The Basics: How to use StumbleUpon to Increase Your Website Traffic

The title says it all; we create websites, blogs, wikis, forums, profiles and so on because we want increased traffic. Why else would tools like Facebook and Twitter be increasing at such a staggering rate? By this point, you’ve got to be familiar with the essentials, at least Facebook, if not Myspace as well, and maybe you’re starting to familiarize yourself with Twitter.  But have you heard of StumbleUpon?

If you’re familiar with Digg, then you’ll pick up on StumbleUpon pretty quickly. StumbleUpon currently boasts 7.5 million registered users. SU is best utilized by downloading its toolbar. By downloading the toolbar, you can easily give websites thumbs up or down, review them and send them to friends with one click.

The more a website is given a thumbs up and a review, the higher the website appears in different categories on StumbleUpon. There’s also the “stumble” button, which users can click to get a website delivered to them based on their interests and the number of reviews and thumbs up of the web site.

StumbleUpon can serve many purposes. It can give users an insight into a new website and what people are saying about it and give users the opportunity to find and tell others about new websites. Additionally, for businesses and websites imparticular, SU can bring more traffic to their site. The more a particular site or article is given a thumbs up and review, the more it’s going to be viewed by other users. So how can you increase traffic using StumbleUpon?

First of all, if you’re going to use StumbleUpon to just give thumbs up of the different pages and articles of your website, then stop reading; you’re a spammer and StumbleUpon has tools in place to prevent spammers. Secondly, before ever giving thumbs up and reviews to your own website, start building a community.  Find other users with similar interests and connect with SU users who you may have already connected with on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.

So how do you now use StumbleUpon to increase traffic after you’ve started building a network and reviewing other websites? First, search through StumbleUpon and see if you find any articles or pages of your website that have already been discovered and reviewed by other users. Next, from time to time start giving a thumbs up and reviewing pages of your website. Make sure these are relevant pages, not just your website’s site map. You can even share these with friends in your network, but be weary of doing it too much, so that you aren’t spamming. Now, as your pages are given a thumbs up and review, they’ll be delivered to more SU users, and therefore, bring more traffic to your site.

You’ll get more referral traffic from SU as more people review your pages. Ultimately, you want to get to the point to where other users are discovering and stumbling pages in your web site. SU has an algorithm in place where you can only discover a specified amount of new pages within a certain domain for every page you’ve discovered from other domains. So be a good SU member and stumble sites and pages other than your own.

Don’t expect large amounts of consistent traffic from StumbleUpon. You may get 5 visitors one day from SU, and 500 the next, but at least download StumbleUpon’s toolbar and give it a spin. If you have a lot of pages on your website or regularly post articles with their own url, then it can be a useful tool.