Nigerian Entrepreneur

If you want free quality traffic for your blog or website, I suggest you check out StumbleUpon. When I first started blogging, I relied heavily on free traffic being provided by Entrecard. The traffic from Entrecard was basically other bloggers like myself who are looking for ways to promote their websites. Some call such traffic junk traffic, I call it good traffic for a newbie. You will not get motivated to continue blogging if your statistics shows that it is only you and your family members that know that your website exist!

Well, it is over six months now that I have been blogging with focus. I felt it was time to try some other means of getting traffic. I started using Digg to promote my blog, but I discovered that the effect was not much and it is often a one-day effect. StumbleUpon offers a better result.

I have tried some other social networking communities, but none has impressed me like StumbleUpon. The result is simply great. Some well established bloggers may not agree with me because they consider StumbleUpon traffic as mostly junk traffic. Nevertheless, I still recommend it because from experience, if you have no traffic, then you can as well start from junk-traffic and then improve on it. Sitting idle and waiting for your website to be discovered by chance is not just a good idea.

I have made some good friends and have gotten good exposure for my blog through the so called junk-traffic being provided by StumbleUpon. One article I submitted to StumbleUpon for one of my website attracted over 6,000 visitors to the site within 48hours. If that was not a good exposure, I wonder what it is. Well, for you that you are interested, let’s get on with the topic.

What is StumbleUpon?

It is a social networking website, just like Digg and Del.ico.us. StumbleUpon allows users to share and recommend sites they find interesting as they surf the internet. StumbleUpon boast of having over a million members. That is the secret of its ability to bring massive amounts of traffic to websites thereby helping such sites to gain rapid exposure.

StumbleUpon has a distinct advantage in that it drives relevant traffic to sites based on the interest indicated by the surfer. Unlike visitors from search engines like Google, StumbleUpon surfers surf by using channels. They indicate what they are interested in and that is what determines the web pages they are served with as they “Stumble through a channel”. That ensures that you are not just receiving visitors who have no interest in your web content.

Getting Started With StumbleUpon

The first step is to register with the website. This is a very simple process and takes just a few minutes. After registering the next step is to download and install the StumbleUpon Toolbar for your browser. It works with Internet Explorer and Firefox Browsers. The toolbar is in a form of add-on which easily install unto the browser you are using. Once you install the toolbar, you will see it displayed on your browser with button similar to the picture below. You are ready to Stumble.

If you click on the Stumble button on the toolbar, web pages that are tagged under the categories you indicated interest in will be served to you at random. If you love the website that is served you can click on I like it, to give it a thumbs up or click on thumbs down if you dislike the content.

You can also submit your content or any other webpage that you consider interesting. If the website has never being submitted before, you will be required to write a little description of what the webpage is all about and to tag (classify) the webpage using specific keywords that are provided on the form. All these are easy to do. After submitting the webpage, others will have opportunity to view it as they surf using StumbleUpon. The more people that give a web-page thumbs up, the more popular it becomes.

How to get tons of traffic to your webpage

1. Submit your webpage ensuring that it is labeled and tag under the appropriate category.
2. Befriend people with similar interest in the community ask them to add you as a friend
3. Form a stumble team that stumble each other’s posts. You can join my team if you’re interested. Just send me a note.
4. Rate and comment on other users submitted webpages. Be an active participator in the community. The more you participate the greater your influence in the community.
5. Be generous with your stumbles. Avoid creating enemies. If you don’t like a webpage, I suggest you simply ignore it. Writing derogatory comments is a sure way to make enemies in the community.
6. Submit the URL of every new post you create. Submit some yourself while you ask your friends to help out with some.
7. Ensure your webpages are properly categorised so as to ensure they get displayed to relevant users. Wrong categorizing will only earn the webpage a thumbs down.
8. Add multiple tags where possible to ensure that a wider range of users are attracted.
9. Get your profile reviewed by reviewing the profile of others.

I guess that is enough to kick-start your activity in the community. However, there is more work to be done. Actually, getting the visitors from StumbleUpon is half of the job, keeping them is the main issue.

Keeping the StumbleUpon Visitors

This is a very difficult task. The only way guarantteed for keeping a visitor is by serving quality content that meets the need of the visitor. So, it is advisable that you ensure you have great content on your webpages before attempting to use StumbleUpon. Visitors will get irritated if they arrive and find out that you do not have anything of quality to offer. You simply will receive a thumbs down.

If you are in the habit of copying others content and pasting them verbatim on your blog, then StumbleUpon is not for you. Stumblers hate duplicated content. They will simply give such website heavy dose of thumbs down which equals no traffic. Yaro Starak advises that you ensure you have nothing less than 10 quality articles on your website before inviting traffic from StumbleUpon.

Do you use StumbleUpon? What has your experience being like? Please share in the comment section.  If you enjoy this post, give it a thumbs up! Stumble it. Thanks.

Tags: Blogging, Website Traffic

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.