Generating traffic via StumbleUpon

From the beginning I’ve had great success on StumbeUpon, I don’t know if you call this beginners luck or something, but StumbleUpon happens to be my 5th largest source of traffic. Traffic from StumbleUpon leads to very less conversions and often leads to high bounce rates, but it also helps me to spread virally through other networks and many visitors from StumbleUpon have become loyal visitors of my blog. StumbleUpon does not have the capability to send millions of visitors like Digg and Reddit, but it sends constant traffic.

The beauty of StumbleUpon is that with just a few Thumbs-up you can get hundreds of visitors, but most bloggers fail to get those first thumbs-ups to their sites. As any social media site patience, time and networking is the key and Stumble Upon is no different, this post is no secret technique, all of the below tasks require hard work,

Submit your favorite posts and friends posts

Its not always wise to keep submitting your own posts, submit and rate which ever post you find interesting and resourceful. I usually submit all of my bookmarks and rss feeds, sometimes I also Stumble the sites which link to my site or any of my posts.

If your the first one to submit the particular page you’ll get a pop-up mentioning that you discovered a website, you’ll have to tag it and write a small review. The particular page can now be seen by other StumbleUpon users interested in that niche, maybe they’ll subscribe to your future discoveries.

If that particular page has already been submitted, you can give a thumbs-up and write a review on it. These first submissions will help you gain a good network on your StumbleUpon base.

Make friends

Once you start actively submitting articles, your sure to make some friends, be sure to rate all of their submits. Also go back and analyze the blog articles you submitted and figure out the people who discovered it, shared it and reviewed it. Take a look at their profile and subscribe to their favorites.

To get others to Stumble your posts, you can network with them either through StumbleUpon or through some other social networking site. Submit them link to your post and ask them to stumble it. Make sure you send one of your best posts and before you do that rate and review some of their submissions.

Patience, time and hard work

As I mentioned above there are no secret techniques for this, you’ll have to keep repeating the above steps for days and after a few months you’ll find a network of users around you. This can be the perfect time for you to submit your posts and take others help to showcase it to the StumbleUpon traffic.

Share your posts with as many active users as possible, because active users can lead thousands of visitors to your site with just a click.

Onsite exposure

These days your blog can give you the maximum exposure on StumbleUpon, you can put a Stumble button on each post which will make it easy for your users to submit or rate an article. Ask users to keep in touch through your StumbleUpon profile, link to it in your about me page and your homepage.

Its advisable to use the WP Greetbox plugin to greet your StumbleUpon visitors with a welcome message and asking them to rate your post and subscribe to your feed.

Start a StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign

3 weeks ago I went ahead with my first StumbleUpon advertising campaign and i had a budget of just $5, but this $5 generated more than a 1000 visitors not only from StumbleUpon but from other sources too. Even today I keep getting traffic from this campaign.

StumbleUpon charges $0.5 per view and with $5 I generated 100 views in that 25 people liked my post due to which I still keep getting traffic. Many of the visitors I got from StumbleUpon also retweeted and digged my posts taking it to a all new audience.

You can start off with a budget as small as $5, but the aim of your campaign should not be traffic, it should StumbleUpon exposure. After the campaign I got 3 active subscribers, so a StumbleUpon advertising campaign helped me in all forms. (For more on this : Case study – My StumbleUpon advertising campaign)

Start StumbleXchanges

I started off by asking my friends on Facebook and Myspace to rate my articles, slowly I started to contact people on StumbleUpon directly and started to ask them for Stumble exchanges, almost 95% of the people accepted. The key here is to ask beginners and people with less exposure on StumbleUpon.

Recently, I came across a site named StumbleXchange, the name itself sounded interesting to me and I thought that this was a site for me. I created my account there, and started getting active in it. What this site does is, it gives you points very time you rate others articles and you can showcase your own articles using those points. This is a very simple system, but as proven to be very effective, I got a lot of traffic through this site.

On to our readers

StumbleUpon’s traffic generation methods change all the time, so you’ll have to keep experimenting. If any of you have any tips or views on this post please share it with us in the comment section. Also to keep up with my updates follow me on Twitter or subscribe to me in StumbleUpon.