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Are you a StumbleUpon user? If you are not, you are missing out on potentially 3 million readers seeing your blog articles. There is no better tool for beginner bloggers to get traffic for their blogs.
StumbleUpon was the most effective social media tool that I used to attract 190,000 page views in just three months. In fact, StumbleUpon has delivered over 10,000 page views to one of my posts alone. There simply is no better source of consistent social media traffic than StumbleUpon.
What is StumbleUpon?
For those of you who have not used StumbleUpon, it provides a unique way to surf the Internet. By using StumbleUpon’s social browsing toolbar, you can connect with other bloggers and readers that share your interests. This is perfect for you niche bloggers out there.
Unlike some other social media sites, you will always be able to find an audience interested in your niche at StumbleUpon. For example, I also write a blog that discusses mmorpgs. It can be difficult to find social media sites to promote articles about video games. However, there are tons of StumbleUpon users that are interested in this niche.
Where can you find me on StumbleUpon?
I have been a StumbleUpon user since March 2007. Here is my StumbleUpon profile page. Please visit it, check it out and add me as a friend. If you are interested in blogging and social media, I think that you will really like my StumbleUpon blog. My StumbleUpon blog is a list of the websites to which I have given a “thumbs up.”
How do you use StumbleUpon to promote your articles?
1. The first step you must take is to download the StumbleUpon toolbar. The StumbleUpon toolbar allows you to find great websites, bookmark websites that you discover, send more traffic to those websites, search for articles in your niche, and much more. I will be writing more articles on how to use the StumbleUpon toolbar to take advantage of all of StumbleUpon’s features. Subscribe to Newest on the Net now to make sure you don’t miss any of these articles.
2. After you have downloaded the toolbar and joined StumbleUpon, become a part of the community. This is the most important thing to understand about social media sites. In order to achieve success with social media sites, you have to become a part of their communities.
Lucky for you, StumbleUpon has one of the best communities. The users are friendly and discover some great online content. You need to recommend sites to others, make friends, and provide well written reviews. Just like you want your blog readers to value your opinion, you need your StumbleUpon friends to value your opinion. Don’t be a social media abuser.
3. Once you have been using StumbleUpon for a month or so, you can start promoting your own content with great results. Every time I stumble one of my own articles, I get at least 200 to 500 views. As mentioned above, one of my articles on Firefox tips received over 8,000 views from StumbleUpon.
4. Other keys to gaining traffic with StumbleUpon:
- Use all of SU’s features. Stumble photos, stumble great sites you find, stumble great videos, stumble great blog articles (maybe like this one!).
- Make friends. Don’t forget that StumbleUpon is a SOCIAL media site. The point of StumbleUpon is to share great content with people who share similar interests. Start by adding me as a friend.
- Stumble great content. One key to increasing your StumbleUpon power is to give thumbs up to sites that other StumbleUpon users will thumb up. The more people who like your articles, the more traffic your stumbles will generate.
- Send messages to other StumbleUpon users. One of my favorite features on StumbleUpon is the ability to send message to other members. This is a great way to network. I ofter send messages to other bloggers.
If you want more information about StumbleUpon, here are 65 Articles About StumbleUpon. Of those 65 articles, you won’t want to miss these,
- 7 Reasons Why StumbleUpon Traffic is the Best on the Planet
- A Comprehensive Guide To StumbleUpon
- Building Your Blog With StumbleUpon
- Revealed: 16 Different Personality Types of StumbleUpon Users
- 25 Reasons You Get Thumbs Up
- 5000 Stumbles And Counting
My next article in this series will cover some very powerful, but under utilized features of StumbleUpon. Again, don’t miss my future articles. Subscribe to Newest on the Net.
Please share with me your StumbleUpon profile name. Additionally, please share your personal experiences and opinions of StumbleUpon. What topics do you think are most popular on StumbleUpon? What features are your favorite? Who is your favorite Stumbler?
My StumbleUpon Page
26 comments ↓
A good continuation of the StumbleUpon series. I’m a big fan of SU as well. I think you’re doing a good job of laying out the basics of what people need to know in order to participate. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the feedback Jason. I am glad that you like the series so far.
Boy can I testify to the power of Stumbleupon!
I started my blog a couple of months ago but didn’t get serious about it until I joined Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind program (now closed to new people) a month ago.
Anyway, one of my blog posts got Stumbled (not by me) and it has gotten 55,000 visitors from Stumble over several weeks and then some 37,000 visitors from digg over a few days when it made the Digg front page for a little while.
My RSS subscriber rate spiked to over 400 after the Digg day and then settled down to just shy of 200, which is more than twice the pre-Digg rate.
Not bad for a blog about Math, huh? The article was about how to do Math tricks quickly and in your head. I didn’t think the article was that extraordinary but it has gone all over the web and gotten me lots of trackbacks and greatly improved my Technorati authority ranking and my Alexa ranking but that will die down as the traffic does.
If you need a poster child for Stumbleupon’s gifts let me know!
Anyway, I’ve stumbled this post
Very informative post Fred, well worth a Stumble.
I love StumbleUpon.
I also added you as a SU Friend.
Keep up the great posts Fred
I really like SU because it’s very easy to get traffic from. Even though it does take some participation, it’s very less as compared to other famous social bookmarking sites. Also you can submit your own content as much as you want…
Agreed Stumble can make a difference, I just Stumbled an article about Stumbling
This is kinda like writing an article about wikipedia and putting it on wikipedia.
Nicely summarized! I think the key to the whole process is to first submit enough good sites to Stumble to generate the following and once you do - you will start seeing traffic on your stumbles.
I think Maki also had a great post on “influencing the most prominent users” to get even more traffic with this great tool.
I think as long as we don’t abuse it and submit our post that actually deserve a THumbs Up - we can do it. I personally use an evaluation for this - if I would have found it elsewhere on the net, would I have Stumbled it?
Cheers
Great advice Alex!!
Nice article!
I am a great fan of StumbleUpon and have experienced the power of SU countless time.
I have also added you as my SU friend
SU has been my greatest source of traffic overall - I was getting around 500-1000 unique visitors per article until one of my posts got very popular and received 5000 visitors in the period of a few hours. This is dying down now to about 1000-2000 visitors per day but I’m still very pleased with these results. Great article on just how amazing and useful this powerful tool is.
Pretty amusing, too. It’s how I found this article!
[…] page (most of which I’ve copied and pasted above), I headed straight for the first post, StumbleUpon - A Blogger’s Secret Weapon, and I agreed with it before even getting past the title. StumbleUpon was, for me, a kind of mental […]
Well written and concise. Thanks for the great intro. I picked up your feed and did a short review on SU. Keep it up!
I love stumble (I don’t like digg!)
mixx.com could be a great alternative
We all love the attention alright, but what can we do to get Stumblers to return to our site, instead of just repeating the “Stumble-thumb up-Stumble-thumb up” cycle?
Yes, SU is great, however, due to the increasing amount of users and the increasingly competitive nature of the internet, generating traffic to your site via SU is not quite as easy now. I think there is a saturation point the web has reached…and unless you meet really high, niche interests of your viewers, their visit to your site is meaningless…they only spend a few seconds at your site. Every day the web is growing INSANELY fast…there are billions of sites out there, many of which are awesome…however the fundamental law of supply and demand (economics law) will determine who survives on the net (that is, can maintain a site that pays for itself, or generates real revenue). Read the article “The Penny Gap” and you’ll see where I am coming from. Best Regards, and Good Luck with Your Site, Keith
@pelf - That is a very good question. However, my RSS subscribers did grow by 6% yesterday. That is a tiny CTR from the number of visitors from StumbleUpon, but still a good day.
I wrote a humorous post about the effect StumbleUpon can have on your site statistics. I called it the StumbleUpon Shark effect. You can read it here: http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/stumbleupon-shark-surfaces/
Nice summary. I am a fan of Stumble Upon just because it is so easy with the toolbar. Hope you’ll add me as a friend. Found you through BMM.
arkabc
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thanks for this post! great summary. i’ve seen the effects when others have stumbled my posts and i hope to get involved over there soon myself and start stumbling others’ posts as well.
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