Internet Marketers Guide to StumbleUpon

Glen Allsopp / 38 Comments / September 17th, 2007 / Subscribe via RSS

Like me, you’ve probably seen a few ‘Beginners Guides to StumbleUpon’ but these are often for people who seem to be beginners to the internet, although they are helpful. As Internet Marketer’s we should probably know a little bit about StumbleUpon and the basic principle so we don’t need to go through that today.

What we are going to look at is how you can get started using StumbleUpon (SU) and use it effectively to be able to drive massive traffic to your own websites and the websites of your clients.

Quick: What is StumbleUpon

Just in-case you are planning on marketing to a community that you have no clue about this little section should explain things for you.

SU is basically a socially driven discovery and recommendations websites. People discover websites, pictures and videos and they can give them a thumbs up or a thumbs down on whether they like them or not. This is done by installing the free SU toolbar for either Firefox or Internet Explorer.

The more thumbs up a particular content piece gets, the more the content is displayed around the SU network. Not only is the site great for getting a lot of new traffic but it’s also very fun to use and helps you discover new sites that you probably wouldn’t have found elsewhere.

What Traffic Can you Expect

Another beauty I haven’t mentioned about the large amount of traffic you can leverage from StumbleUpon is that the traffic is relevant and targeted, and catches people in the right frame of mind. When you register you can set-up the types of sites you want to be shown categorically or shown sites by keywords. Remember that when people are using SU they are looking for new sites, one of the reasons the current bounce rate I’m experiencing is only 30.89%. What this means is that 70% of people hitting my websites from SU aren’t just seeing it and leaving it, they are sticking around.

In terms of traffic volume I’ve seen in excess of 4,000 visitors in one day which continues for a good few weeks after the initial submission and can gather well over 10,000 is the content is good and can be relative at any period of time. Not all SU traffic brings your stats up that high but it’s quick easy to get a few hundred visitors over a couple of days. Traffic does tend to be higher initially then slowly die down.

Social Step-by-Step

• 1. Registration

Registering at SU is completely free, bear in mind you will have to install a toolbar but this takes up little space and can be easily hidden when you don’t want to see it.

Be aware that your username is likely to show up in Google rankings, and quite highly at that so if you use your company name or personal name, you might not want to go stumbling upon content you might not want people to know about. This can be the same for a marketing company where you don’t want your clients to be traceable via your SU history.

• 2. Building Friends

As with most social sites, you tend to get the most out of them the more you put into them. Becoming a loyal and active SU user means that you should interact with those you know on the site, add them to your friends and maybe even check out the sites they are stumbling. Having more friends allows your stumbles to have more leverage and can bring a lot more traffic then someone who just signed up and doesn’t have any friends.

Of course at the end of the day it is really about the quality content but for something so simple that can work so well, it’s definitely worth adding contacts to your profile. You can do this easily by importing your Email contacts which is something I did.

You don’t only need to add people you know but you can also check out the groups section and befriend people who have similar interests. The benefit of this is that these people are more likely to be interested in the content you are stumbling (the content you are interested in) and overall will be a better contact to have then someone completely random who is more interested in pictures of LOLcats.

• 3. Get Stumbling

Seeing as this is what the site is all about we better include it somewhere ;). Not only is stumbling ‘good for your account’ but it is also really enjoyable. I’ve found some amazing articles on some of my favourite websites that I hadn’t noticed before.

I have no doubt that part of the SU algorithm will be based on how often you stumble or what you stumble i.e. whether it’s the same few sites all the time or a wide variety. I tend to just do a search (rather than categorically) on keywords such as ‘Social Media‘ and I could easily stumble away for a few hours. It’s fun, it’s beneficial and it can make a boring day a bit more enjoyable.

Leveraging Traffic

• Tip 1. Create Quality Content

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in a social media marketing campaign is to try and promote something that just isn’t remarkable, quality content. If you don’t have something good to share then don’t waste time trying to share it. This can be said for other social sites and the truth is, the best way to leverage traffic from SU is to write something unique, create a humorous image or even an interesting video.

It sounds simple but it is something many people fail to do so bare that in mind before trying any of the following tips. There’s nothing worse than spending hours planning your tactics & strategy on content that just isn’t beneficial to anybody. Once you get Stumbling more and more, like any site you can start to see ‘what works’ and what doesn’t work.

• Tip 2. Take Care in Your Submission

If somebody has already submitted your story then don’t worry, you can still stumble it and write a quality review. If somebody hasn’t then take time to do the following.

• Tip 3. Recommend Content to Friends

Remember how I said it was best to add friends who had the same interests as you? Well this tactic is one of the reasons. Although this can be a little annoying and can be used to annoy people it’s really not worth trying to spam people with any old content. If you are constantly stumbling pages about dogs, and your friends are doing the same, then feel free to refer pages about dogs to your friends because they will probably stumble it as well.

This works well because the StumbleUpon algorithm sends traffic based on how many stumbles something gets, therefore if you send a page to a lot of friends and they all stumble it at once you are going to be able to generate a lot of traffic. Just a word of warning once again that if you send them anything spammy, unrelated or poor they won’t stumble it and may never stumble anything you send them again. You never know, they may go as far as removing you from their friends.

• Tip 4. PhotoBlog it

Believe it or not, written text is not the only active area of SU, images play a huge part in the interests of those who use the site and publishing a humorous, breathtaking or unbelievable image can drive even more traffic to your site. Once you install the extension for SU you will notice that when you right-click on pictures you have the option to PhotoBlog them.

It’s recommended that you leave some tags for the image that you submit and a description / review depending on whether it has already been submitted or not. One of the ways to get popular on Digg is to submit stories that have made the Reddit homepage because they are likely to make it on Digg. Well…one of the ways to get lots of Photo-Stumbles is to submit images that have made it onto both Digg and Reddit. Now you can see how things start to link together.

In Conclusion

I love SU, I really do. It’s not like Digg where I sometimes feel I’m only using it so others get to read quality content out there, with SU I find great sites myself and often get traffic from it when others like my content.

I like using the service and I put a lot into it, but I also get a lot back, I don’t think I can say that for many other sites. Please, Please, Please don’t try to fill it with anything and everything, pushing your poor content in the faces of those who were foolish enough to add you.

It’s all about enjoying a service, giving something to others and getting something back. I’ve gotten closer to a lot of great people thanks to the site; SU is for life, not just for Christmas ;).

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