When I first started blogging, I mainly was experimenting with StumbleUpon for the first few months. It was only recently that I went back again to take a closer look at what it can do. This simple but yet incredible viral tool can actually drive a large amount of targeted traffic to any website over a period of time.
I love this tool a lot and I thought I write a mini guide on StumbleUpon for beginners as I felt StumbleUpon has a huge potential in getting free traffic to your site. What is StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is a social web tool bar that sits right in your browser which allows the users a new experience to surf the internet. Instead of searching for keywords like what you normally do in Google, StumbleUpon users only have to search tags and hit the search button.
StumbleUpon will automatically bring you to pages that are tagged with the keywords in random order.
To start using StumbleUpon, you will need to install the tool bar shown above which is compatible with I.E and Firefox at http://www.stumbleupon.com. After you are done installing, you can check if your website is listed on StumbleUpon by visiting http://reviews.stumbleupon.com and typing in your website URL.
If this is your first time using this toolbar, most likely your website is not listed. What you need to do now is start using your newly installed toolbar to tag and review it by clicking on the blue thumbs up symbol which has “I like it!” next to it.
In the pop-up panel, this allows you to categorize your website, write a short description and tag with specific keywords. After you have filled up the form, your website will be included in StumbleUpon’s database and will show up when other users with similar interests to your tags use the Stumble Upon toolbar to surf the Internet.
Why Use StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is well known in giving web owners the ability to generate massive amounts of traffic to a specific webpage or website that has been stumbled. Example, if you wrote an article or created a website which offers creative and useful content, you would want as many people looking at it as possible, right?
Once your website gets stumbled, your website will immediately receive visitors from all over the world who has this tool bar installed.
Here Is A List Of Benefits Using StumbleUpon
1. Help to generate a huge exposure on a specific website
2. Gain lots of backlinks from StumbleUpon visitors with websites
3. Establish a constant reader base for your blog very quickly
What type of traffic can I get from StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is different from normal search engines, when you search keywords in search engines it shows results. Searching for tags in StumbleUpon will automatically bring you to the page related to the keywords.
This offers very targeted traffic that matches the keyword tags for your blog.
However, the nature of StumbleUpon allows open exploration of various website which may be loosely tagged by other users. Hence, this may produce weak targeted traffic with specific keywords.
Here are some of my experience so far with StumbleUpon
• Traffic is long-term as I still receive traffic from websites that I have stumbled a long time ago.
• Stumbling on well known names help to get constant traffic from famous people whom I have stumbled upon through their review pages.
• Visitors from StumbleUpon come from various countries all over the world, but most of the traffic are mainly from North America.
How To Keep Visitors To My Website?
Because of the nature of channel surfing, many StumbleUpon users assess your website based on their first glance and determine if the channel is worth watching. To retain StumbleUpon visitors, you would want to provide great content on your site so that StumbleUpon users would want to stick around to read more.
Another great tip, is providing great tools that they can use to do some activity on your website. I realized this after I’ve stumbled my 2000 MyBlogLogs, I’ve got many stumble users coming back to that same page.
StumbleUpon users are generally attracted to unique content, useful online tools, free stuff and interesting news. Make sure that these elements are all present to ensure that you receive a “thumbs up” as well as repeated visits to your website.
Here are some pointers to help you
• Have an easy to remember URL, I especially recommend users who are using free blogger or wordpress accounts to buy an easy to remember domain name so that people will come back more often and find you more credible.
• Your website should be full of content, so that users who come in to see your post will have more things to read.
• Do not try to have too many poorly blended ads on your website like banners and so on. If possible, you can avoid putting banners and replace them with words instead. I have tested that words tend to be more readable and acceptable than banner pictures.
• Your website should be visually appealing, so that users will be attracted to your site.
• Your website must always ask visitors to subscribe to your blog feed or newsletter for updates.
How many visitors can I get from Stumble Upon?
Expect an average of 100+ to 8000+ daily unique visitors for a specific web page that is stumbled. I’ve stumbled several post pages on GatherSuccess as an experiment and the best performance was 300+ visitors in 24 hours.
However, the number of visitors will slowly decrease as the days go by. I was amazed that it received so many views and because I did that when my blog was so new, not many people actually stayed on to view more posts.
So if you were to stumble your post, do make sure your blog has lots of content for them to read before you stumble your articles.
I hope you like this article I have written and if you like it do stumble it! Happy stumbling.
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