StumbleUpon is an excellent way to increase traffic to your blog.

It is a social bookmarking site that allows you and other users to “Stumble Upon” sites, blogs, articles or anything else… bookmark them and share them with other fellow StumbleUpon users. The way it works is fairly straight forward. You find a site, you ‘stumble’ it, and once it is included in the system other users will be directed to it every now and then. When the page you included gets stumbled by someone else traffic increases. The more likes/ reviews a page gets the more traffic will be directed to it. The more votes of confidence a site gets, the more traffic it will get. Reminds you of something?

Although, I registered with stumble upon a couple of months ago to increase traffic to my blog, I never really gave it a shot. I think I downloaded the tool bar for my Internet explorer but because I mostly use Firefox it was never used.

The reason why, all of a sudden, I decided to write a post about stumble upon is this:

The ‘spike’!

Which is not necessarily a spike in the particular case, it is a steady flow of StumpleUpon users, Stumblers who have been visiting and stumbling posts of this make money blogging blog. The following photo shows my traffic sources for the day this blog had 492 visitors. Usually, and before stumble upon, this ‘how to make money’ blog was getting about 150-200 visitors a day. Then one day, one of my posts got stumbled. That is the smaller spike a few dayw before the big one. Anyhow, I was intrigued by this as you can imagine, and started looking in to the ‘stumble thing a bit more’. A stumbled some sites, photos blogs, things of interest…added some friends through the Entrecard community and then a few days later I published a fairly interesting post about how to make money with Entrecard. Then, the same night traffic exploded. Exploded for my standards…

As you can see there where 354 visits form StumbleUpon. That day there where 1,200 page views, at a rate of 2.3 pages/visit with less than a 40% bounce rate…see for your self:

So, all the above photos and blabbering are to describe my second and more intense StumbleUpon traffic spike. Why? Because I want to

1. Demonstrate that Stumble upon works.

2. To lead up to an outline of how one should go upon and reap the benefits of this exceptional social bookmarking service.

StumbleUpon provides members with something that resembles a guide to the internet. Downloading the Firefox and Internet Explorer integrated toolbars; StumbleUpon brings relevant content directly to every user. You choose what your likes are and every time you surf with their toolbar you can find content that better suits your interests.

After you sign up, create a profile, you can start submitting sites that you like. It is recommended to download the toolbar so you can add websites photos blogs on your favourites directly and faster. The way it works is: you submit your website or your post, it gets listed in your favourites on your profile page and other StumbleUpon users see it and they visit your blog.

The toolbar looks something like this:

It appears in your browser and as you can see in the photo it has a series of functions:

The Stumble! button

When pressing this button your browser automatically takes you to a random StumbleUpon page, a website which has already been stumbled by other users. You can calibrate the options and only see relevant pages or of your interest. You can do that by selecting a particular channel next to the channel button. So you pick a category and you start stumbling. That’s great. You can press the stumble button over and over to take you from webpage to webpage. Content delivered to people is targeted to their personal interests and demographic profile.

The I like it! Button

When you come across a page you like, then you can click the corresponding button, the I like it! button, to add the particular page to your liked pages. If you are the first one to discover a page, you will be asked to write a short description or review for that page and place some tags. Writing up reviews and tags are essential when stumbling. Think of the description as a ‘teaser’ for other stumbleupon users that might be interested in the post/page. The tags are also important because they are used to classify your post in the specific category.

The more popular a site, video, photo, etc, the more people will see it the more traffic it will get. Using the StumbleUpon toolbar, members rate content "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down". The more people who vote "thumbs-up", the quicker it will spread. Well designed and targeted content often starts to spread virally through StumbleUpon. The more people who see it, the more they pass it on to their friends.

If you are new to this service it is highly recommended that you start stumbling sites and make friends. Making friends is important because it provides more exposure for the sites/blogs/posts/photos you stumble. So the more exposure you get on your StumbleUpon profile page the more traffic your stumbled sites will get.

As your profile page gets more exposure:

1. More people will add you to their friends list-more traffic for your stumbles

2. Your favourites, the pages you have reviewed, will get more exposure and traffic

StumbleUpon Goals

The best way to get massive-explosive traffic from StumbleUpon is to make it to the buzz page http://buzz.stumbleupon.com/. The buzz page gets tons of traffic because every member can access it directly from their profile page. There are a few things you can do so that eventually you can get on the buzz page.

Stumble good Content

Don’t stumble crap. When stumbling your stuff, stumble the good posts, the ones that you think will get the most traffic. Make sure you review and tag properly.

Get a ton of Thumbs Up/stumbles, reviews.

Ranking higher in the StumbleUpon pages and potentially on the buzz page it is essential to get stumbled by popular users, who have stumbled, discovered a lot of pages.

To have this high StumbleUpon magic power, one should have reviewer a large number of pages, discovered a large number o pages and be part of the system of a while.

StumbleUpon is effective because it does not disclose the algorithm used to rank users within the system.

Get on the ‘What’s New’ page.

You can acces this page from your profile, every profile page has a tab like this. There you can find the latest stumbled websites by your friends, so even if you couldn’t make it to the buzz page you still have a chance to get some traffic through this page, at least in the first 24 hours of being stumbled.

Get Searched

There is a search box in StumbleUpon that could be used in your advantage to drive a fair amount of traffic to you so, make sure you tag all your submitted posts well, using the proper tags.

Make More Friends

The more people you have on your friends lists, the better the chances of your stumbled pages to be seen.

It is highly recommended that you Stumble new and interesting things. Pages or posts that have not been stumbled before….yes your new post! This works to your advantage for the following reasons:

1. You are providing new content
2. Because you discovered the content your profile picture and link will be seen when people add comments, for ever….
3. You will eventually become a credible and popular Stumbler, get more review and move up in ranking. (Your stumbles have more weight)
4. People will also add you to their friend list
5. If your Stumble becomes a top pick your profile will be seen by a lot more people.

If you have some money to spare you can also pay for a campaign on stumbleupon, I believe it is 0.05 for every visit.

The down side

There is one thing I am sceptical about. The tool bar idea. I am not a big fan of toolbars to begin with. I guess StumbleUpon must make money somehow.

So there you have it. Hope you found these tips helpful. If you did feel free to add me as your StumbleUpon friend, the URL for my profile page is: http://ksc7.stumbleupon.com.

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Increase Traffic to your blog

Community Building-Social Bookmarking and Networking

There are a few things that you can do to increase traffic to your blog.

To achieve high volumes of visitors, readers and subscribers does take time, it won’t happen over night, but it’s not impossible. Even if you have great content you can’t expect readers to flock on your pages. Having good content is one thing however there is much more to it than just posting articles.

Even if you have the best product in the world, best value, good price etc. how can you expect that people will find out about it? You need to let people know about your blog, join or create a community around the topic of your blog before you increase you traffic.

To increase traffic information must flow freely.
To inform, educate, compel and attract readers you must increase the chances of being located.

Getting your blog listed in directories is one way;

Other great ways of increasing traffic are:

1. Social Networking, and

2. Social Bookmarking

1. Social networking

Myspace and Facebook (I think Facebook reached over 60 million users the other day), work fine in letting people know you have a blog and presenting them with the option of visiting. However, there are a few more services that I came across and seem to be friendlier towards the blogging crowd.

MyBlogLog

I have found that MyBlogLog is an excellent way for someone to start building, or become part of communities. There are countless communities on thousands of topics and it is really well set up. It has excellent real time features that allow you to find people interested in exactly the same things you are. You can keep track of all your statistics and communicate with other readers and bloggers.

Entrecard

Entrecard is the new advertising phenomenon that is geared entirely for bloggers. You place the card on your blog and other Entrecard members click on it to “drop their card”, and you as well as they, gain advertising credits. Once enough credits are collected you can use them towards advertising on other members’ blogs. As more visitors drop their entry card on your blog, the cost for advertising on your page increases and so do your visits. There is an argument to be made about the quality of the hits you get, but in the end the more people visit your page the more chances you will have to get a few good repeat visitors.

HubPages

HubPages is another interesting and well set up community based information portal. It differs from MyBlogLog in the sense that you can’t integrate your blog you but can post your articles as part of their system and link to it. It could qualify as a bookmarking service but I think it falls better under the networking class since it has enhanced community features. What HubPages excels at is that they allow members to post adds from google on their articles as well as affiliate links from Amazon and Ebay. You can follow the following link to a sample article I posted; an article from this blog My HubPage.

1. Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a good way to increase traffic. The following services allow you to bookmark articles and have readers go through them, rate them or follow the links back to the source your blog. There are two kinds of social bookmarking sites.

Ones that require downloading a tool bar and ones that don’t.

The ones I found require downloading are StumbleUpon and Delicious.

Although I downloaded the bars I haven’t used them enough so I can’t say how well they work.

Then there is Digg and Furl that don’t require downloads and work fine.

Digg offers the option to install a rating button on your blog that allows readers to express that they “Digg” your articles. Doing so increases your articles popularity and is ranked better in their lists. A similar service is offered by PlugIm which seems to work like Digg but is smaller.

Forums

Forums can also be a great way to increase the inbound traffic to your blog. Replying to comments or posting your own comments with your URL (in your forum signature) can be a good way to attract readers on your page. The ones that I have come across recently, and created accounts for are: EarnersForum, Powelly, and Articleinfor.

Keep posting new topics, keep writing, and focus on the blogging community.

Increasing traffic to your blog is not difficult.

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