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.

I think I have good articles, but they just don't seem to get started very well. Do you have any ideas? As I stated before StumbleUpon is a social networking site. So far all you have learned about StumbleUpon is how to add content. While that was a huge part of it, you won't get very far without the social aspect of StumbleUpon. The more positive votes you receive the more views so what a better way to get your articles past that first hump where you have to receive some thumbs up quickly. Your friends will usually help you out by giving you a thumbs up and a positive review. By receiving just five friends thumbs up votes you can successfully increase your traffic to a level that if it is any good, should take care of itself. I've found articles to succeed greatly after I get the first few thumbs up votes. Remember without friends you have potentially three hundred or less Stumblers to receive these crucial thumbs up votes. The key to success is friendship.

None of my friends in real life use StumbleUpon. I'm having troubles finding a friend on StumbleUpon. How do I get them? Good question. I can say that probably 95% of the people that read this far into the article are a writer, have you own blog, or are a webmaster, or hope to become of the following. With that being said I think it would be fair to say you are in fact creating the content they are Stumbling onto. There are two ways I use to effectively start a successful friendship on StumbleUpon. The first is thing is that I'm sure you have content you've submitted before, but if not start off by submitting a few of your articles. Anybody who gives you a thumbs up, if you get them, you go to their profile and add them as a friend.

After you do this, you send them a message saying you wrote the article they enjoyed, and then maybe ask them a question like how could I improve my content. Unless you want to be blunt and flat out ask them to be your friend, you have to simply keep in touch with them until they do. This means ending each reply with a question so they will for sure have something to say in a reply. Anybody who becomes your fan, add them as your friend and make it a mutual friendship. You must message your friends so they get to know you a bit better as they are more likely to help you out then versus the only contact between you and them is sending them links. Lastly add anybody who adds you. They like your work, or are fishing for friends. Either way, you've added another friend who can potentially help you bring traffic to your site. Keeping my advice in mind, what do you think I'd do if you became my fan? You will then have a friend right there to help you with your questions about StumbleUpon. Take it or leave it.

I've got some friends, I've got the good content, and I am successfully submitting content into appropriate areas, am I ready to go? Basically, yes. There isn't much more that I know of to it than that. As you use it more and more you will learn small tricks that may help you in the long run, as well as increase your friendships. Naturally the long you are on the site, the more friends you'll make which in turn means more potential thumbs up votes. Keep in mind the term friend. Don't abuse them by spamming them with link after link, day after day. I wouldn't want to be your friend. You don't need to tell them to give you a thumbs up vote, they are your friend they'll be light hearted on the article, and usually will give you that thumbs up. A good rule of common courtesy would be to maybe ask them to visit one or two of your sites per every ten messages you send them. You'll get to know them, and your friendship won't be based on thumbs up votes. Also don't forget to check out content they discovered.

I am running an experiment to see the potential traffic StumbleUpon can bring you. I will post results, but so far the help of the StumbleUpon community hasn't been as successful as I'd hoped. Only seven have helped out. Please check out the experiment and maybe help out. The StumbleUpon Experiment 2.0. Spread the word about successfully using StumbleUpon by giving this a thumbs up and making a new friend. As a side note to all viewers please do not submit this site to StumbleUpon. If the screen comes up to submit it, cancel out and come back later to give it your thumbs up.

My goal is to observe the patterns of StumbleUpon and to see exactly how many views an article can get at different stages of popularity. The preferred stages to provide the follow up articles on the results would be after the amount of thumbs up reach one hundred thumbs up, two hundred, three hundred and so on. However this can only happen with your help. In return for your help I will give you a thumbs up vote on up to two sites of your choice along with adding you to my friends, as I only Stumble the pages my friend's thumbs up. Simply give a thumbs up and in the comments on this page, or the stumble upon review put your StumbleUpon user name and the site(s) you would like the thumbs up on.

Lastly you will receive the knowledge provided in the follow up articles that may help you achieve a front page article and gain many new visitors that are interested in your website giving you a more likely chance to have a returning visitor. If you want to get 10,000 views on your blog my graphs will show you approximately how many Stumbles you will need to reach that mark. You could find that you need one hundred and fifty Stumbles to receive 10,000 views so you would know you need natural thumbs up votes or to add that many friends and message them for a Stumble.

The StumbleUpon experiment 2.0 is a retrial of a test a fellow writer for Webupon ran about five months ago and failed to come through with a follow up on it. As I have no way of obtaining the records of the experiment I'd like to try again with promise of a follow up to be posted both on the StumbleUpon review of this page, and as a comment. When to expect the follow up? I will publish the first follow up once a total of one hundred thumbs up have been achieved. If after a week this has not happened yet I will post a follow up on the results. I will continue to give results for as long as my view counter stays at a steady pace of views worth reporting. I read the criticism of the last experiment and regretfully I am purely a publisher not a webmaster so I cannot remove the ads, however they do not affect the experiment.