Using StumbleUpon

Stumble upon is an incredible tool for traffic. I’ve gotten around 5,000 hits from the site, which is a good amount for any site. However one of people’s biggest complaints, is that stumbleupon visitors don’t stay long, and that they have a very high bounce rate. I want to dismiss this myth, I have found the opposite. My stumbleupon visitors stay for an average of 1:30 minutes, to 2 minutes, which is quite good for 5,000 visits. Also the bounce rate, has been at an incredible low of 29%, that’s is unbelievable. So there, myth dismissed.

So Stumbleupon produces some good quality readers, and commenters as well. But the question is, how do I use stumbleupon? Everybody says it’s a great traffic source, but nobody has yet explained step by step how to do that. Well here is my step by step help.

1. Create an account

Obvious I know, but yeah just do it, it’s pretty important.

2. Write an Article Worth Stumbling

This is the most important step, because you can use it for more then just stumble. Sit down, and write a worthwhile article, check your grammar and spelling… and make it knowledgeable on your niche. Take as much time as you need on this, make it good, because it will determine the success of traffic.

3. Install the Stumble toolbar

This is easy and can be done here on the stumble site. You Need it so make sure you get it. It is simple to use, just the “thumbs up,” “thumbs down” buttons. The stumble button, for going to random sites. And the “send to” button, which is very important as you’ll find out later. 

4. Getting Friends

There are three ways to do this. First, earning friends over time because of like interests. This is the best way and will be the most successful for you. This will help you greatly because if they are in your niche then it’s pretty likely you’ll like your posts as well. However this can take a lot of time to generate a lot of friends like this, and for weeks to months, depending on how active you are, you’ll have only a couple friends. Which would decrease your potential for lots of traffic. The second way, is to just go on the site, and run around frantically adding random people that look cool, or seem to have a lot of friends. I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Laregly because most of the time, people won’t even add you back, and you can only have a maximum of 200 friends. So if you waste 50 with people who don’t add you back, later you’ll have to go back and delete all of them. The third way, is by going onto social sites like blogcatalog, and doing friend request exchanges. This isn’t as good as the first way, but also not as quick as the second way. It’s kind of in the middle with success rate. My suggestion is to do a mixture of the three. Add around 50-100 people from a site social marketing site, and then as you work on the site, make friends and add them. And also add popular people in your niche, their most likely popular for a reason. This is what I did, and it worked really well for me.
 Now you maybe be wondering why is friends so important? Well I shall explain later.

5. Gettings Stumbles on your posts.

There are three ways to get stumbles.

First, to do stumble exchanges. I would be wary of this, because you can get banned from the site. It can be very successful but it’s also risky. However that doesn’t mean you can’t join those types of groups. Just don’t stumble blindly, actually read the article and if you like it, give it a thumbs up. But don’t just thumbs up everybody. Stumble can’t track whether you really like it or not, all they can track is if you thumbs up, 100 sites in one day.

The second way, is to send it to your friends. Once you’ve written the article and installed the toolbar, you can press the send to button. And then click the friend’s name to send. This is a very laborious task, if your trying to send it to all your friends, cause you have to click each one and do a message, but it’s worth it so keep at it.

The third way, is write content worth stumbling. This is the most best way. Make sure it is a good article that your stumbling, and it Will get stumbled. I have got a lot of faith in the stumbleupon users, they can tell good content from bad content.

6. Be Active on the site.

This will vary depending on how much time you have. But you have to be, to some extent active on the site. Otherwise, you will be considered a spammer and be blocked. So find a couple niches, and check up on them occasionally, stumble the good posts, down the bad. If you enjoy doing this spend more time on it, but if nothing more, this is a way to keep your account from being banned.

Those are the basic six steps on How to use Stumbleupon. But now I want to share with you some tips that I’ve learned from experience by using the site.

1. Don’t only stumble your own posts.

I had an account that I didn’t really use very much, only on a occasion, and it got suspended. Honestly I don’t really know why, but I’m guessing because I only stumbled my posts on it. Don’t make that mistake, be an active contributor to the site, stumbleupon is to powerful to waste by being kicked out.

2. Don’t lose your friends by spamming them.

Do not send out every post, friends can be very useful but I would use them very sparingly as a trump card. Friends can get you a lot of stumbles, so don’t waste the oppourtunity by sending htem every article.

3. Make a Really good Title.

Your title is what the readers see, and it has to get their attention. Make it something relevant to everybody, and grab their attention. A good article is worth nothing with a bad title. It will just fail, and not get any traffic.

4. Be the first one to submit your own posts.

Submit your articles right after you finish posting them. There are several reason for this. First, you get can start seeing results right away, and see if it takes off.

Second, and most important, because then you get to choose the topic it goes into. About a week ago I wrote a post about how to write comments. I called it, a Psychological Analysis of Comments. It was a good title because it got attention, however I wasn’t the first one to submit it to stumble, and so somebody submitted it into the category Psychology. Which it wasn’t really about psychology, it was just a title ploy to get people interested. And thus all the psychology readers, ignored it. I sent it out to my stumble upon friends, about twenty of them stumbled it and five gave reviews. Which is enough to get hundreds of visits, but because of this simple mistake, it hardly got any traffic from stumble.  So learn from this, submit your article first so you get to choose the category.

5. Check out the category your going to submit your articles to.

Find one with 25-50 people who like that type. If your submitting to a type that has only 10 people who like those types of stories, your potential for readers is way lower.

6. Add the stumble button at the bottom of your posts, and a message asking for stumbles.

There’s nothing wrong with asking for stumbles. On my better posts I say, “If you liked this post, please stumble it.” Something like that, nice, and polite, just saying if I helped you please help me as well. If they really liked the article generally, people are happy to help. So those are the instructions for stumble, and then my personal tips. I hope it helped you understand how to best use it.

If this article helped you in anyway, I would really appreciate if you could stumble it in the category "Internet". Thanks!

Don Gilbert