are no "stars" under the page - no hitting FP and no traffic. For example, comparing to 50000 visit before now you have cca 500 visits ...

Here, just a thought, and a info I heard ... and a question - anyone knows anything about this?

Have a nice day!

 

I'm using Stumble-Upon right now mostly for fun but I am contemplating different ways of using it for some of my sites, one in particular. I forgot to add it right into my profile description. Thank for the reminder!

It's a slow process to build up friends and a large network but I'm hoping it will be worth it in the end.

 

Thanks for the info I'll be trying it out.

 

Good tips. Indeed I learn something.

 

Thanx for the tips.
I get a lot of traffic from digg, but have yet to work with Stumbleupon

 

really nice

thanks

 

Really nice to know will try it out to see how it works,again thanks alot

 

Thanks for the tips. I rarely use stumbleupon these days to promote my websites. I just stumble a few pages and then I receive very few visitors from stumbleupon.

 

great share

i liked it

 

its pretty hard to convert SB traffic unless your giving them something as they hardly ever click ads etc!

 

Yeah, StumbleUpon users and most users of social media are very much used to ads, so you have a problem with banner blindness. Not many of these visitors will click on ads.

But the whole point of this strategy is to build traffic. If they like the content that you provide, they will subscribe to you, come back to your site, comment on it, "like it" in stumble bar, forward it to friends, become loyal visitors...

...and in the longer term that is much preferable and much more profitable than them just clicking on an Adsense ad on their first visit, you earning few cents and them never return to you.