StumbleUpon – Social bookmarking to generate quality traffic

by sweta on August 5th, 2010 10

Since its launch in 2001, StumbleUpon has gained tremendous popularity and respect all over the world. Before we take a look at its immensely successful run, let’s have a brief synopsis of the product. StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows users to discover and rate web pages, photos and videos. Using social networking as a main tool, StumbleUpon acts a personalized recommendation engine.

When any user clicks the “Stumble!” button on the browser‘s toolbar, web pages are displayed to the user based on his/her ratings of previous pages, rating by the user’s friends, and by the rating of users with similar interests. Users can rate any web page with thumbs up or thumbs down and a one-click blogging is built in as well. StumbleUpon offers a list of nearly 500 topics to choose for the users in order to fetch the relevant content matching the user’s interest. Toolbar versions exist for Mozilla, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. Third party toolbars are available for Safari and Opera.

If you wish to get started on StumbleUpon, install the toolbar and register your own site by entering the URL of your site and clicking the “I like it!” button. Now, there will be a pop-up panel that would enable you to categorize your site, write a short description and insert a tag with a few keywords. Now, whenever someone will search for sites with a similar content as yours, your site would be displayed in the StumbleUpon database.

Now, let’s come to the success story of this product. What makes StumbleUpon so special is that it can generate a huge amount of traffic to a specific webpage or website. In case you wrote a great article on a specific topic, and want to bring attention to it, StumbleUpon is the tool you should be using. Once your website gets stumbled by a few people, it has high chances of attracting large number of visitors from all over the world.

StumbleUpon offers you three great ways of building a solid web site that guarantees a large amount of traffic from all over the globe. First, it generates a speedy exposure for any new site, product or idea. Second, StumbleUpon helps to build a large base of readers for your site or blog. Third, it presents you the opportunity of gaining a large number of backlinks from StumbleUpon visitors with websites of their own. While the search engines provide very specific results based on the keywords being searched, StumbleUpon offers a wide range of options based on the ratings and reviews given by visitors.

However, a few things should be kept in mind if you are trying to attract a large reader base using the services of StumbleUpon. A good web design is of primary importance in case you are looking to hold the attention of visitors for more than a couple of seconds. Studies have shown that visitors in StumbleUpon tend to judge a website based upon its look rather than its content many a times. Also, the average time spent on a web page is less than 10 seconds, which gives you little time to attract a potential loyal reader. Additionally, the RSS feed subscription can be pretty whimsical- it can shoot up owing to a particularly interesting post to one community, only to find them rapidly unsubscribing from the RSS feed over the following days. Last, but by no means the least, is the issue that not all blogs receive unbiased treatment in StumbleUpon. Video, humor and Web 2.0 sites enjoy large preference over other sites.

In order to ensure a consistent and large volume of traffic, there are certain things you should do-

Good Content: Make sure your site provides a large archive of good content that cannot be browsed in one single visit. Generally, people come back for reading more of the interesting articles.
Avoid Overabundance of Advertisements: Too many poorly designed ads cluttered in your web site make it look ugly and amateurish. So refrain from doing that.
Provide Exclusive Materials: If you want to succeed in the long run, it would be best to offer tools and online services which no other website can provide.
Simple Website Design: Keep it short and simple. Don’t host unnecessary advertisements or tools. The site should be simple enough not to scare people away from trying it.
Branding in Social Media: At this time, you simply can’t ignore the overwhelming presence of social media. Ask visitors to join your Facebook group or fan page, as well as to follow you in Twitter.

Although the algorithm upon which StumbleUpon bases its calculations is not known, the most important factor still remains the number of users who give thumbs up or thumbs down for your site. Next importance must be given on the number of StumbleUpon friends you have as well as the number of users in your network. Having a strong StumbleUpon profile with a good number of profile reviews determines your clout in the StumbleUpon domain. Getting other users to review your site pays off well rather than doing the task yourself.

StumbleUpon has made a good use of people’s leisure time to navigate it towards a profitable business. It is a great way of getting a lot of new visitors who might be interested in your site, products or ideas. Apart from concentrating on building a good amount of traffic for your own blog, remember to stumble the sites and blogs that you like.

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