How To Use StumbleUpon To Generate Traffic
StumbleUpon is a great social networking / bookmarking site to use to drive traffic to your site. But how do you get your articles stumbled? And does every stumble count the same?
In order to get your blog articles stumbled, you will need to promote it in the following ways.
1. Social Promotion Buttons
Social promotion buttons at the end of your posts will help readers easily submit your article to the social network of their choosing. There are several WordPress plug-ins available that include buttons for the most popular bookmarking sites, including StumbleUpon. Sociable, Damn Sexy Bookmarks, and Tweet This are good ones to try.
2. WP Greet Box
The WP Greet Box WordPress plug-in will detect if users have found your article through StumbleUpon. If so, they will get a message at the top (or bottom) of the post welcoming the reader and asking for a Stumble for that article. You can edit the message that greets them, and even create a default message that will ask readers for a Stumble, regardless of the referral site.
3. Sharing with Friends using the StumbleUpon Toolbar
By building a community of friends on StumbleUpon, you will have a list of people to share your article with. Using the StumbleUpon toolbar for Firefox (recommended) or Internet Explorer, you can easily share your posts with a friend using the Send To button. Or, by clicking the comment bubble to the right of the Send To, you can see who has stumbled your post. If you go to the Reviews or Favorites page of one of the users who have stumbled your page, you can hover over the thumbnail of your article, click Share, and then send the article to a selection or all of your friends.
4. Direct Links
In a recent article about how to make social promotion easy, I suggest using direct links to posts on social networking sites when promoting articles by email or social promotion forums. For StumbleUpon, simply click the comment bubble to the right of the Send To button on the StumbleUpon toolbar. You can then send the link to the reviews page as the direct link to your article on StumbleUpon, which will hopefully help in getting more reviews.
Stumbles vs. Reviews
People have two options when submitting your article to StumbleUpon. They can simply give it a thumbs up, or they can give it a review. While having lots of stumbles is a definite perk, reviews are much better. For example, if you use FeedBurner for the feeds to your site, and you have turned on the Stumble It Feedflare option, subscribers in Google Reader (or select other feed readers) will see the number of Stumble Reviews for each article, but not the number of regular thumbs up stumbles.
How do you encourage reviews? Within your Stumble community, one of the best ways to encourage reviews (besides having great content) is to be sure to not only thumb up stumbles sent to you, but to review them as well. Many people like to read their reviews, and if they see that you often review their articles, they will be more likely to return the favor.
Building a StumbleUpon Community
Finding friends for your StumbleUpon network is simple. While browsing blogging sites related to your topic, simply look for the blogger’s social profile links. Also, be sure to promote your StumbleUpon profile on your site’s about page, in the sidebar, or within articles mentioning StumbleUpon. You can advertise it on other social networks by adding it to your links on your Facebook, Digg, Google Profile, or any network that allows you to add links to your other social networking identities. You can even include a shortened link to your Stumble profile on a custom Twitter background.
How Do You Use StumbleUpon?
Now it’s your turn. How do you use StumbleUpon, and does it work well for you?
[...] Re: PIPS Members: Get Your Hot BLOG Backlinks Here! How To Use StumbleUpon To Generate Traffic [...]
I've found stumbleupon to be a great way to get traffic. One thing I have noticed is that when a person who has never stumbled a post on my site before gives it a thumbs up, I get tons more traffic than if my regulars thumb it up.
Tracy’s last blog post..People who need pupa are the pluckiest people
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Ben Pei Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 2:11 am
@Tracy, Yup! The worse is to thumbs up yourself.
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Kikolani Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 4:39 am
@Tracy, I didn't know that about Stumble, but I know that Digg puts more weight on non-friends Digging your article than if friends Digg it.
Kikolani’s last blog post..Benefits of Blogging – Gaining a Worldwide Audience
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Excellent article with very useful and valid tips. I've used StumbleUpon for a while and found it to be a great tool for building traffic to my blog. Using the StumbleUpon toolbar with Firefox makes the process really easy and efficent. I picked up a couple new tips from this post to help me use SU even moe effectively. Great info. Thanks Kristi.
MikeM’s last blog post..30 Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts
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Ben Pei Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 2:12 am
@MikeM, So did I! Do come back for more Mike.
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All great tips. I personally really like the tweet this plugin and use it on my blog. Another really cool one not mentioned here is Referrer Detector
If someone let’s say stumbles your site they will be presented with a message that says “hello fellow stumbler please be sure to thumb up if you enjoy this page”
This plugin works for most social platforms you can think of. Digg, SU, Reddit, Twiter and so on.
Gerald Weber’s last blog post..How to Make WordPress More Secure from Hackers & Robots
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Ben Pei Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 2:13 am
@Gerald Weber, Works exactly like Greet Box, excellent plugin!
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StumbleUpon is great for driving traffic (it's how I found this article). I like to get new articles from friends, but don't always have time to review each one. I really didn't know why reviews helped before reading this post — you learn something new every day!
Highest CD Rates’s last blog post..Ally Bank CD Rates
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Ben Pei Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 2:14 am
@Highest CD Rates, Woo I am glad to hear that my friend!
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Kikolani Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 4:38 am
@Highest CD Rates, I don't have time to do review much either. I usually check out who reviews my posts and try to do the same for them if they do send me something though.
Kikolani’s last blog post..Benefits of Blogging – Gaining a Worldwide Audience
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I like your post a lot Ben, you made it very easy to understand how to drive traffic from StumbleUpon, I am still not lucky with it, but I will follow your steps, I have a feeling it will work for me.
just one question plz, is StumbleUpon going to hold your submission if you stumble only your blog posts?
it happened to me and StumbleUpon is not allowing me to stumble one of my blogs anymore!
thanks a lot!
Hesham’s last blog post..ComLuv network and CommentLuv plugin are READY
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Ben Pei Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 2:15 am
@Hesham, Yeah it is not advisable stumble only your own post. SU will do something evil to you =)
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Kikolani Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 4:36 am
@Hesham, What I do is send my post to a few people at first, and keep an eye on it. Once someone has it stumbled, then I share it with the rest of my friends. My goal is to send it to someone I know pays attention to their stumbling, so I know it will get put in the right category, but every so often, I get a random stumbler who puts a blogging article in the Senior Citizens category. I think that is one thing Stumble should change, so blog owners can at least get their stuff categorized properly.
Kikolani’s last blog post..Benefits of Blogging – Gaining a Worldwide Audience
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Getting tons of stumbles was always my goal with stumbleupon. I will start getting reviews and see what happens.
Deneil Merritt’s last blog post..Obsessive Compulsive Disorder – Pulling Out Hair
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Ben Pei Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 2:16 am
@Deneil Merritt, All the best!
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Kikolani Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 4:37 am
@Deneil Merritt, Tons of stumbles are still good as far as getting traffic to your site. It's just on those pages that actually show numbers from stumbleupon will only count the reviews, so it is good to have those. The ratio is lower on reviews to stumbles though.
Kikolani’s last blog post..Benefits of Blogging – Gaining a Worldwide Audience
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Great article! Start using Stumbleupon since 2008, but now only i focus on it!
Dicky’s last blog post..14 Javascript Resources And Plugins For Creating A Stylish Chart
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Ben Pei Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 2:16 am
@Dicky, Not too late dude.
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Great Post Kristi, StumbleUpon is great source of traffic. I am working on SU from last year and getting lots of traffic for my blogs.
@YogeshGautam’s last blog post..Get Traffic from Forums
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Ben Pei Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 2:15 am
@@YogeshGautam, Yeah.. Each stumble easily brings 500 uniques a day.
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Nice post. On our blog we had a very pleasant experience with SU the last week. We started off by getting about 1500 uniques per day, and now settling around 600 – 800 per day.
The article was titled "25 Social Media Jokes and Comics", which was thought up by our team to target SU specifically.
Now, what I want to add to this conversation is what we did when the article was ready: We invested $50 in SU Advertising. SU charges 5 cents per visit, that's 1000 visits in 24 hours. The article was good enough for thumbs up, so when the $50 ran out, the organic SU traffic hit in, and it's still going strong.
Great post
Amer Kawar’s last blog post..Don’t Ever Laugh Out Loud on Reddit
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But with that we are getting too much emails as well. Is there any way so that I wont get such emails.
I believe if you have common interest thing that you will be able to get tonnes of traffic.
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I've been ignoring my stumble requests recently so didn't see this article until today. The reason I've been ignoring it is that some people send me requests for every single one of their articles. Ok – great. I like you but that doesn't mean I think that every article you write should be stumbled and it gets really spammy. I just finished removing a number of stumble friends who were only sending me crap.
So while I think it's a worthwhile tool to use for promotion I really think some people need to use it with more discretion. I very rarely ask someone to stumble something of mine and my articles are still getting stumbled…I don't know – I just was getting caught up with my stumble requests and am really annoyed with it right now.
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I have had a lot of traffic in the past from Stumbleupon, and the nice thing is that you never know when someone is going to review a page/blog of yours and cause it to suddenly get hundreds or thousands of visits a day. Doesn't always happen of course…
I am always open to stumbling and reviewing sites for my friends on Stumbleupon and enjoy finding new sites.
Tony´s last blog ..The UK Versus USA Culture Shock
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Thanks for sharing this valuable info with us.
I believe if using StumbleUpon discretely, it will bring impressive results to our blog traffic. Had experience with a blog post about Twitter Desktop and I'm amazed with a sudden traffic influx. However, it does not happen right away, so patience is greatly needed. Also, as Kikolani put it, it's a virtue to review for others as well. Wish everyone the best in SU. ^^
@wchingya
social media/blogging
Ching Ya´s last blog ..Family & Blogging — Who Comes First?
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[...] of time and it can last for sometime too. You can also read up on one of my post on this blog about How To Generate Traffic With Stumble Upon. Somebody just stumbled my previous post and I received 500+ visitors today just from SU alone, how [...]
I just stumbled your page
LOL. I recently discovered Stumbleupon and really enjoy it.
Kelly´s last blog ..Links for 2009-08-14 [Digg]
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Just recently joined StumbleUpon due to a very convincing prodding of a fellow blogger. I also saw how effective it is at getting traffic to my blog. Sometime ago, someone stumbled on my blog, the very next day, I saw (in G.Analytics) a huge spike of visitors.
When I made known my intent to learn more about StumbleUpon, another blogger (Brian Hawkins) sent me a few links which included this post to read through.
Thanks. I’m beginning to appreciate StumbleUpon more and more.
Noel M.´s last blog ..Claiming Back Home Space
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Just one stumble can give you hundreds (or more) traffic in one go. I like it much better than Digg to be honest. Although be prepared to have a high bounce rate
Michael Aulia´s last blog ..One wireless receiver to rule them all
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wow dude I had always heard good things about stumble, but I had no idea about the social promotion buttons, some people might really do the job for me. Really good guide I have just favorited your site
Danielle ´s last blog ..Samurai Ben 10
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