StumbleUpon Part 2: The Gooey Center (How to use it to get traffic)
2007 at 7:00am | by Dave
You can find Part 1 of this article by clicking here
Welcome to Part 2 of my overview of SU. As the title suggests, today I’m going to give you a rundown of methods you can actually use to drive traffic to your site. So without further ado…
Getting Started With StumbleUpon
It’s relatively simple to get SU up and running on your computer, you just have to sign up for an account and install the plug-in for your browser of choice. Now the little spam gnome inside you is probably telling you to just stumble all your site’s pages and wait for the traffic to roll in. However, it’s not quite that simple… not only do you have to have good content that the demographic will be interested in (if you don’t have good content, you’re most likely dead in the water anyway) but you need to get it in front of Stumblers, so they can indicate they like your site.
SU isn’t an exact science and we don’t know what goes behind the scenes for sure, but here are some pretty good guesstimations on how to increase the trust in your submissions to SU:
1. It’s All About Who You Know - Build your network of friends. The more friends you have, the more stumblers you’ll get your submissions in front of. Don’t just add everyone willy-nilly. Add friends that have similar interests as you, and are interested in the topics you plan on promoting.
2. But Dave, Every Page Of My Site Is Informative AND Fun - If all you ever do is stumble pages from one or a small handful of sites, people on your friends list will catch on. You need to discover and stumble other pages that will interest the community, not just your own sites. When the community likes a page you’ve stumbled, it will help your rating as a Stumbler, and if you’re lucky enough you may even reach a coveted “Top Stumbler” position.
3. A Tag By Any Other Name Is Not The Same - When you stumble a page, don’t forget to add description tags. You should add multiple relevant tags and try to make them as broad as possible. From my research, other bloggers have reported that broad tags work better on SU than more specific ones.
4. Choose (Your Topic) Wisely My Son - This goes without saying, but when submitting a page, you need to accurately select the topic title. More accurate topic selection will ensure the visitors sent your way are targeted and increase the chances of giving you the good ratings you need to get your page sent to a large number of visitors.
How Does StumbleUpon Decide How Much Traffic To Send My Page?
As I mentioned earlier, no one is really sure what algorithm SU uses, and they aren’t dropping any hints, but the general consensus (and in some cases common sense) is that the following factors may effect the traffic you’ll get sent on any particular page you’ve submitted.
1. Who Likes Your Page? - It’s pretty obvious that SU works similar to many other social media sites, so the more “I like this site” votes you get, in the shortest amount of time, the better your results.
2. Authority of Stumblers - Another potential factor that may affect results is the authority of the users stumbling the page in question: top stumblers being the best type of vote to get and brand new users with no trust from SU being the worst.
3. What Have You Done For StumbleUpon Today? - It’s possible that the number of sites you’ve discovered and submitted reviews for, as well as how well those submitted stories fared for other users, affects the weight your submissions are given by SU.
4. Are You In? - Other possible factors are the number of friends you have and the size of your SU network. The size of these may give your account more weight when it comes to stumbling new pages.
This concludes our little lesson on using StumbleUpon to promote your website. I’ll be experimenting with it in the near future and following up with any new developments I learn during this time.
Good Profits.
