What is StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is a combination of a social network site and a search engine. It has a giant community totaling over four million members all sharing and discovering the best sites on the internet. When you sign up you must add the StumbleUpon toolbar to your browser. The toolbar has many options, but the basic three you'll need to know are the Stumble, thumbs up, and thumbs done buttons. When you click on the Stumble button it will bring you to a category you selected as an interest. There are many different things you can select as an interest. Anything from sports, your favorite hobbies, or religious topics that once selected will bring you sites submitted into these categories. Once you are on a page you found through Stumbling you can read the material, browse the site, or click on to the next one. If you would like to give the website a rating you can give it a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” accordingly. If you gave it a good review StumbleUpon will give you more sites similar to it more often, and the website will be marked as a better site under that particular interest therefore increasing the traffic that is sent to the site through the Stumble option.
Okay, so I know how to use StumbleUpon to view others sites, but how do I get people to get to a site I would like to submit? In order to get your site added to StumbleUpon you have to go to the page you would like to submit. Then simply click on the “thumbs up” button, and if it has yet to be added to StumbleUpon a screen will pop up asking for a review of the site, a title, tags, and a topic. You will learn the importance of these later on. Once all this information is filled in it is submitted into the StumbleUpon database and will start to receive the “beginning traffic”.
My website says I got between 200 and 300 views through the StumbleUpon site in only one day! Well as great as it may seem to you, this is not good because this is most likely the end of the traffic you'll receive to this page. There are many ways to improve upon this but that will take a little bit of work. First of all you will generally receive around that many views just by submitting it to StumbleUpon. You can only raise this by receiving the “thumbs up” votes on your page. (You can check these by looking at the review of your page.) By receiving only a few “thumbs ups” you will have successfully gotten more traffic. The more positive votes, the more traffic you will receive. My tips for increasing the positive reviews greatly depend upon the type of content you are submitting. If it is a list of items your best bet would be to put the best picture or item in the list as the first thing they see. Why? Well if your article looks boring they may not even take their mouse pointer off the Stumble button. A catchy yet to the point title is also important. Make your title interesting. There is a great difference between “10 Uses of Duct Tape”, “10 Amazing Things Made of Duct Tape”, and “10 Amazing Things You Can Make Using Duct Tape”. Which one catches your attention the most? If you said number two, I agree. As it is an opinion question you may think different, but my opinion is the second one. It catches my attention in a way the first one couldn't, and it's more to the point than the third one.
So you're saying that the reason I'm not getting a lot of traffic is completely the fault of my article or content? Not exactly, I'm just saying that those are important things for a Stumbler to see on your page because they can be gone as quickly as they came. Then what else might I be doing wrong? Well as I mentioned before, the information you enter when first submitting the page is very important. The most important is the topic in which you enter it. Although you may think that by entering an article about football, in the topic of sports will give you a bigger base of fans you may not do as good as if you enter it in the topic of football. Why? Well the more positive votes you receive the more traffic you will get. So what point would there be in entering it into the sports one? It will receive views from people that enjoy totally different sports and will give it a negative review thus hurting the traffic brought to this article.
