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 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
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.
Tags: StumbleUpon, Social Bookmarking, Website Promotion
November 24th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
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.
November 26th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
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
December 14th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
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 :)
December 20th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
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.
March 3rd, 2007 at 3:22 am
that is a comprehensive article. By the way how did you change your header?
regards
March 15th, 2007 at 8:23 am
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.
March 15th, 2007 at 8:33 am
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.
March 18th, 2007 at 5:30 am
Thanks for the useful information. I will focus on stumbleupon in order to drive traffic to my blog. Lets see the response.
March 21st, 2007 at 4:34 pm
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.
March 24th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
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.
June 2nd, 2007 at 2:07 am
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
June 7th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
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
June 17th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
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.
June 25th, 2007 at 12:41 am
nice post, now I will try to do as directed,thank you
July 9th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Thanx Kev…again, nice job.
July 10th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
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
July 17th, 2007 at 6:35 am
Nice Post… A very informative one for new stumblers :->
July 18th, 2007 at 8:26 am
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
August 7th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Thank you !
Very helpful tips :-)
August 17th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Thanks for the tips. I have been reading several articles about StumbleUpon, and yours has answered my questions.
September 15th, 2007 at 7:55 am
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.
September 22nd, 2007 at 9:27 am
Useful info and it could help me a lot in getting more traffic.
September 24th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
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?
October 7th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
is this a natural traffic? i really want to generate an organic traffic.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
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.
October 14th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
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 :)
October 20th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
I never got traffic with it.
November 5th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
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..
November 5th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
I am new to Stumble. This really helped me! Thanks!
November 8th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
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
November 8th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
great tips! Stumbleupon is a great resource.
December 18th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
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.
December 26th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Thank you. I have often wondered about using Stuble Upon.
December 28th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
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January 15th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Great ideas! I will definitely use them for promoting my content!
January 18th, 2008 at 12:01 am
very useful article – I have tried! stumble really can give traffic!
January 21st, 2008 at 8:49 am
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 !!
January 26th, 2008 at 8:55 am
But I heard the quality of the traffic is low at least for adsense.
January 28th, 2008 at 2:38 am
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.
February 7th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
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!!
March 6th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
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!
March 7th, 2008 at 3:36 am
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…
March 11th, 2008 at 4:14 am
great tips just gave you a thumbs up
March 13th, 2008 at 8:43 am
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
March 18th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Hi,
Thanks for the info. Will check it out. Much appreciated.
April 1st, 2008 at 1:22 am
I just signed up with an account with them an also purchased some credits. I’m courious if this traffic will be valuable
April 10th, 2008 at 6:40 am
I just stumbled you and gave you a thumbs up…how about sharing the love.
June 9th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Thanks for the info, much appreciated. Gave you a thumbs up and added you to my technorati favorites.
June 17th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Bumping an old post here but it has withstood the test of time. These tips are still paramount when looking to increase stumbles. Good writing!
June 18th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Kevin you should definitely check out my wordpress plugin for stumbleupon http://www.preblogging.com/increase-sociability/
Basically this plugin helps to get social media votes by reminding people fromthose sites to upvote you.
B
June 20th, 2008 at 8:47 am
This is quite instructive. Short and straight to the point. I am encouraged to put into use those tips. Thanks
September 7th, 2008 at 12:10 am
I have started using SU and my traffic has gone from 40 to 170+-. Most of it from SU. However, it is not consistent. Why is that? Help apretiated.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:00 am
I have been having a hard time trying to find out how to add those buttons to my site.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Thanks for an interesting article. How many pages of one’s blog should be stumbled? I read sometimes that people stumble every post they make but this seems to be overkill and not right.
October 25th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Is it advisable to auto-stumble?
October 29th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I am new to stumbleupon and I really appreciate this article..I still have to put to test whether it will work on my page or not..I am starting to put thumbs up and rate some websites that I stumbled on..Thanks for the help
October 31st, 2008 at 3:52 pm
great information! found you by searching how to get stumbleupon traffic! Just launched a site which is basically a directory for indie companies, specifically t shirt companies! If your into that stuff check us out! http://www.iamthetrend.com
happy stumbleing!
November 6th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
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November 11th, 2008 at 3:55 am
In my opinion this is an interesting article through which i gathered a lot of information.
================
Taylor
Social Bookmarking
November 12th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
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November 14th, 2008 at 4:57 am
Many people make the false assumption with Stumbleupon that they can sign up Stumble their own page and immediately get a rush of traffic. Nothing is further from the truth. A helful Stumbleupon technique is to avoid only stumbling your own pages. Make good use of the Send to: function to give your post some momentum.
November 26th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
your site has an interesting article through which i gathered a lot of information. thanks a lot dude
November 26th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
great optimizing tips that is highly appreciated for your hard work .
November 29th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
StumbleGenius Stumbling on thru, StumbleUpon thumbs up to you, hope to see you in more clicky stumble trips soon. Happy day merry seasons greetings an all that jazz.
Read you later or tweet me on Twitter @StumbleGenius … tweet you soon ???
December 17th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Great tips – my StumbleUpon traffic went through the roof in the past few days. The spike is so big that I’m still trying to work out whether this is genuine traffic or not.
December 21st, 2008 at 5:10 am
[...] How to increase StumbleUpon traffic? [...]
January 16th, 2009 at 12:58 am
This is a great simple to understand article for users like myself who have never used Stumbleupon. Using the toolbar as suggested seems very easy and straightforward, ‘I’ll be back’ (as Arnie says) to visit this website for frequent tips for my blog Thanks
February 2nd, 2009 at 9:30 pm
what a impressive article. last days I didn’ t read post like that. I am now your blog’ s follower thanks for this useful blog. I am now your blog’s rss follower.
February 14th, 2009 at 8:13 am
Very helpful, thanks
February 14th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Came across this blog and comments and found it useful for helping to do more with traffic increasing.
February 24th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I was really surprised how effective is stumbleupon. I have been a member since months but nothing happened first. I thought it was the same waste of time as other community sites (blogcatalog, mybloglog etc)but when I accidentaly stumbled one of my own posts..I got surprised :) I think doesnt make any sense to cheat the system..stumbling all your post and leaving. If your site is a nonsense..you will have a lot of traffic without any further interest. Stumble helps but wont make your blog better. Thanks for the interesting post..now I understand better why it works!
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:14 pm
It’s quite effective, but working less well for non-english websites.
June 28th, 2009 at 5:57 am
Awesome article, I have been looking at StumbleUpon as a viable way to increase my traffic to my blog. Amazing tips for anyone looking to make money online blogging professionally, definitely use Stumble Upon social media marketing
October 6th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Got 2,000+ in one night after just a single stumble upon post!!! Neato!
January 20th, 2010 at 7:22 pm
It’s difficult getting SU traffic. I try and try but never get anywhere, however, I get random spikes, some days receiving over a thousand unique hits from SU. I wish I could figure out how to get that daily. lol
April 30th, 2010 at 6:04 pm
I wanted to note that I ran about $150 over 6 days on stumbleupon. I got a couple of conversions, but the sad thing is the free traffic was almost nil, and the last 20 days have brought exactly 0 hits from stumbleupon. I can’t say I would recommend this as a good method of paid advertising.