How to attract thousands of visitors through StumbleUpon
Friday, July 2, 2010 at 4:00PM StumbleUpon may just be the traffic goldmine you’ve been looking for
StumbleUpon has a reputation as an idle time waster, and as such is often overlooked as part of a serious strategy to promote web content. But in reality it’s a widely used tool for people to find new, highly targeted content tailored to their interests. In fact, almost 10 million people have jumped on board this discovery tool, recommending over 5.4 billion pages in the last year alone.
When we noticed StumbleUpon was sending us a lot of visitors, we decided to look deeper into how it works and how to enhance traffic from the service. With minimal effort, you can get hundreds, or many more, new visitors. Here is a quick guide on how to get your content to go viral among the stumblers of the world and give your numbers a swift kick in the pants.
How it works
Installing the toolbar puts a “Stumble!” button in your browser. You select the topics you are interested in – say Arts, Marketing and Roleplaying – and when you hit Stumble you are sent to a webpage about one of those topics that other people have recommended. Pages are only registered when a user specifically recommends it. While you’re stumbling along, you also have a thumbs up/down button to pass judgement on the page (if you click thumbs up on an unregistered page, it will open a form for you to submit that page to the database). A page with a lot of thumbs ups will have more people sent to it, and vise versa.
May the best man win
Creating brilliant content is key in all social media, but it’s especially vital with StumbleUpon. If Stumblers aren’t giving you a thumbs up, the service will stop sending people to your site. Put extra effort into creating intriguing headlines and striking visuals as it is in the nature of Stumblers to quickly click away from a page if they don’t think there’s anything of interest. You’ve only got a few seconds to hook them, so make them count.
Be selective with what you submit
Certain kinds of content do well on StumbleUpon. It’s a long haul traffic source, so timeless content is more likely to do well than breaking news. Since visitors by and large don’t know you, the page also needs to work as stand alone content and not require delving deeper into your site. Great big no-no’s include pages that have long load times, protected content that requires a sign up, layouts laden with ads and any page with pop-ups - all of those will send people clicking away immediately.
Advocate stumbling
Put a “Submit” button on your website or blog so people can recommend it with one click, even if they didn’t arrive via StumbleUpon. As many don’t know about the service, it’s also not a bad idea to write a post or article educating people about StumbleUpon and why they should use it.
Cheaters never prosper
If you’re thinking you’ll just register and recommend all your pages yourself, StumbleUpon is way ahead of you. Submitting loads of pages from one site will get your account blacklisted (and they won’t even tell you, it’ll just stop working). The only way to effectively submit your own content is to use StumbleUpon genuinely and often, and be very selective about which of your own pages you submit. Also note that if you have avid fans that recommend all of your pages, the value of each thumbs up will quickly diminish, eventually reaching zero. In short, your recommendations need to be from a wide array of active stumblers.
Or just take the shortcut: pay for stumblers
If you’re strapped for time and want an overnight traffic boost, you can join StumbleUpon’s ad program. You first specify your target audience by category, demographics and geography and StumbleUpon will recommend your content to relevant individuals when they click the Stumble button. But it’s still on you to impress them - the more people that recommend your page, the more traffic you’ll get.
StumbleUpon is one of the most genuine recommender communities where each person can shape the content. If you think you've got the content to get loads of thumbs up, dive in and start stumbling your way up the charts.
Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.
Reader Comments (2)
I agree that it can send heaps of traffic but what kind of traffic are you gaining.If you spend hours creating and optimising content on your site to ensure that you gain great traffic, what value does attracting 'stumblers' or untargeted traffic to your site?
Maybe there is something I am missing... even though it takes very little effort, does it create any value?
Interested in a bit of discussion on this.
I don't think it's fair to say the traffic is untargeted. The page gets categorized by its content, and then only people who have told StumbleUpon they want to see pages on that particular topic get sent there. So, in theory, you only get traffic from people who are interested in what you have to say. And the only way you get a lot of traffic is if people visiting indicate that they like your page and essentially recommend it to others. I wouldn't recommend reshaping a site's content around SU, but it's worth playing around with to see if it works for you as a way to expand your audience.