Stumble upon has been a fantastic source of free traffic for me. Today I want to share with you what I did and how you can copy my formula and get traffic from stumble upon.
Given away free one way links
I put a post on my blog titled “FREE Back Links To Your Site” and it invites people to leave a comment with a link to their website.
A huge component of search engine optimization is getting back links from other websites and that’s what I give my visitors.
So I begin my post by saying that the purpose of the post is to give people free back links to their website. I then outline a few rules i.e. no porn links or affiliate links.
You can see a screenshot below:
What’s the catch?
At this point many people are wondering “What’s the catch?” They are used to having to buy stuff or sign up for something before they can get anything for free. So I tell them that there is no catch, nothing to buy, and nothing to sign up for.
I also provide a short video explaining what to do.
You can see a screenshot below:
Below the video I posted short message asking people to be patient if their comment doesn’t show up immediately. Occasionally a comment with a back link still gets caught by the spam filter and has to be approved by me.
Posting this message reduces the number of people who post a comment multiple times and get frustrated because they don’t see their comments immediately show up.
How I get traffic from stumble upon
The next thing I do is ask people for a favor. I say, “If you found this helpful, would you mind stumbling this page?” and have it link to stumble upon.
The link is in this form:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=YOUR_URL&title=YOUR_TITLE_WITH_NO_SPACES
You can see the red part is where your URL goes and the green part is where the title of your page should go. Make sure that the title does not have any spaces.
Here is an example:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http://nickstraffictricks.com/1537_free-back-links-to-your-site/&title=FREE+Back+Links+To+Your+Site
Not everyone will stumble the post
I don’t expect everybody to stumble the post. In fact most people don’t.
But that’s okay because each stumble might result in 20 new visitors to the post. If it least 1 of those 20 visitors stumbles the page then I will get another 20 visitors. And 1 of those 20 visitors will stumble the page sending me 20 more visitors.
This cycle results in an endless flow of traffic!
Promoting the blog post
For this to work I had to promote a blog post and get the initial set of visitors.
One thing that’s been very effective for me is a post a little message at the bottom of every blog post notifying visitors about the free back links.
You can see a screenshot below:
Warrior Forum
The warrior forum is a popular online forum for online marketers. They have a special section designated for people looking to buy or swap back links.
I posted the following message in that section:
Hey everyone I want to do everyone a favor and give each person a free back link from my popular blog:
[URL to my site]No Catch, Nothing to buy, No email address needed.
This has been especially helpful for getting things started.
So get started!
This has been a great way for me to get traffic and spread the word about my site. And the best part is I get to help people out by giving away free back links and I am getting free traffic from stumble upon.
So get started and post your own “free back links” blog post. It’s super easy and you can even copy mine if you want.
To help you get started I will link to your “free back links” post if you link to mine.
Here’s what you do:
- Set up your “free back links” page
- At the bottom include an “Other Sites Offering Free Back Links” section
- Add a link to http://nickstraffictricks.com/1537_free-back-links-to-your-site/ in that section
- Make sure that your site uses DoFollow and not NoFollow. (What’s this?)
- Send me an e-mail with the URL of your “free back links” post. Be sure to mention that this is for the “free back links” post in your e-mail. (I get a lot of e-mail and if I see something with just a URL I won’t know what you meant.)
My e-mail address is: nickstraffictricks at gmail.com
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi guys,
Nick this is a very good idea. Thanks for sharing.
Kind regards,
Sam
X
Thank you Samantha.
Sounds like a great idea. I have signed up for stumble upon but don't really use it. I do use digg a lot and think this might work with that also.
Good thought. This could certainly work for Digg also.
Nick you are a genius, i always like to read your articles.Thanks for the wonderful idea.
Glad to help. If a lot of people end up doing something like this I think we could really help each other out.
ya nick i went and stumbled you website for you.
I had a guy thumbs up my article, that article recived 276 visitors. So if the right person stumbles your stuff you will atract way more visitors!
Awesome. And thanks for the stumble!
Thank you for this another tip. You are really great Nick…Nice article.This technique could really help me.. Thanks again for sharing.Thumbs up!
At first reading this post I didn't get it but after reading it again now i understand! what if my blog is already dofollow isn't this technique will not work anymore?
If your blog already has dofollow then you have nothing to worry about. It should work just fine.
I found that social bookmarking by users depends on the target group.
If I have a site targeting IMers, a stumble is more likely than when I target gardeners (or in my case, people interested in learning japanese).
The idea is good, but the stats i receive from addthis.com show that it is very difficult.
How is your success rate?
The power of stumble upon does very depending on your niche. For my blog here, it has been a powerful way to generate traffic.
Just remember, if you want lots of stumbles you have to do something that is unique and valuable to your visitors. If you're trying to get traffic to a point sales page you're not going to have any success. There are thousands of sales pages on the Internet for every topic and they're not very interesting. People won't stumble them.
Nick wrote:"There are thousands of sales pages on the Internet for every topic and they’re not very interesting. People won’t stumble them."
Have you tried advertising at Stumbleupon? I understand that the cost is quite low compared to other media and you can even target by interest. Before I spend some money on this I wanted to have some feedback from experienced marketers (btw, this is not for the site in my profile).
Nick,
thanks for explaining in so much detail how you are attracting traffic. I spent much too much time on your site today reading some of youor interesting methods.
I have used stumble upon to pay for traffic. I have mixed feelings about it though. It's pretty cheap, only five cents per visit, but I'm not sure how targeted it is. If you can make more than five cents per visit off of your website then this might be a good route to take for traffic.
Tit for tat. You scratch my back I'll scratch yours. Everybody wins!
I like that. Thanks for the great idea.
It is a free backlink, but it sounds like a reciprocal link, and although there may be many of these with this method, I'd heard that they are not so highly esteemed as they were seven or eight years ago.
Maybe I just don't understand, but giving lots of links to just about anyone might dilute your own ranking.
It is not a reciprocal link. It's a one-way link from my website.
> might dilute your own ranking
Perhaps. But to be honest I don't really care about my rank in Google. Most of my traffic comes from other sources.