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October 1, 2006

How to increase StumbleUpon traffic?

Filed under: seo — Kevin Gibbons @ 6:24 am

Having noticed StumbleUpon come up regularly in my referrer stats I decided to try and increase the amount of StumbleUpon traffic for this blog. A traffic stats graph from SEOmoz shows StumbleUpon’s fantastic ability to drive traffic, the amount of referrals I have been receiving recently are around 50-100 visits a day which I hope will continue to improve.

What is StumbleUpon?
Social bookmarking websites such as Digg and Del.ico.us are an excellent method of gaining large quantities of traffic in a short space of time but the concept of StumbleUpon is slightly different. StumbleUpon has over a million users and generally refers a lower (but still significant) amount of traffic at a more consistent rate, whereas sites like Digg can send thousands of hits in the space of a few days for promoted stories which have made the frontpage.

How does StumbleUpon work?
Here is the definition of how StumbleUpon works but basically instead of listing popular stories on the homepage StumbleUpon works by downloading a toolbar which allows you to rate a website as thumbs up or down and view relevant websites (by clicking Stumble!) based on your own preferences.

StumbleUpon Toolbar
StumbleUpon toolbar
To begin receiving traffic from StumbleUpon you must have at least one of your webpages submitted. You can add this yourself by downloading the toolbar and browsing to your website, selecting the thumbs up ‘I like it!’ button will add this page to StumbleUpon.

How to increase StumbleUpon traffic?
The main methods I have found to improve StumbleUpon traffic have been:

  • Rating websites
    By getting involved in the community and rating some of the websites I visit helps my website appear for StumbleUpon users who have similar interests to my own, therefore they will be more likely to rate my site with a thumbs up! StumbleUpon is time-based, although not to the same extent as Digg, which means the more votes you can get in a short period of time the more traffic you will receive.

  • Adding friends
    By adding friends you will increase the amount of users who will see your newly added webpages, making them more likely to give your site the thumbs up.

  • Submit new webpages
    Once I have created a new blog post for example I will submit the URL to StumbleUpon using the toolbar, it is perfectly fine to promote your own website providing you don’t overdo it. This will help to increase the amount of my webpages I have present in the StumbleUpon database and improve the likelihood of my site being ’stumbled upon’.

  • Carefully selecting topic titles
    It is important to categorise webpages carefully to ensure that it will be displayed to relevant users.

  • Adding multiple tags
    By using multiple tags you can help to attract a wide range of users and by keeping these as relevant to the content as possible will help to keep the traffic targeted.

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49 Comments »

  1. You hit the nail on the head since that’s basically what I have done and about 75% of my traffic is from there.It’s a super way to increase traffic.

    Comment by Gary McCurry — November 24, 2006 @ 3:38 pm

  2. Have you seen on your computer
    or heard from anyone about
    the stumbleupon toolbar
    containing any “ware” ,
    such as spyware, adware, etc ?

    I appreciate your input, I found
    you from a google search about social bookmarking.

    Thanks, Steve

    Comment by Anonymous — November 26, 2006 @ 3:44 pm

  3. No, there isn’t any adware or spyware. Clearly it tracks what you stumble to make sure you don’t keep seeing the same things, and to keep rating records for sites, but you never have to give information you don’t want to. I’ve used it for several months and found it very useful. They make money from user sponsors (20$ a year) and sites paying to get viewed (I haven’t noticd a difference so I couldn’t tell you who pays for placement in SU). I use the free account and I’ve found a couple dozen really great sites, hundreds of photos and humour pages… all sorts of stuff i’m interested in basically.

    It really is a great extension for your browser :)

    Comment by Blissfulpain — December 14, 2006 @ 2:50 pm

  4. Boy I dunno man. I use stumbleupon to find sites in a particular topic. I don’t use it to find people who suggest the sites I find useful. Your ideas are ok _if_ your assumptions turn out to be correct. However, they wouldn’t be correct for my case and probably aren’t right for others either — but with close to 2 million users, even a few stumblers visiting yoursite would look like a lot in certain situations.

    Comment by KC — December 20, 2006 @ 3:27 pm

  5. that is a comprehensive article. By the way how did you change your header?

    regards

    Comment by gazzali — March 3, 2007 @ 3:22 am

  6. I got ’stumbled’ the other day and when I looked at my logs it showed 300+ visitors in a day (I typically have about 40). Thats pretty good qualified traffic.

    I recently tried their paid program for a client (I do SEO) and they currently charge a flat rate of 5 cents per view. A 20 buck test got my client a bunch of traffic and 7 thumbs up yesterday. Now they are in the stumble rotation and will continue to grow. The pay route is a good way to get a jump start on the stumbling as I am sure the more stumblers like the page the more it will go into the rotation.

    Not good for all clients, but pretty useful in particular instances.

    Comment by hornswaggled — March 15, 2007 @ 8:23 am

  7. That’s interesting thanks hornswaggled, most people seem to view paying for stumbleupon traffic as a waste of money because the quality of visits is generally poor, but if this can lead to more votes and a further increase in traffics maybe that would help to increase the amount of free stumbles.

    Comment by Kev — March 15, 2007 @ 8:33 am

  8. Thanks for the useful information. I will focus on stumbleupon in order to drive traffic to my blog. Lets see the response.

    Comment by Syd — March 18, 2007 @ 5:30 am

  9. Thanks for the StumbleUpon comments, Kev. I was looking for this sort of thing when I was googling around and your blog popped up. I’ve since put in the remaining sites I control and am looking forward to receiving additional traffic.

    Comment by Matthew C. Keegan — March 21, 2007 @ 4:34 pm

  10. What do you mean by not overdoing it? Is it OK to submit all of your own posts to Stumbleupon? I know somebody who did this and, after a while, he was no longer able to submit posts from his site to Stumbleupon.

    Comment by Josh — March 24, 2007 @ 3:10 pm

  11. A great post thnx :D

    I have used stumble upon for the past few days and i am receiving an extra 100-200 UNIQUES a day

    Comment by Sam — June 2, 2007 @ 2:07 am

  12. Today I wrote about stumbleupon traffic myself and guess what I got over 3.000 unique visitors in about 4 hours , i can’t wait to see what will happen tomorrow!

    check out
    http://www.bontb.com/2007/06/07/one-day-stumbleupon-experiment-traffic/

    you could stumble it too tho

    Comment by juliax — June 7, 2007 @ 8:09 pm

  13. As a member of the DP forum I have used all the stumbleupon threads to increase the exposure of my site on stumbleupon and am averaging 2k plus referrals from stumbleupon daily to My proxy network I can testify that stumble will drive traffic to your site. It will provide better results if you get friends and reviews provides you with even more exposure.

    Comment by William — June 17, 2007 @ 6:10 pm

  14. nice post, now I will try to do as directed,thank you

    Comment by abhi — June 25, 2007 @ 12:41 am

  15. Thanx Kev…again, nice job.

    Comment by Izdelava spletnih strani — July 9, 2007 @ 9:26 am

  16. hey ,

    i am trying to build up my social network too .. if anyone would liek to stumble my game, please do :)

    http://www.stumblegames.com/cucaracha.html

    Comment by Stumbler — July 10, 2007 @ 12:30 pm

  17. Nice Post… A very informative one for new stumblers :->

    Comment by Rohit — July 17, 2007 @ 6:35 am

  18. A problem however is that it seems like stumbleupon creates “fake visits” due to it’s prefetch mechanism. I really appreciate the real traffic it drives to my site, but I think it is kind of ugly of stumbleupon to increase their application’s speed on behalf of load on our sites and faulty statistics.

    Look at:
    http://www.chrisbusse.com/2007/05/many_of_the_stu.html#comment-76237684

    Comment by johan — July 18, 2007 @ 8:26 am

  19. Thank you !
    Very helpful tips :-)

    Comment by Lilly — August 7, 2007 @ 9:33 pm

  20. Thanks for the tips. I have been reading several articles about StumbleUpon, and yours has answered my questions.

    Comment by Techie Guy — August 17, 2007 @ 3:50 pm

  21. Thanks for the tips.

    I’ve been stumbling for a while, but haven’t seen many results from my labours. Your tips should help me focus on driving success.

    Comment by mcrilf — September 15, 2007 @ 7:55 am

  22. Useful info and it could help me a lot in getting more traffic.

    Comment by Elinker — September 22, 2007 @ 9:27 am

  23. But the thing is, stumblers normally:

    (a) rate a post/page, or
    (b) do nothing and stumble the next post/page.

    Many aren’t bothered to leave a comment. So that takes us back to square one: Who is benefiting from all this visits? Definitely not the blogger because what good would it do to the blogger is his page views increases but not his number of comments/subscribers?

    Comment by pelf — September 24, 2007 @ 3:23 pm

  24. is this a natural traffic? i really want to generate an organic traffic.

    Comment by The Real Proxy — October 7, 2007 @ 12:28 pm

  25. I would really like to try this out (as i am a user of StumbleUpon myself..)
    But approximately how much thumbs ups or reviews does it take to get some significant traffic to your site? i am not active in their community too.

    Comment by Munim — October 11, 2007 @ 9:12 pm

  26. I’ve been using StumbleUpon to drive traffic to my newer blog and it’s been working out really well. I’ve picked up new readers and had good success with visitors to specific pages that have been given the thumbs up. I think the most I got on one article was 407 in one day from StumbleUpon.

    Great advice :)

    Comment by loretta — October 14, 2007 @ 3:21 pm

  27. Hi,
    I must thank you for giving a innovative way to get traffic and I look forward for incorporating same in my blog for Free Day Indian share tips

    Comment by analyst — October 16, 2007 @ 1:55 pm

  28. I never got traffic with it.

    Comment by Mr.Money — October 20, 2007 @ 2:27 pm

  29. Good information thanks for the tips. I am using StumbleUpon for traffic and wrote a review about all the mainstream traffic sources. StumbleUpon is the best for sure..

    Comment by BloggerDollar — November 5, 2007 @ 7:08 pm

  30. I am new to Stumble. This really helped me! Thanks!

    Comment by kathylynn — November 5, 2007 @ 10:20 pm

  31. This is some really great information. I actually read this on other sites but the didn’t suggest on putting your own posts on here. This has increased my traffic tremendously.

    What I’ve started doing is created the http://www.addthis.com button and rotating with my posts through each social bookmarking site. This way, I don’t get blacklisted on any site and can still get exposure to my site.

    Thanks,

    Richard Rinyai

    Comment by Richard Rinyai — November 8, 2007 @ 8:27 pm

  32. great tips! Stumbleupon is a great resource.

    Comment by MJE Sales, LLC — November 8, 2007 @ 8:51 pm

  33. I have just started using stumble. Seems to be a great resource. I’ll get sit back and wait for the traffic to pure in. lol.

    Comment by Mike Jones — December 18, 2007 @ 9:19 pm

  34. Thank you. I have often wondered about using Stuble Upon.

    Comment by Tom — December 26, 2007 @ 5:08 pm

  35. [...] 10 posts by pageviews during 2007 1 5 web design elements to earn your visitors trust - 14,090 2 How to increase StumbleUpon traffic - 5,545 3 Google patents SMS payment system - 4,021 4 10 ways to make your website more popular - [...]

    Pingback by SEOptimise 2007 end of year stats | SEOptimise — December 28, 2007 @ 4:59 pm

  36. Great ideas! I will definitely use them for promoting my content!

    Comment by Natalie — January 15, 2008 @ 1:48 am

  37. very useful article - I have tried! stumble really can give traffic!

    Comment by seoalligator — January 18, 2008 @ 12:01 am

  38. thanks for the article, I guess I’ve already figured out all the tips you listed here just through trial and error over the last year or so I’ve been doing StumbleUpon. Anyway, you’re article is definitely a good read for people who are trying to get traffic from SU, so I stumbled your post !! cheer !!

    Comment by Code4Gold — January 21, 2008 @ 8:49 am

  39. But I heard the quality of the traffic is low at least for adsense.

    Comment by bestofmoney.info — January 26, 2008 @ 8:55 am

  40. I found this blog post by doing a search for “stumbleupon traffic”.
    Thanks for the information.

    SU sends me the most traffic of all the social network sites that I use
    but I’m not so sure about the quality of the traffic.

    Comment by Copywriter RAY EDWARDS — January 28, 2008 @ 2:38 am

  41. Another great guide. You consistently bring good content like this so i have added a link to your site in my blogroll. Keep up the good work. I am an avid fan, and will continue to do so with content like this.

    Im about to go and do some stumbling i think!!

    Comment by Andy MacDonald — February 7, 2008 @ 9:50 pm

  42. Thats a great tip, i have just started to use social bookmarking on my websites and although i am not getting a lot of traffic right now i will put your tips into practice!

    Comment by Rooms in Scotland — March 6, 2008 @ 5:45 pm

  43. How to increase StumbleUpon traffic?…

    Having noticed StumbleUpon come up regularly in my referrer stats I decided to try and increase the amount of StumbleUpon traffic for this blog. A traffic stats graph from SEOmoz shows StumbleUpon’s fantastic ability to drive traffic, the amount of r…

    Trackback by socialmedia1.com — March 7, 2008 @ 3:36 am

  44. great tips just gave you a thumbs up

    Comment by Proinvestorsblog — March 11, 2008 @ 4:14 am

  45. Great tips and check out StumbleUpon to see what they have to offer. My blog is somewhat similiar to the one you have here. Of course I hope to have the same kind of popularity for my blog like the one you have here. I did come up with a couple of articles with regards to blogging. Hope you can drop by to give a comment or two about my article. Many thanks in advance. Here are 2 articles that I have written.

    http://4u2invest.blogspot.com/2008/03/making-money-from-blogging-part-1.html

    http://4u2invest.blogspot.com/2008/03/want-to-start-blogging-part-2.html

    Comment by sksee82 — March 13, 2008 @ 8:43 am

  46. Hi,

    Thanks for the info. Will check it out. Much appreciated.

    Comment by Vijay — March 18, 2008 @ 11:53 am

  47. I just signed up with an account with them an also purchased some credits. I’m courious if this traffic will be valuable

    Comment by Stoian Adrian — April 1, 2008 @ 1:22 am

  48. I just stumbled you and gave you a thumbs up…how about sharing the love.

    Comment by Modern Wedding Advice — April 10, 2008 @ 6:40 am

  49. Great post. really good info.

    Comment by Modern Wedding Advice — May 9, 2008 @ 6:06 pm

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