If you have a website or blog online and one of your main goals is to get as much traffic as possible (lets face it that is what a large proportion of people on the web are up to) then you will probably have read somewhere that you need to focus a little bit of your time on Stumbleupon. For those of you not familiar with stumbleupon it is a toolbar that you can install and it helps you to find random sites that are within your field of interest. It is great from a users perspective but I wanted to share with you what it can do from a publisher’s perspective…

I am using the example of Foodandfizz which is a site we run over at Lookandtaste. I started promoting Foodandfizz 3 months ago and built it up to 20,000 unique visitors in the first couple of months and on the odd occasion we would get a bonus of about 500 uniques per day from stumbleupon but these would only happen about once a week. We then had a little re-design of the logo and tightened up the design in general and I started working on promoting it on sites like Stumbleupon and the results and takeoff have been incredible. Here is a section of stats spanning 10 days…

Now some of the key things that you will see form these stats…

• Quarter of a million visitors over the span of a full month
• Very high bounce rate
• Very low amount of pageviews
• Large amount of new visits

When you take into account that people would normally view about 3 pages per visit on the site this is certainly very poor quality traffic but there is also no doubt that the site is being opened up to a much bigger audience than you would normally expect. There was a certain amount of work that went into building a presence on Stumbleupon (probably about 3 full days of my time spread over a month) but as you can see once they do turn on the traffic tap to your site it can certainly be worth it. With that in mind I thought I would share some of my tips for getting you some Stumble action!!

Get Stumbled Tips

1.Only submit highly visual pages from your site. Users will be on your site for a fraction of a second and you need to get their attention real fast.

2.Build a couple of accounts on SU and start surfing around and adding some content yourself. Once you have built up a bit of trust submit a few of your own pages.

3.Ask a few friends to install SU and give a few of your pages the thumbs up.

4.Twitter out some of the links that you want stumbled as people on Twitter will be more likely to have a stumble bar installed.

5.Add a stumble button to the relevant pages so as users can quickly stumble it.

All in all stumbleupon is well worth using if you are playing the traffic game and although many people will leave instantly there are plenty who will find your site for the first time and come back time after time.

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