Using Stumbleupon for free traffic

Stumbleupon is one of the biggest social networks on the internet with aprox 3.5 million users. Most of these users stumble around rather randomly (as the name suggests) and can be guided to your site with a little skill and luck. If you compare stumbleupon with Digg, another large network, you will find that they differ slightly.

If you get traffic from Digg, you will get thousands, you can't get some traffic from digg, either you get lots and lots or you get nothing. It is not this way with stumbleupon, a successful stumble can get you 500 visitors a day for a while, it's more like a small stream of visitors rather then diggs explosion.

On the other hand, it's much easier to get a successful stumble. Ending up on the Digg frontpage is hard wok and it is very difficult while getting the smaller stream of visitors from stumbleupon can be done easily in just a day.

How does it work?

Stumbleupon works by votes and reviews (just as digg does), the more people have voted on your site the more people will stumble upon it. You get a vote by someone going to the page and pressing the thumbs up button in his toolbar (Yes, the toolbar needs to be installed but very many have it). If this is the first time the page is thumbed it's called a discovery and the user is prompted to write a small review and tag the page. A similar review to this one can be made at later points as well but then it's just refered to as a review.

If the tags are good and the site get a few reviews and thumbs up (40 thumbs up goes a long way) you will start getting traffic. Tags that work well with stumbleupon can be for example Humor, Software and Internet. The tags are important because the user can only end up on pages he claim he might be interested in. You get to select topics when you sign up.

How do you get thumbs up?

The idea with stumbleupon is that you should just sit there and hope that random visitors to your site vote for it. This will not work. The only way you can get started with stumbles is that you make sure people stumble the page. In theory this is very easy, you just trade stumbles with people, you stumble my page and I'll stumble yours. In practise this is a bit harder because you need to fin a large number of stumblers prepared to do this.

The best way is to find a webmaster network of some kind, maybe a forum or something similar and send out requests. There are even specialized Stumble forums just for people who wants to trade stumbles. Spend a day or two finding the best stumbleupon forums, 1 will not be enough. You need more people than you can get from 1 forum because you want to add some speed to the stumbling of your site. Post for trades on every place you can find and make sure to work your threads, answer people if they have questions, thank them for stumbling and so on.

If you keep this up for a day or 2 you should start getting traffic from stumbleupon. The best I've managed with stumbleupon is somewhere around 10k visitors in 6 hours. The data isn't that exact because the blog I had submitted got banned from the blognetwork due to too heavy traffic.

What do I do with this traffic?

One thing you might want to know is that stumbleupon traffic doesn't convert very well. It's hard to sell anything to these stumblers but they are a bit more willing to click on links or adds. I'd say an averege conversion (if you have a decent text) should be around 0,5% up to 1% for clicking on a text link. This of course depending a lot on how well the article matches the tags it has gotten.

Except from Google adds or other text links it can be used to get an alexa boost. There are a few out there that actually cares about alexa rank when bying sites or links/adds on sites. If you need a boost, stumbleupon can be a way. The ratio of stumblers that have the alexa toolbar isn't as high as if you would advertise on a webmaster forum but it's not to bad either.