My post that gives away free stumbles has been a hit and received a lot of traffic.

And today I came across another site that is now offering free stumbles so check it out!

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

I recently came across an excellent guide to StumbleUpon on someone’s blog.

It covers how to setup your account and how to get traffic.

Read: Definitive Guide to Getting Traffic From StumbleUpon

Today I had an epiphany and realized why it’s difficult for people with low traffic sites to get traffic from stumble upon even when they craft high-quality blog posts.

The sad truth is that high-traffic websites have an unfair advantage.

How it works

Let’s say you have an amazing blog post on how to cure unicorn baldness. And you have just written a blog post that is going to make the unicorn community stand up and take notice. No unicorn will ever have to hide in shame because of his hair loss.

Like any good blogger you publish this post and wait for the traffic to come. The trouble is very few people know about your Unicorn Herbal Remedies website.

Nevertheless, you have high hopes of getting lots of traffic because your content is fantastic and has the potential to change the world (or at least the unicorn world).

You expect everyone that sees your blog post will give it a thumbs up on stumble upon, which will send you traffic. And every one of these visitors will give it a thumbs up, sending even more traffic.

This snowball effect works very well for high-traffic websites but frequently falls flat on its face for low traffic websites. To understand why we need to do a little math.

A Little Math

Even if you have fantastic content, the vast majority of your visitors will not give you a thumbs up on stumble upon. The number of people that will give you a thumbs up is actually quite low. I don’t know the exact figures but let’s just pretend it’s 1%.

So if you have 10 visitors to your website and each one has a 1% chance of giving your blog post a thumbs up then there is a 90% chance that none of your visitors will give you a thumbs up.

If you have 50 visitors you still have a 60% chance that no one will give you a thumbs up.

If you’re 100 visitors then your odds increase; you have a 73% chance that at least one visitor will give you a thumbs up.

And let’s pretend that each thumbs up sends 100 new visitors from stumble upon your website. And most likely at least 1 of these 100 visitors will give you a thumbs up sending you another 100 visitors.

Furthermore, it’s possible that the visitors that stumble upon sends to you have a higher chance of giving you a thumbs up, maybe 2%. This would result in even more people giving you a thumbs up which results in more traffic and more thumbs up and more traffic.

But this entire snowball effect is dependent on you getting 100 visitors to your website before you get any traffic from stumble upon.

If you look at popular websites like ProBlogger this is exactly how they get traffic from stumble upon.

What to do about it

The most obvious thing to do is get more traffic. But that’s probably not very helpful.

What you need to do is keep producing quality blog posts and build a relationship with the visitors that you have.

Make it easy and encourage them to subscribe to your RSS and follow you on twitter.

Invite them to ask questions and respond to their comments.

In a nutshell if you build a community then the traffic will come. Once you have traffic it’s far easier to get people to give you a thumbs up on stumble upon and begin the snowball effect of traffic.

Just remember that sites like ProBlogger were once brand-new and had no traffic. The way ProBlogger got to be so popular was by building a community.

Of course getting more people to stumble your website wouldn’t hurt.
You can get a free stumble from me if you want.

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.

This is part of my 30 Days To More Traffic Series

Links from the video

My Traffic Generation Checklist

6 Reasons Quality Content Receives More Traffic And Makes More Money

I did an experiment

A few months ago I decided to try an experiment.  I posted a page on my blog offering free stumbles to anyone who placed a comment with the urls they wanted to be stumbled by me.

There were no strings attached to receive the free stumbles.  It was just a free gift for visiting my website.

(You can get your free stumbles here.)
I also asked people to stumble the site if they felt this was useful but that wasn’t required.

Since that time 25 people have stumbled the page up and the page has received thousands of hits.  It only takes a few stumbles to get traffic.

One of the reasons I was able to get people to stumble up this particular page is that I first gave something away for free.  And then I asked for a favor to stumble up the page.

Not everyone was willing to do me a favor but quite a few were.

Rule of reciprocity

This follows the rule of reciprocity which basically says that if you do something kind for someone else and then ask for something small in return, the person is likely to do it.

This concept is covered in depth in the book by Robert Cialdini called: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.  If you haven’t read this book I highly recommend it!

Has anyone else done something like this?  Where you give away something of value for free and then ask for a favor?

What I did

A couple weeks ago I received an e-mail from a friend with a funny picture.

I thought it was a good example of viral marketing and so I posted the image on my blog.

You can see the image below.

I then submitted that one particular post to StumbleUpon just to see if I would get any traffic from this funny photo.

How much traffic did I get?

On May 30 my traffic spiked to over 400 unique visitors.

The chart below shows that the funny picture with the plumber received a ton of traffic.

The chart below shows where most of the traffic came from.

As you can see I got quite a bit of traffic from this funny photo. In fact I received several times more traffic than I normally get in a day.

So as you can guess I was pretty pleased with the result.

The downside of getting lots of traffic from StumbleUpon

The downside of getting traffic from StumbleUpon is that it’s not worth very much if it’s not targeted.

This blog is about how to get traffic to your website. If I get lots of visitors who are interested in funny jokes and they probably won’t stay very long then they probably won’t click on any advertisements.

Just like any other social medium, StumbleUpon is a great way to get traffic. But it’s not always very targeted traffic.

Unless of course you run a website with funny pictures and jokes. Then you should be able to get massive amounts of traffic from StumbleUpon.

If you are still reading this I will stumble 3 of your URLs

To have me personally stumble three of your URLs go to:
http://nickstraffictricks.com/can-i-stumble-your-site/

Introduction

There is one essential aspect to using StumbleUpon as a top marketing tool.

While it is important to take all the right marketing steps, the end goal is to have your site ranked on one the StumbleUpon engine.

Yes, it’s a short learning curve to get StumbleUpon working as your intense marketing assistant. Hooking up with other people helps get the word out. You can get a higher StumbleUpon rank by having a good strong profile and a wide range of tags.

Since your tags allow your site to be pulled up by users who have specified their interest, the more tags you have, the more interest choices you will attract. Of course, you have to be careful to make sure that your interest tags are relevant to your page.

There was an old trick that marketers used in the early days that involved putting high interest words in their keywords – you know, words like “sex” and “money” – in order to draw traffic.

The catch was that the sites had nothing to do with sex or money but somehow the marketers thought that if people came to the website, they would stay.

However, people who follow a trail offering information related to, for instance, sex or money and find a site that offers information on something else are going to have a bad taste in their mouth.

This translates into a very negative feeling towards that web site.

This brings me to the essential aspect.

The fact remains that if what you are offering as your own page is not up to a high standard you may have many visitors but not many thumbs up. Even worse you might get thumbs down.

An odd thing happened as I was about to enter my website into my profile – I took a look at it. (No, that’s not the odd thing!) What happened was that I saw it from the perspective of the StumbleUpon user.

Yikes. There were some problems that might seem tiny but anything that can put off a user can get you a thumbs down. I gave that particular site a good tweak.

There is that old cliché – you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. You can lead the user to your site through a carefully planned StumbleUpon marketing program. But if your site offers nothing, not only will they not stay. Yours peers will thumb you down.

This comes back to the “content is king” rule. Have something lively, vibrant, and informative that will make them want to share the site with their friends.

Introduction

StumbleUpon is a web browser plugin. It’s a toolbar that you add to your browser. The toolbar allows users to find webpages related to their own interests. For marketing purposes this is a great resource for pulling in new traffic.

StumbleUpon is also a social networking site. It allows you to interact with other people online and share information that you find.

The situation with the internet is that the amount of information is astronomical and increasing daily. It is overwhelming to go looking for information online. You get a million responses to your search term.

What do you do? You know before you begin you will hit as many crappy pages as jewels. Social sites like StumbleUpon helps you narrow your search to sites that people you trust recommend. In return, they will learn to trust you.

The result, your traffic will grow.

Oh yes, that is why you are reading this article. You want to know how to pull in traffic.

The StumbleUpon toolbar lets readers give a webpage a thumbs up. The more thumbs up you get, the higher your page moves in the StumbleUpon delivery system.

Getting your page into the system is fairly simple (and free). You create an account at Stumbleupon.

Add as many users to your network and as many friends as you can. The more of these you have in your system the more thumbs up you will get.

There is some confusion about giving your own page a thumbs up. It’s better not to do this. Focus on building a good network and finding other, like-minded, people who will (one hopes) give your page a thumbs up.

However, it is extremely important to create a public profile. You can tell the world who you are. And you can add your website link here.

Think of StumbleUpon as the ultimate viral marketing tool. If you have a friend who has 10 friends and each of them has 10 friends – well you get the picture. Soon your web page will be traveling via word of mouth to people who are interested in that topic.

If you want to kick start your StumbleUpon efforts, you may want to consider Stumble exchanges such as those on the digitalpoint forum. (Please know the site occasionally has troubling loading, so if the site times out then wait a few seconds and try again.)

There are forum rules regarding length of membership, reputation, and number of posts that you have to reach before being able to post in the Buy, Sell or Trade forum which is where StumbleUpon exchanges are made.

What this means is that while you might want to jump right into StumbleUpon, at digitalpoint, you will have to wait 14 days, make 25 posts, and have a reputation that is not overall red.