Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

How to Use StumbleUpon to Promote

June 29, 2007 | Marketing, Technical, Traffic

StumbleUponA few months ago, I signed up for StumbleUpon. I downloaded and installed the toolbar on Firefox and started surfing. Pretty cool. However, I had seen a few people talking about using StumbleUpon for promotional purposes on their websites, with apparent success. Some were talking about driving thousands of visitors PER DAY to their sites using the system. But, I could not find any clear information on what needs to be done to make that happen. I mean, I can use StumbleUpon as an end user all day long, but what do I really need to do to use it to drive traffic to my own site?

I did some research into this and I thought I’d pass it along.

What is It?

StumbleUpon is a social website which allows users to share and recommend websites that they find in a networked setting. When you sign up for the service (for free), you will install a toolbar to your browser. The network of sites is organized by user-generated tags, not by a search engine spider. So, it provides a way for you to view what others have found cool, organized by tags so surfers can find sites in their own interests. The primary way of getting around is the “Stumble” button in the toolbar. When you press that button, you are taken to a random website that was “stumbled” by others and that fall within the areas of interest you define at StumbleUpon.

From an end user perspective, its a huge time waster. I can spend hours “stumbling” around the net randomly and discovering all kinds of great sites I knew nothing about previously. Getting started is easy. Just head on over there and create an account and install the toolbar. Nothing more to it.

What About Promo?

StumbleUpon is known for being able to generate massive amounts of traffic to a website. It all starts with somebody “stumbling” your website. Essentially, this is done by one of your readers clicking the “I Like it!” button on the toolbar while on your site. They’re giving you a thumbs up when you do that, and that puts your site in the network. If they are the first ones to vote for your page, then they will get a dialog box saying that they discovered the website. They will be prompted for a quick review and for a series of tags which best fit your site. Once they have “discovered” your site, your site is then available for other StumbleUpon users to surf into using the toolbar.

It should be noted here that because of the somewhat random nature of the network, visitors that you get from StumbleUpon are likely to give you a high bounce rate. The toolbar essentially allows the reader to “channel surf”. And just like on television, you tend to flip quickly through the channels until you find something that grabs your eye. Well, its EXACTLY the same with the Stumbleupon toolbar. You will find that StumbleUpon visitors are:

  • Fickle as hell with a very high chance of moving on quickly (but you can minimize this with some work…see below)
  • From all over the place
  • Won’t really click on any ads

So, I’m certainly not saying that StumbleUpon viewers are high-value, qualified traffic. But, its still traffic and you can do what you can to make them more qualified once they arrive. A couple of things you have going for you are the fact that SU users come in based on interest. Plus, unlike one trick ponies like Digg that are good for a spike of traffic, SU can actually provide a pretty steady stream of traffic.

How To Make Your Site “Sticky”

Given the fickle nature of a StumbleUpon viewer, you obviously need to do what you can to make your site stand out. Such things include:

  • Having a nice web design. Viewers are most attracted by professional web designs. Its just like channel surfing, remember.
  • Having craploads of content. You want to have a lot of content to offer so that they cannot see all your site has to offer on one, short visit. You need to WOW them and cause them to want to bookmark you and come back (or hit that “I like it” button).
  • Limit the Ads. Advertising is necessary, but don’t make it outweigh the content. That’s asking for a sure bounce.
  • Prominently ask for the subscription. You want it to be extremely obvious how to subscribe to your newsletter or RSS feed. For many, that will be the only way they remember your site once they’ve stumbled onto it.

What To Expect

Some report some awesome numbers. This article from SEOmoz.org discusses how he seeded StumbleUpon with a linkbait article he wrote and got over 13,000 visitors to the article in 5 days. Wholly crap, batman.

Now, don’t expect those kinds of numbers easily. There’s nothing magic about this. I am not writing to you from the perspective of having gotten thousands of visitors from StumbleUpon in that amount of time. But, in looking at this, there are some things that you can control and do that increase your exposure and likelihood of seeing nice traffic spikes.

How Can I Rake in the Visitors?

Well, like Google StumbleUpon does not just come right out and say what to do to get favored. It’s like the PageRank algorithm at Google. If the exact formula was known, there’d be no mystery to it. We can kind of figure it out, though, based on observation. So, based on my research thus far, here are the things I see that can be done to get the most bang out of StumbleUpon.

  • Get a bunch of users to click the “I Like It” button on your page. But, really work for that rather than cross your fingers and hope. Offering up some serious linkbait is your best change of getting that to happen. Do something to WOW the viewer and you have a much higher chance of getting them to click the magic button. And the more people that do that, the higher “ranked” your site will be with StumbleUpon and the more traffic you get.
  • Get others to “like” your site. You can seed StumbleUpon by submitting your own site, however don’t expect to get any serious traffic until others begin to stumble your site.
  • Build up your network. The more “friends” you build up for your StumbleUpon profile, the more stumblers will notice your stuff. When you check out your own profile, you will get a list of “suggested friends”. If you don’t have this, its likely because you have not been very active and thus have not trained StumbleUpon on your interests. But, once that is defined, you will get suggested friends based on your interests. And, you can add them as a friend at the click of a button.
  • Participate. Don’t just submit your own sites. Get out there and vote on other people’s sites as well. Remember, this is a community based on interest. So, when you “stumble” a site, you are putting that site in front of the eyeballs of other people that share your interest. If all you do is submit your own sites, the community will catch on. But, if you stumble others, your value and weight as a member increases.
  • Choose good tags when you tag a site. Try to keep the tags broad. More specific tagging probably won’t work very well.
  • Put a Stumble button onto your site to remind people to vote for your site.
  • You can form a group of like-minded webmasters who can stumble each other. Remember, votes by people OTHER than yourself are better, but there’s really nothing keeping you from exchanging stumbles with other webmasters and bloggers.
  • You can always go the paid route if you’re up for it. It starts at 5 cents per lead.
  • Take advantage of some StumbleUpon tools like buttons and Wordpress plug-ins.

If you get enough positive stumbles from your visitors, your site can make it onto the StumbleBuzz site. That’s a good, PR7 site that will post a direct link to your site if you get onto that page. Like Digg, its based on user votes.

More Reading

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

  1. StumbleUpon – Good For Promo?
  2. 10,000 Page Views From StumbleUpon in One Day
  3. The Digg Effect
  4. Using Content Hubs to Promote
  5. 10 Tips for Web Success
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  • Great info, but there are some "basic" rule. I use Stumble but I can't find an effective way to promote. Thanks
  • David, I would have to say, after your wildly successful article "Why Nobody Cares About Your Blog", you don't even need to use Stumbleupon!

    Thrilled to have discovered your site.
  • Awesome info, I have been usung Stumbleupon for a couple of years and had been wondering on how to use it to my advantage
  • I've been using Stumble Upon for a while, but I'm not active, and I have't been trying hard to promote my blogs or my posts. That's really because I can't seem to figure out how.

    I don't have a lot of "friends" on SU, and I usually stumble my own posts first, and that's probably the problem.

    Do you ask people to stumble your posts first, or do you always stumble your own posts?

    - jens -
  • Thanks for this article. I discovered stumbleupon tonight and I'm finding it quite addictive. I'm hoping it will be a more useful promotional tool than twitter, which I think functions poorly and is, quite frankly, oversaturated with rubbish.

    Just to say your article was very concise and useful, but there was a minor typo I couldn't help noticing; wholly crap, batman = completely crap, batman. 'Holy crap' is actually what you're after. Sorry, I hate to be pedantic, but I thought this was a bit of an unfortunate one :)
  • One thing that isn't mentioned here and is driving me wild is how to find one of your referenced pages on the StumbleUpon website. I've been getting a steady stream of traffic for one of my articles, and I'd like to see if it has been commented upon on the SU website, but I can't find it at all! Any ideas about how you go about doing this?
  • I've been using StumbleUpon for some time, but some of the info in your article was completely new to me. I'll try the tips and see how much it improves my traffic. Thanks for the post.
  • Interesting post on StumbleUpon. I realize it is a couple of years old now so was just wondering whether your opinion of it is still the same today? Do you still make use of it? Is it another area of the Web2.0 scene that is being overly abused and spammed?
  • binyamin butler
    Just a few lines to let you know that after scrutinizing your site; I was pleased with the selflessness of your contributions; esp. your advice on promoting through Stumble upon. The address of my proposed website is: (sonoftherighthand.netfirms.com) which I will be going public with in the near future; being as I believe that the content of my site is one of a kind; even though there seemingly are an overkill of religious practitioners on the web, and in every other place except Hell where they belong. Oh, concerning your views on O'Obama; I will prophetically tell you this: Watch him and the deft moves that he shall be making very closely; for he is a man of destiny such as the world will only see one of his kind.
  • In regards to social media converting to rss subscribers, I have found that niche SM sites convert much better then the bigger names.

    Yes they bring traffic; you may get 4-5 comments and 3-4 clicks on adds and 3-4 subscribers per 1000 via SU. Though the question is it really worth it?
  • It's exciting to see thousands of visitors come to your website from stumbleupon, but I have never seen many ad clicks or signups from these visitors. Your best bet to make a return on SU visitors is probably with CPM ads.
  • Great article. I've been getting about 3,000 monthly referrals from SU without doing a thing to promote my site through SU. With the techniques you mention I can see that SU can be a real gold mine.
  • Interesting stuff - many thanks for posting. I have to say that I had much more luck finding out what Stumbleupon was actually supposed to be for from here than I did from their own homepage.
  • I have tried quite hard on stumble upon but not sure about the results, my blog stats shows quite low number of referrals from SU, but the page I have submitted on SU actually viewed several times more than the number of referral, not sure why it is like that.
  • Rob: I would stumble the post itself, not your homepage.
  • Thanks for the advice, Dave. I set mine up over the weekend. If I read correctly, you stumble all of your new posts or just your home page?
    Rob
  • Hi David,

    This is a great site. I found you from Problogger. I am checking out a lot of your articles. As a fairly active user of SU I found this interesting. I think its spot on except for one thing....

    You didn't really say anything about subscribing to favorites. This is one of the most important parts of the SU experience. When I go to my home page I see the stuff of people I have subscribed to that they have fav'd in the past couple of hours. I surf those sites and I rarely use the Stumble button.

    The more active users all use subscribe to favorites a lot. This can't be underestimated. They are the ones you want finding your site because its more viral. They are the ones that get it voted high enough to gain traction and for SU to start loading that article in the random Stumble mix.

    Food for thought...

    Cheers,
    Jeremy
  • Good research. I got stumbled one time. It was an article on Warren Buffet that I did, and I guess, it caught like hot fire.

    The traffic was basically meaningless though. Upwards of 5K a day at the highest hits. But they really did not click on Google ads or buy any of the CPAs I had running. Makes you wonder sometimes if the surge of traffic is worth the bandwidth.
  • Great Article!! Thanks for sharing :)
  • I just had to comment back on the above post. I had the code wrong. The directions for the code are confusing! When I finally got it right - I see that someone already discovered me back in Sept. of 2004!
  • I just signed up with SU and installed the button on my website. I clicked on it to see if it worked and tried to write a review and I got an error message: The page you are submitting is not accessible (http error 404). I don't know if my button code is wrong or if we can no longer submit our own sites.
  • David:

    I found your article from a google search that I did on this issue today.
    Kind of interesting as I pretty much figured out this process on my own (with some work). Just to verify, I did the search and found you here.
    Although I have not actually "Stumbled" my own site just yet, I will do so and if I have anywhere near the results mentioned here, I will report my results.
    It's nice to know that I must be on the right track if so many others have had such results!

    Jay
  • I get also so much Traffic from Stumbleupon, its just great. I learned some new stuff trough your tips and just wanted to thank you for this great article.
  • David:

    I found your site through a google search using "how tomake use of stumbleupon." YOur article was interesting but it still left me perplexed as to how I suddenly got a huge spike in traffic from SU yesterday. According to Google Analytics, the day before I had a measly 40 visitors and then suddenly yesterday it shot up to 216, mostly from SU. I am trying in vain to figure out how exactly that happened.

    Of course, I'm not complaining-I'm actually THRILLED. But, but, but, SU does not really give very helpful hints on how to find out more about SU traffic or where they came from. And believe it or not, I'm still trying to figure this thing out. SU's user interface is not 200 percent easy to figure out. There are a lot of missing gaps like helping SU users learn more about SU traffic, what made traffic spike and how to make it happen more often.

    Can you lead me in the right direction on how to figure all this out? Thanks!
  • StumbleUpon is awesome! I typically get more than half of my daily traffic from SU, sometimes a lot more. Some of my visitors stop long enough to leave a comment on my blog, read an article, or contact me for more information.

    Because SU is so valuable, I purposely stumble as many pages as possible for each of my mutual friends. Together, I am sure we do a great job of helping each other out.
  • Great article! Thanks! That's how SU works.
  • I have always been wondering how to promote a site with StumbleUpon and this article comes in very handy. Thanks for it.
  • I think with most of these things, you have to be ready to capitalise on the short-term gain from the traffic you receive from StumbleUpon. Personally, I think encouraging RSS subscribers is the best bet, as they'll hopefully result in long-term visitors. Obviously any backlinks gained from other bloggers don't hurt either...
  • David
    Gerard, you know, I didn't even notice the nofollows on those links. That would alleviate any search engine benefit from showing up there. So, I guess getting onto the buzz page is kind of like the Digg homepage now.
  • Loved your post David, but a small correction - the buzz.stumbleupon.com site actually applies nofollow to all of the links, so there's little chance of any link juice from those pages. Besides, the links are only there short term, so any effect would be negligible.

    On the plus side, I've got on Stumble Buzz before, and it definitely generates a great spike in traffic. For a while, anyway.
  • The Stumbleupon user interface could definitely use some work. Mostly their problems are because that lack of intuition on the website back end. It would be nice if their stumble toolbar remembered the categories I usually submit to rather than having to scroll through a long list of topics. Additionally, by limiting users to submit to specific categorical topics rather than directly by tagging it kind of kills the motivation. Their search feature only brings back a few results and it would be nice if they had a Digg type method for displaying articles. I get that the idea is to stumble but what if I want to display all recent articles about a certain topic? No luck.
  • Wow I didn't know that Stumbleupon is such a great tool! I did install the plug-in for Firefox, but don't really know how to use it.
    Thanks for providing the tips!
  • Hi David,
    great tips. As I was also wondering how people manage to get traffic using stumbleupon.
    Now I will actively participate in stumbling in the network!
    Thanks.
  • Thanks for the great article. I looked into the whole stumble thing but never actually tried using it. A follow up posting on using Digg and we're all set!
  • Hi, I'm Crystal and I'm a StumbleUpon addict - thanks a lot, David. One more thing I need to keep me chained to my computer;)
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