StumbleUpon is a famous discovery engine which helps us to discover new websites in the world wide web. StumbleUpon helps a lot for the newbie bloggers who need more true and regular readers for their blogs. If a new post or page is submitted to StumbleUpon it starts suggesting it to its users who are stumbling in the same niche to which  the article has been submitted from its community of 10 million users .I as a newbie blogger has benefited a lot by StumbleUpon because it has given my blog around 1.4k visitors in a day even when my blog is just 2months old. So I suggest StumbleUpon to every newbie blogger who like to showcase his blog to rest of the world. Now if you have decided to start stumbling then you must know these tips to get even more traffic to your blog.



First Things First:
The very first thing you need to do is to submit your blog post or page to stumble upon and work on remaining tips and I guarantee that you will get good amount traffic from SU.

Be Active:
StumbleUpon expects you to be an active user in their community to drive traffic to your discoveries. You can be active by discovering websites i.e. stumbling and reviewing the websites by giving thumbs up or thumbs down. It suggests its users your discoveries based on the activity of your StumbleUpon account. So I suggest you to become an active stumbler to get more traffic from StumbleUpon.

Ask For A Thumbs Up:
After submitting your post to SU it first tests by driving a few users to your site and if your post gets thumbs up from some of these users then your content will be suggested to many more. So if you are a newbie blogger you can ask your friends to give some thumbs up for your content in the first days so that your content will be exposed to many others.



Su.pr:
Your account can also be assumed to be active if you use there URL shorten service which provides you with a su.pr short URL. If you share any URL which is shortened using su.pr service then if anyone clicks on it they will be redirected to your page through StumbleUpon domain and even has a StumbleUpon toolbar. Users may easily like your site even if they haven’t installed the SU toolbar.

Follow A Few:
Follow few people in its 10 million user community who belongs to your niche so that you can share your discoveries with them directly to their inbox by sharing it and if they like, your content may get thumbs up which will be an added advantage for you in driving traffic.

Su Badge Helps You:
You can add a stumbleupon badge on your website so that your readers will know about your SU profile and may follow you. Once you have good number of followers belonging to your niche, you can  update them about your posts and can get good reviews.

StumbleUpon is a superior website traffic generation tool. Use it well and you can literally drive thousands of visitors to your website. Of course to maximize StumbleUpon traffic, you need to create a strategy.

Here are five steps to maximize StumbleUpon traffic :

Step #1 Create StumbleUpon Traffic
StumbleUpon is a bookmarking site and social networking site. This means like other social networking sites, how you interact and the content you provide your “friends” have an impact on the effectiveness of your efforts.

To create StumbleUpon traffic, you need to spend time interacting on the website. It’s also important to create valuable, stumbleable content. Pay attention to the pages your target audience stumbles. What do they respond to? How can you create content that people respond to and will stumble willingly?

Step #2 Integrate StumbleUpon into your traffic strategy
Most traffic generation strategies include a variety of tactics. If you’re using StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your website then it’s important to integrate it into your traffic generation strategy.
For example, if you’re using PPC to drive traffic to your website, you might want to consider using StumbleUpon’s advertising program as well. Test and track effectiveness of the two campaigns to determine which provides the best results.

Additionally, use it with your other social networking sites and your opt-in list. StumbleUpon offers a unique Share option. This feature allows you to share a Stumble site you’ve approved with Facebook or Twitter. You can also choose to share with others or send the link instantly to an email address.

Step #3 Integrate StumbleUpon into your content strategy
Your content strategy is likely designed to accomplish a number of things including boosting your credibility, driving traffic, and generating awareness. For example, your Squidoo content can be Stumbled for more awareness and traffic.

Step #4 Tag Appropriately
Tagging is essential both for Stumbling your own website pages but also for other website pages. This is a basic SEO strategy for your website and it applies to your StumbleUpon strategy too. Be sure, whenever possible, to apply relevant albeit broad, StumbleUpon tags to your website reviews. This enables a more user friendly experience, better StumbleUpon interactions, and helps drive traffic to your website.

Step #5 Integrate StumbleUpon Into Your Website
StumbleUpon buttons are available and play an important role in promoting your website content for stumbling. You can choose from a variety of badges and buttons, create the code, and insert it right onto your website.

Maximizing StumbleUpon traffic is a straight forward process if you follow a few simple strategies. Take these five steps, interact in the StumbleUpon community and become part of the growing StumbleUpon wave! Use this amazing tool for all it’s worth to build and grow your business.

Learn how StumbleUpon can help your business! For super quick pointers that will save your time and fast-track your way to StumbleUpon proficiency and traffic, get the report “How StumbleUpon Benefits Your Business” at .www.StumbleTrafficReport.com.

Stumbleupon & Digg Thumbnail Maker is a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to specifically select a thumbnail for a post when your post is submitted to some social media sites.

StumbleUpon for example, it automatically create a thumbnail & attach to users ‘favorite’ when the web page is submitted. However, it does not always create a image thumbnail as what we want. Sometime, it just capture the whole web page or even takes the image ad on your page & use it as thumbnail.

Without any modification to the web page, we will have little control over what image should be used for the thumbnail. If the thumbnail is wrongly selected, the ‘favorite’ will becomes less interesting & it will attracts less clicks or stumbles. The following illustration shows two difference thumbnails from techmiliue.com submitted to Stumbleupon, which one do you want to click first?

Use this plugin to insert some image & html herder tags into the post for the social media sites like Stumbleupon or Digg to pick up.

Latest Version: 1.0

Here are some features that come with this plugin:

• The plugin will ONLY inserts the thumbnail image specify by you on the fly right before the contents when your post is submitted to Stumbleupon. At all other times, the thumbnail image is not included in your post.
• A header tag is inserted to the header of your post for Digg submission.
• You can switch to javascript instead of php for Stumbleupon website detection. This is useful when you have other cache plugin installed, such as ‘WP Super Cache’, etc. as most of the time your web pages are static.
• You can specify different thumbnail image for different post.

Download

The Quick Overview

Screen shot showing the editing option right under the ‘Edit Post’ panel.

Link To TechMilieu.com

If you believe that Stumbleupon & Digg Thumbnail Maker plugin is valuable to you, than a link from your blog to http://techmilieu.com/ would be highly appreciated. You can show your support by simply copy one of the HTML code below & paste into your pages. This will help spread the words, thanks.

Text Link : TechMilieu.com
TechMilieu.com

Tiny Button : 

Feel free to use it in your blogs. Please feedback for any bug you might have found, or any suggestion you like to add. Hope this plugin which have benefited me would benefit you as well. Also, check out my other WordPress plugin: Quick Adsense

In the land of online advertising, content based and less intrusive are two buzzwords. Enter StumbleUpon's ad platform, which leverages ads-as-content type marketing and now the company reports 20% growth since March. The platform is now running about 3,000 daily campaigns with 2,000 active users (monthly).

More than 40,000 advertisers have worked within the StumbleUpon ad interface to engage demographically targeted consumers through content based advertising.

"We're able to match each sponsored page to the users most likely to enjoy it by taking into account their expressed preferences as well as the interest-level relationships between them and other users," said Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon founder and CEO. "This personalized approach results in over 70 percent of paid placements receiving a positive endorsement - which we call a 'thumb-up'- from viewers. No other interest-based ad platform so effectively connects advertisers to potential customers while delivering viral traffic to a like-minded audience."

According to the company, the year over year ad inclusion rate is now around 30%.

One advertiser, Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, used StumbleUpon's platform to engage consumers in their great grilled cheese debate. To help determine, through consumer input, on which state's cheese was the best, the brand used StumbleUpon to promote their Grilled Cheese Academy website. In two months, website views reached 176,000 with a total of 8,000 engagement hours (based on time spent on-site).

"By leveraging StumbleUpon, we garnered twice the site visits and engagement rates expected for this campaign," said Nick Newlin, Interactive Director for Shine Advertising, the agency working with Wisconsin Milk Marketing. "[The platform] offered us the chance to share content from the Grilled Cheese Academy...with audiences that were relevant and engaged, which increased results beyond...traditional...efforts."

Adding the Stumbleupon extension to Google Chrome is easy, but does it work as well on the new browser as it does on Firefox or Internet Explorer? If you want to find out, and have the Google Chrome browser already, then adding an extension such as StumbleUpon is quite straightforward.

Just click the spanner icon on the top right hand corner of the tool bar to access the Google Chrome Tools options. When the drop-down menu appears, choose extensions. You will see a list of all your current extensions you have installed there. Scroll down to the end, and at the right hand corner you will see a link to add an extension.


Simply type in StumbleUpon into the search window that opens up and click on the title for more information, and to install. At this point, different users may have different experiences. My experience with it was that it was no way as quick or easy as on Firefox or Internet Explorer. I straight away got an error window saying ‘problem handling stumble.’ To test the StumbleUpon toolbar, I chose a politics news story and clicked the Stumble button. The response was slow and made my Acer notebook lag, Also, the Stumble page then led me to an advertisement for a kitchen gadget. 


I was beginning to understand other comments I had heard that the extension needed frequent refreshing updating or refreshing. I also had similar problems to friends who had  difficulty sharing, despite the enhanced facility to share with multiple users.

Google are apparently working fast to resolve all these issues with different programs and the extension has improved already. StumbleUpon has always been great for finding bright new content on hobbies and different fields of study. The Stumbling button offers up a variety of related sites, but on Chrome I think it still needs some work. Although sharing with other users is more comprehensive, the Share button doesn't always work first time. It's useful for some people. I, however, have now un-installed StumbleUpon as Google Chrome is working so well for me that I don’t want anything heavy or lagging on it. I will wait for the improved version, and I haven’t really missed StumbleUpon yet. Other good sharing extensions which do work well include Shareaholic, and of course you can always share pages by posting on Twitter via Chromed Bird and via Facebook.

Most of us are thinking that social bookmarking is just way to build backlinks (or to get your pages indexed ASAP). To be frank, your thoughts are absolutely wrong. Actually, social bookmarking sites will help your blog to reach a better audience. In less words, it can bring you a lot of traffic than what you dream. It will happen only if you are applying some special tips (I call it as tactics). Well, I’m gonna teach you those tactics in this post. Of course, its all about Stumbleupon since it is the best and easiest traffic driving SB site. Remember: this is a tested and working technique.

Just follow the steps and see how it works.

1. Register an account at StumbleUpon.com
2. Don’t submit a lot of bookmarks in the first 2 weeks (for promoting your blog). Just submit 3 or 4 of your posts (that must be interesting).
3. Do stumble few articles that are previously submitted by other people.
4. Comment on as many bookmarks that you can. Make sure that stumbles are related to your niche.
5. Subscribe to the stumblers those who are stumbling about your niche. Of course, be friendly with them. Message them that you’re following them and stumbling their submissions. Most probably, they will follow you back.
6. Unlike twitter, each followers are very important in SU. A single great follower is enough to bring even 1000s of traffic to your submission.
7. After 2 weeks or so, your profile will be subscribed by at least 10 stumblers. So, start submitting new stories and most probably, your stumbles will get re-stumbled by your followers. If any of your followers do that, that follower’s followers will do that and it will go like a ring! Just image the traffic if your followers are above 1000!
8. Keep stumble button below your blog and recommend stumbling to your friends and readers.
9. Use su.pr as the URL shortener while sharing your post on Twitter and Facebook. By doing that, your StumbleUpon button will show a lot of stumble count 
10. At last, the hardest tactic: Rinse and repeat this technique 

So, what do you think? You gonna work this out?

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.

Social bookmarking doesn’t being and end with Delicious. StumbleUpon is one of the web’s most powerful tools in getting your website seen by tons of visitors. Not only does StumbleUpon bring traffic to your website, but it brings relevant traffic that your visitors are looking for who are more likely to come back to your site later.

So how is StumbleUpon different from other social sites? StumbleUpon has re-invented web browsing by delivering quality websites to users at the click of their mouse. The StumbleUpon toolbar allows users to rate content by clicking “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” which effects how popular the website is overall.

One of the great aspects about StumbleUpon is the amount of social features that other social bookmarking sites lack. For instance users can choose their interests so the Stumble button only serves relevant websites. Users may also add friends and see their friends’ favorite websites while they surf. Users can even join groups based on interests and share websites with other members.

If you’re getting started with StumbleUpon, install the toolbar and sign up for an account. The toolbar is compatible with Firefox and IE browsers. Once you’ve joined and installed the toolbar, start stumbling to get a feel for how it works. After that try to submit your favorite sites by clicking the “thumbs up” button to build credibility on your StumbleUpon account.

While it’s occasionally acceptable to submit your own website to StumbleUpon, it’s best to let other users submit it naturally. Your site won’t get circulated as widely if it’s only submitted by the same user. StumbleUpon can create a powerful boost in traffic if it’s used as part of your overall web marketing strategy. If you’re looking to generate natural StumbleUpon traffic from users, it’s important to include Stumble buttons on your webpage. These buttons make it easier for visitors to thumbs up your website, even if they’re not at a computer with a StumbleUpon toolbar installed.

So what are the main reasons you should use StumbleUpon? Traffic, traffic, traffic. If a site becomes popular on StumbleUpon the surge in traffic to your site happens fast. All of these new visits can potentially boost your blog’s reader base. And of course all of this new traffic has the potential to turn into backlinks from other blogs who come across your content. So there you have it, great ways to drive more traffic to your website with StumbleUpon and the StumbleUpon button.

Twitter generates nearly 10 percent of social media global hits to websites, according to new research from StatCounter.

The report found that Facebook is still the main source of traffic to global websites with almost half (48%) ofsocial media hits followed by StumbleUpon with 25 percent.

The data for March is based on 13 billion page views across the StatCounter network of member sites. The analytics firm just recently added social media to the categories its tracks.

 "From a business perspective the findings suggest that there is merit in having a corporate Facebook page or Twitter account," said Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter.

"The surprise packet is StumbleUpon, which over the past year has been consistently in the top two SocialMedia sites in terms of generating global website traffic. Indeed, in the US in March StumbleUpon was number one ahead of Facebook in terms of website traffic generation."

The top social media sites to generate global website traffic after Facebook, StumbleUpon and Twitter are YouTube (6%), reddit (4%), Digg (2%) and MySpace (2%).

"Social Media market share fluctuates a lot more than browser or search statistics," said Cullen.

"For example, Facebook peaked over Christmas and the New Year with almost three quarters of the total, perhaps reflecting its important role in communications between families and friends."

The Tool that Drives Long-Term Traffic To Your Website -  And Encourages More People to Stay and Consume Your Content

The Latest Stumbleupon Information:

How to StumbleUpon For Business Awareness 7 StumbleUpon Tips and Expert Strategies How to Maximize StumbleUpon Traffic Creating Your StumbleUpon Strategy Why Use StumbleUpon

Did you know that Stumbleupon will save you time - not waste it?
This was the astonishing discovery I made, back when I first checked it out!

What’s more, its ability to integrate and post to multiple social networks (painlessly!) also saved me time working Facebook and Twitter – while not actually taking my “presence” away from them in the slightest. In fact, it helped me become more consistent with my social networking. (There’s nothing worse than being a “hit-and-run” social networker, blitzing in to drop a load of posts, then disappearing again for six days – or weeks!)
StumbleUpon actually increased my Facebook and Twitter presence – even as it was saving me time by allowing me the freedom of not even logging in to either!

And there are 2 more two rock-solid reasons for the big conservation of time:

• StumbleUpon is drop-dead easy to manage

• It helped me find genuinely original material – and cross post it with one click

(And when I say “one click”, I really do mean “one click!”)  

No setting up messy interfaces.  No massive learning curves or nasty little surprises.

And best of all…

No Spending Hours Looking for Content that will Thrill Your Readers – Content that Somehow Others Always Seem to Find

Because you can now find sites they will genuinely thank you for in minutes!

• No more leaving a lame, hurried post on Facebook that is met with resounding silence.

• No more logging in and out of multiple social networks to share the same link.

If you’re using StumbleUpon for your business,or you want to learn how, you may want quick access to the little refinements that give you an edge over competitors – and have you stumbling like a pro, efficiently and with results, straight away.

CLICK HERE for quick pointers with screenshots to save your time and fast-track your way to StumbleUpon proficiency.