How to Use StumbleUpon? A Basic Guide To Beginners

As i always tell in my all SEO and traffic generation post that there are so many source to get traffic to our blog. Between these sources the most powerful source is Social bookmarking sites. If you are not taking benefit from social sites then your are doing a big mistake. There are lots of social bookmarking sites out there but here we are going to talk about Stumble upon.

What is StumbleUpon?

Stumble Upon is a social website which allows its users a new way to experience the Internet. Instead of searching for specific items on search engines like Google, Stumble Upon users only have to tag specific personal or professional interests and then ‘channel surf’ the web by simply clicking on a button on Stumble Upon tool bar.

Upon doing so, they will be randomly directed to specific websites which adhere to their lists of interests. Users can then choose to tag the webpage they are on or give it a ‘thumbs up‘ or ‘thumbs down‘ to indicate if they want to see it again.

Users can also use the Stumble Upon toolbar as a form of social bookmarking. By surfing the web and tagging or submitting specific websites, each user can keep track of which websites they like and share it with others.

Why Should I use the StumbleUpon?

Simply because it can drive huge numbers of new visitors to your website. Some of these people will love what you do and bookmark your site or sign-up to your newsletter. Others will decide to link to your site from their own, giving you valuable inbound links.

How do I use StumbleUpon?

1. First create an account on StumbleUpon. (www.stumbleupon.com)

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.

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. Don’t be Ghost or stay Connected

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.

Conclusion:

In starting don’t expect large amounts of consistent traffic from StumbleUpon. You may get 5 visitors one day from SU, and 500 the next, but at least download StumbleUpon’s toolbar and give it a spin. If you have a lot of pages on your website or regularly post articles with their own url, then it can be a useful tool.