A bloggers guide to StumbleUpon

In the past few weeks I have been experimenting with StumbleUpon, and the results have been beyond my expectations. With StumbleUpon I have recived 21000 pageviews over 14 days and my feed subscribers have almost doubled. I had heard about the high traffic capability of StumbleUpon and that is why I decided to learn and write about it. This is a post on StumbleUpon for bloggers,



What is StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon may seem a bit complicated for first time users. StumbleUpon is a unique social bookmarking site, it works on a basic principle, if a user likes a site he can Stumble it using the StumbleUpon toolbar, while doing this the user is asked for the category, tags and language, after the user enters the details and stumbles the site, the user is randomly taken to a similar website according to the tags and category. The webpage the user has stumbled will appear on the StumbleUpon search and also to the users who stumble similar pages. A particular webpage is ranked and shown to people according to number of people who like it than the number of people who dislike it.

StumbleUpon for bloggers
StumbleUpon can become a pretty powerful tool for bloggers. Some experienced bloggers say that even the smallest webpage stumbled can receive upto 50 views. I have stumbled almost all of my articles and it seemed to have a great effect. Well for bloggers there are 3 main things you should and can gain from StumbleUpon,

• Awareness of content, brand and website if your website is a start-up that is.
• Subscribers increase rapidly in the first few hours after you stumble a page, but after sometime it comes down by half.
• Gain backlinks as most of the StumbleUpon visitors are bloggers or active social media users.

Boosting StumbleUpon traffic

All your posts on StumbleUpon usually gain traffic ranging from 25 to 100 pageviews, if you want to boost it to 200 to 1000 then are a some things to care about. You can get more pageviews only if you get more thumbs up, and for more people to give you thumbs ups you'll have to stumble good quality articles, which have graphics and the articles will have to be lengthy. If you cannot do the above things there are still many ways to gain StumbleUpon exposure,

• Exchange Stumbles by contacting other users or friends and tell them to stumble your posts and it is well and good to exchange stumbles with someone who has got a good amount of friends and subscribers. You can also use third party networks such as StumbleXchange.
• Paid Stumbles can be a bit expensive if try this on StumbleUpon, but it is cheaper on third party freelance sites. StumbleUpon charges $0.5 per view and that is not cheap, you can go with this if you have a very unique and sticky content, but make sure you'll have to send out your best article or else this can result in a loss of money.
• Use a StumbleUpon button on your blog, website and social profile. If you can write a post on your blog about your StumbleUpon profile.

Monetizing StumbleUpon traffic

All of the users I got from StumbleUpon seem to be ignoring contextual advertisments, this ahs caused a dip in my click through rates. There are many other ways you can monetize your StumbleUpon traffic,

• CPM Advertising can be the solution as it is the easiest way to monetize your site, you don't have to worry about the click throughs.
• Paid services can be utilized, either yours or others. You can promote your e-books to StumbleUpon users and some other digital products.
• Affiliate marketing is a good source of revenue, but using banners or links wont workout, the articles you stumble should be related or about the affiliate product and you can put a link at the end.

Wanna find me on StumbleUpon, then go here.