If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get your blog updates by email. Thanks for visiting!
One of the greatest ways for any webmaster to get new visitors for free is Stumbleupon. I have been using this Firefox addon for months now, and the simplicity and ability to send as much traffic as it does amazes me. For websites that you like, users of StumbleUpon “thumbs up” the site, and it sends tons of stumblers to that website who are interested in those topics. For webmasters, it is a common idea to “thumbs up” your own site for an instant burst in traffic, but other than that one time traffic flow, I have created a list of how to ab(use) Stumbleupon to get the maximum amount of traffic without spending a dollar!
Benefits of StumbleUpon:
- You can select the exact niche that sends these visitors, so if your blog is about investing, you will get tons of people who enjoy “investing” sites, which turns into excellent clickthrough rates for your ads.
- If you do go on the “paying” route, it is far cheaper than most advertising solutions. (I still recommend the free way, as it is dead simple).
- It can help anyone who owns a website
- It is completely free
- You can learn the entire ups and downs in 15 minutes (by reading this post in its entirety)
- Tons more, take a look for yourself
The guide to (ab)using Stumbleupon for all it’s worth:
- 1. Sign up for Stumbleupon.
- 2. Register on forums.digitalpoint.com, and post a thread in the freebies section stating that you will stumble anyones website if they add you as a stumble friend. (http://*YOUR_USERNAME*.stumbleupon.com). For example, mine is raithe1337.stumbleupon.com.
- 3. After you have accumulated a good number of friends, the sites you stumble now get an even larger burst of traffic to them. My stumble account has over 300 friends, but I started to notice my stumble visitors tripling when I reached 200 friends, so make that a monthly goal.
- 4. If you own a blog, exchange reviews of websites with other blogs, and then when their blog’s first post is about you, stumble their main page as well as the exact URL of the post. This will give them “2 stumbles” to their website, sending them a flood of visitors, but it will also help you in that those hundreds of visitors will be reading a review of your website.
- 5. StumbleUpon will not let you stumble your own site with hundreds of pages, until you stumble 9 other pages. With the technique shown in #4, for every 9 stumbles you make on blogs about your own, you will be allowed to stumble another one of your own pages.
- 6. Join stumble exchanges. You can make a thread on the digitalpoint freebies section, or join a stumble exchange website such as SUExchange.com, or StumbleXChange.com. People will stumble your pages in return for you stumbling theres. Both of you result in tons of free visitors, so it is mutually exclusive.
- 7. If you get a lot of stumbles in a small period of time, you get listed on the Stumble Buzz page, which will send you tons more free traffic. To raise your chances of getting on this page, only stumble your best websites or blog posts, so that with the thousands of visitors that Stumbleupon sends you, they have the highest chance of also giving you a thumbs up, sending thousands more and making your content go viral.
- 8. Stumbling sites does not cost you anything, so I recommend stumbling every website that links to your website, because the better that those sites do, the better they help you. This will also make the owners of those sites like you more if you are sending them tons of traffic. Like I said earlier, mutually exclusive.
- 9. If you own a blog or an interesting website, you can provide a stumble upon button on every post. Your readers generally shouldn’t mind, and it has the potential to send you lots more easy traffic. If your blog is big enough already, I don’t recommend this because I feel you should only stumble “your best content”. The call is yours to make though.
- 10. Like I said with stumbling sites that link to yours, another really “evil” trick is to get around that “you can only stumble another page on your website if you stumble at least 9 external sites” problem is to stumble your Digg posts, your own Stumbleupon profile, your forum profiles, your Myspace/Facebook pages, forum posts about your site, etc etc. Not only does this get around the stumbling limit, but it will also send you some more visitors.
Now obviously, like everything there is a few downfalls:
- 1. The traffic is inconsistent. You will get a burst of traffic one time, but then it idles down to very little, or if you write good content consistently, it will be a series of traffic spikes.
- 2. The links from the stumble pages are nofollow, so it does not help your search engine optimization
- 3. It takes up a pretty big portion on your browser
It is completely free, so stop worrying about the three downfalls and start using it to make some money!
*Update:
My fellow Minnesotan over at digitalpoint has written a blog post which has introduced me to a new “stumble friend adding website”. If you are interested, head on over to MyStumbleFriends.
Ok..great post! Who wants to exchange stumbles..lmao
Nice post. But isn’t this what all we DP members have been doing for quite a while?
Jokes apart, I read somewhere that SU is targeting webmaster forums like DP and whoever does this “exchange” stuff will be banned from SU or something like that. Is it true?
Thanks for the tips, never knew that there were stumble exchange websites.
Excellent article. Recently I started to use SU, and seem that traffic getting from there is amazing, but not constant. Now my SU profile is PR4 and with the number of friends increasing traffic will also increasing.
I have heard no such thing. I know they are stopping people from stumbling the stumble exchange websites, but so far I have been using it for months without problem. As with any third party program, only time will tell.
Great post!
Thanks I am gonna try this out.
Very useful article…I do stumble but I prefer Technorati…
Really helpful and got lots on StumbleUpon. If you want you can add me as your friend in StumbleUpon. Here is mine, http://espresons.stumbleupon.com/
@Sarbarth: Done, as well as stumbled your site.
Thats a lot of cool information to getting started with SU. Good article and good luck with the blog too. but you really did not share methods to abuse SU though
lol
Sarbarth added as a friend
anyone feel free to add me and ill add you back
http://soulbleed662.stumbleupon.com/
thanks for this article. I had self stumbled my humble blog with only the intention of trying to get reactions so I could improve my posts….little did I know that it would lead to what seems to be getting banned from stumble….Im anxious to try what was posted here. I can understand the fear of trying to use stumble as a way to get out spam,
Yes, StumbleUpon is a great thing. I wrote my own post about my success with StumbleUpon. The traffic spike has been going on for 8 days strong now!
Excellent post (will be digging and stumbling this in a moment right after I click “Post Comment” >:¬} ok I know ..
But aside from that I have enjoyed reading this blog in general for its honesty. The amount of blogs I see with posts on how to this or that and they are all worse then spam because they don’t contain the info.
Well Done
As an aside, I have a newvine page (service and site I love) but with all my SU, Digg’s Newsvine, and other related large posts I do the SU on them and also manual technorati ping (started doing this) and it finds and adds authority.
Also email me where you would like a free link on my blog
http://www.gogan.com/blog/
http://alex-gogan.newsvine.com/ (also seed this page after post so click on the link to see potential
http://alexgogan.stumbleupon.com/
http://digg.com/users/alexgogan
http://technorati.com/people/technorati/alexgogan
@Alex: Thanks, any blogroll links are greatly appreciated. =)
Its nice to see you also one of those who like DP’s forums.
And this trick really works i have used it many times.
Haroon
[…] to social networking sites (Stumbleupon, Mixx, […]
[…] of the free Stumbleupon toolbar. I have always received ample amounts of free traffic from the use and abuse Stumbleupon technique, but I have never tested the paid version until now. I decided to do a $60 test run to see what […]
[…] Start a stumble exchange thread in the freebies thread. This will also help bring lots of traffic to your blog. If you want more tips to build traffic with this, read my post on How to Use and Abuse Stumbleupon […]
nice post. i´ve been using this tool and it´s very worth for my site
Hey, nice post man, I wasn’t fully aware of the amount of friends needed to see a decent traffic spike. I have been linking to loads of sites by other bookmarking and social networking sites too. I have a nice list of my profile pages on my blog (http://blog.sa-nethost.com/my-social-profile-pages.htm). If you or anyone ‘friends’ me, I will gladly participate in a mutual ‘link love fest’!
As I said, nice post….
[…] a post I really liked, and apparently John did to as it was one of his recommended articles, about using StumbleUpon to bring in traffic to your site. While the traffic will likely come in spikes if you blog on a regular basis you can build up a […]
great post.
thanks for sharing this info
btw, I stumbled it!
Wow, great post! Thanks for the info.
Thanks for the info. I have learned something from you
Great post, very educating, liked it a lot.
I would advice anybody who has a website to use stumbleup. The site has given me so much traffic at some point i wanted to unstumble an article someone had stumbled because the huge traffic i got from stumbleupon was eating up all my band width.
I went from an average of 50 visits a day to 6000 visits thru stumbleupon. I didn’t stumble the article that brought me all that traffic myself someone else did.
Just to let you know of a new SU exchange website, which is StumbleUdon.com (not a typo: UDON, not UPON)
The exchanges are automatic
Hi there
Great article
Feel free to add me as a friend and I will return the favour!
http://planetofrock.stumbleupon.com/
great post.. it is true that there are a lot of advantages to using stumbleupon! I like the fact that I can target my viewers with tags…
StumbleUpon has sent some traffic my way, but I’m working on different formulas to write some truly viral posts. Hopefully I’ll hit the right chord and get a successful linkbait create.