Recently I have received questions from various people about stumble upon. In this post I will answer the most common questions.
If you have a question that isn’t answered in this post please leave your question in a comment at the end of the post.
And don’t forget to get Free Stumbles For Your Site from me.
What kind of things will get traffic from stumble upon?
Websites that get a ton of traffic from stumble upon usually fall into one of these categories: funny, breaking news, inspirational, incredibly useful, or free stuff.
Funny
Jokes and funny videos seem to do really well with stumble upon. People find it enjoyable to have a good laugh and will frequently give funny things a thumbs-up.
Breaking news
When Michael Jackson died a little over a year ago the social media scene went crazy when the initial reports came out. Twitter was overloaded and so were other forms of social media including stumble upon. It’s all people could talk about.
Inspirational
When someone posted a YouTube video of Susan Boyle’s debut performance on “Britain’s Got Talent”, the video went viral. People were e-mailing it to their friends and telling their coworkers about this video that they “just had to see”. Things like this do very well with stumble upon.
Incredibly useful
Blog posts that truly surprise readers with the content and the value they provide are 100 times more likely to get a thumbs-up from stumble upon.
Last December I published a post on How To Build Back Links Super Fast and submitted it to stumble upon. Because of its great value many other people gave it a thumbs-up.
Free Stuff
I have had a couple different blog posts give away something for free and because of this they received quite a few stumbles.
The posts are Free Back Links To Your Site and Free Stumbles For Your Site.
When you give something away for free you cannot have any strings attached. There cannot be any hoops to jump through.
So your page where you give away a free e-book if people join your e-mail list is not going to get a lot of stumbles because people have to do something (join your e-mail list) before they can get the free e-book.
Will my one post continue to get viewed or will this taper off?
The short answer is yes. Your traffic will most likely taper off.
But it really depends on how many people continue to stumble your post. As long as you keep getting stumbles periodically your traffic should continue though it may not be as much as your initial amount.
Is it okay to post all of your pages to Stumble Upon?
I routinely submit new blog posts to stumble upon. But I never submit more than two or three each day. I also make sure that I give a bunch of other pages (not on my blog) a thumbs-up. I don’t want to stumble upon to the think that I only submit my own stuff.
As long as you do something like this you should be fine.
What influence does SEO have on how many stumbles you get?
As far as I know search engine optimization should have no influence on how many stumbles you get.
However, if you have good SEO it may lead to more traffic from Google and other search engines. This in turn may result in more thumbs up (because you got more traffic). And more thumbs up means more traffic from stumble upon.
But as far as I know there is no direct connection between search engine optimization and traffic from stumble upon.
Can you have multiple stumble upon accounts and stumble your blog posts using those accounts to get more stumbles and more traffic?
I would strongly advise against this. Stumble upon has excellent statistical tools that look for and will detect this kind of behavior.
They have no qualms about disabling an account that they believe is trying to cheat the system. I should know because I did it once before and had my account disabled.
Did I miss any of your questions?
If you have a question about stumble upon it was not answered then please leave a comment below with your question.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
I used to use Stumbleupon like about 3 years ago, I wonder is it still as good as it used to be? Or is it better? I just went to their home page again, and the front page says it has 10+ million members, I wonder how many of those are active members.
Till then,
Jean
It's fabulous for the right kind of content.
Hi Nick,
Just something I observed about Stumbleupon's Su.pr tool. I noticed you are using Su.pr (or were) to tweet about your blog posts on Twitter. But, using Su.pr to promote an article you published on EzineArticles doesn't register on their stats page as a view. It used to be that whenever I tweeted through Su.pr about a new article I published I could count on 15 or 20 views on my stats at EZA's. But it doesn't work that way anymore. Not since they changed their reporting. It seems that the links promoting your article must be hosted on Twitter's servers and EZA's counts them as "bots".
Yah, EZA has made a bunch of changes like that in the last year.
As you say, free and funny stuff goes well with SU, but sometimes it is difficult to find your audience within SU. I tried to advertise with SU, but had problems getting my ad (acutal landing page on one of my sites) approved. Difficult guidelines?!
Regarding SEO mentioned above I think basic SEO should get applied for the creation of your SU review so you get a better chance on getting as many stumbles as possible. Also applying basic SEO principles to the stumbled page could help in keeping the visitors on the site/page and not instantly clicking away.
SU can be fickle about approving pages. I have had them not approved before.
Thanks for the stumble. I will have to go find the link.
I have always been wary of stumbling my own stuff, but I do once in a while. I've found that even though I think the stuff that I stumble is good, I rarely get anyone else giving it a thumbs up — whether it is my stuff or something else that I discover.
I'm not a really active networker on SU though, and that may be part of the problem. Do you know if that makes a difference? I usually stumble a couple of posts a day from things I see online, so I'm active on that side of things.
Being active is probably part of it. But part of may have to do with having low traffic. I started to explain why traffic would impact how many stumbles you get but the comment became really long and I turned the comment into a blog post: http://nickstraffictricks.com/3134_why-youre-not-…
This is great info, but I found the traffic from Stumble Upon does not convert well and most just visit your site and then leave.
Stumble upon it is great for certain types of traffic but you're right in that it may not convert well in some niches.
As you said Nick, stumbleupon is just good for only some niches, not for all. I did stumbling quite 2 months back for 5 or more pages of my website, but the traffic that i got was only 3.
The real power in stumble upon comes when other people stumble your website. If the website gets one stumble from you you won't get much traffic. But if two or three or four people stumble your website then you will get a lot more traffic.
Hey Nick, is direct traffic good for site or referring sites like stumble upon, digg, reditt traffic is good ?
Naser @ Best Tips Fo recently posted..Is it true that domains set to expire with in a year are penalized by search engines
> stumble upon, digg, reditt traffic is good ?
It really depends. Are these sites sending you traffic that converts into sales?
I think both of them are good way of getting traffic and eventually sales. We all know that our sites doesn’t usually goes up in the first page of the SERps when we have tons of competition but having sites like stumble upon, digg, ect gives us that advantage of getting more traffic without hitting the first page in Google.
Hi Nick
Thanks a lot for the great ideas. I've pretty much ignored things like StumbleUpon etc because I've wondered whether people would be genuinely interested in what I have to say. It's a pretty narrow topic. But you've given me some ideas now about how I might be able to make use of this channel to improve traffic and or SEO.
Cheers
Leigh
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I am so new in StumbleUpon and I can say that you have provided useful insights on waht to expect in this social netwoking tool. A very good tutorial for starters like me.
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