Thanks to an initiative from websites to incorporate social media sites into their articles and blog posts, social websites are more popular that ever when it comes to sharing content online. The Guardian, a United Kingdom online and print newspaper, reports that UK newspapers are getting about one third of their traffic from online aggregators and social media sharing sites like Digg, Facebook and Stumble Upon.

Read Full Story: How Social Sharing Spreads News

Social Media can be a bit of a difficult space for an affiliate business. An affiliate website acts as a conduit to a merchant website; thus by that very nature much of “the story” belongs to somebody else. It must therefore seem to some that the only opportunity is the following: create multiple profiles – use automated software, or rent-a-fan packages to generate an audience of followers – publish automated messages containing links to your site – get clicks.

Read Full Story: Social Media Readiness Tips for Affiliates

Being good at social media is a lot like being at connecting with people in real life.

We’re a little too focused on collecting humans like marbles.

Our fans. Followers. Subscribers. Impressions.

Once upon a time, numbers like gross circulation mattered a bit more, because the available channels and paths for information were somewhat limited. So by putting yourself visibly in one of them, chances were pretty good that you’d actually be seen, and command a fair bit of someone’s attention, at least for a few moments.

Read: Going Beyond Social Media Reach

Over the last few years I have been few active on a number of social bookmarking sites including Digg and StumbleUpon. I have picked up a number of tools along the way that have helped me with staying active on a number of communities with ease. I thought it would be a good idea to share those tools with you, so it can help you with your social bookmarking.

Read: 7 Social Bookmarking Tools You Should Know About

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.

Andy asked,

What’s the most traffic any of your sites got in a day and how did you get that spike of traffic? If you don’t want to reveal direct numbers a % boost would be interesting to know.

Is there any good trick you can recommend to generate a spike of traffic?

Here’s my video response

Super Fast Backlinks

This is part of my 30 Days To More Traffic Series

Everyone knows that social bookmarking is a great way to get your site indexed and noticed.

It’s a great way to get traffic.

But honestly it’s a pain submitting your site to so many places.

Much of this pain is removed using onlywire.com

Get Traffic From Social Bookmarking – This How The Pros Do It