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Imagine being able to drive literally hundreds and at times thousands of visitors to your website or blog within a matter of a few hours. Don’t just imagine, this is possible if others StumbleUpon you.

Today I will briefly discuss how I used StumbleUpon to drive hundreds of visitors to the miWisdom blog.

 

So What is StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon is a social community and bookmarking network that - at the time of this writing - currently has close to 5 million members. People join the community just like on any other social network. You create your personalized profile page, upload a picture, and write a little information about yourself. Finally it is recommended that you download the StumbleUpon toolbar for both Firefox or Internet Explorer. This toolbar is designed to assist you with navigating and Stumbling randomly through websites across the world wide web.

Once you have setup your StumbleUpon profile, selected your preferences and interests, you are now ready to begin stumbling.

 

How can StumbleUpon Generate Traffic to My Website or Blog?

As a StumbleUpon member you browse through websites as per usual throughout your day. When you come across something that you find interesting you are given the option to reward this website page a Thumbs Up. If you are the first person to discover this page, you are asked to categorize it accordingly and to provide a short description of your finding so that other StumbleUpon users can find it in the future.

Because this newly discovered website has now been Stumbled, it is automatically entered into the StumbleUpon bookmarking directory under the categories that you have specified. Now, when Stumblers click on the StumbleUpon button on their toolbar, a small percentage of them are now going to randomly Stumble upon this website you have discovered. Once there, they can either acknowledge the website with a Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down. By giving a Thumbs Up they inform StumbleUpon that they would like to view more of these types of websites in the future. By giving the website a Thumbs Down they inform StumbleUpon that they would not like to view these types of websites in the future.

When a website page has been Stumbled for the first time, traffic will begin to flow at a steady pace from StumbleUpon usually within the first hour. The amount of traffic that you will receive will depend on the popularity of the category that your website has been placed under, and on the amount of Stumblers who acknowledge your website with a Thumbs Up and a Review.

 

My Learning Experiences from StumbleUpon

Marketing your site through StumbleUpon has wonderful benefits that provide your blog with exposure to a community of people who normally might not have come across your website. There are however some hard lessons that I have learned that may hopefully assist you in your future StumbleUpon endeavors:

  • Stumbling My Own Website Pages - Stumbling your own website pages intentionally is okay in moderation. However, it is important that you do not do this too often as your Stumbles will have a diminishing effect in bringing in new traffic.
  • Good Categories Bring In More Traffic - Selecting the right category is more likely to bring in more traffic to your website. Stumblers naturally Stumble through topics that interest them most. If you place your website page under a category that very few people search for through StumbleUpon, than you will receive very little traffic as a result. However be wary, if you select a category for your website page that does not belong there, the traffic to your web page will quickly pitter away just as quickly as it came.
  • Unbiased Reviews Provide You with Credibility - When you review your own websites make sure that they are informative and unbiased. Stumblers do not appreciate someone selling them on the features and benefits of their website, blog or products. Make your reviews short, succinct and straight to the point.
  • Stumbling on Other Websites - Through the act of Stumbling on other people’s websites and rewarding them with a Thumbs Up, you will gain credibility within the Stumble Community and will rise in Top Stumbler Rankings.
  • Traffic Moves through Spurts - At first, within the first few hours of having StumbledUpon my site, traffic to miWisdom came in its hundreds. After which the traffic somewhat subsided and within 3 days I was no longer driving new traffic from StumbleUpon. What I found though is that as new people come across your website and give it a Thumbs Up, that this will invigorate and bring a new wave of StumbleUpon traffic to your blog.
  • Stumblers Have Short Attention Spans - I found that on average a Stumbler coming to the website spent a lot less time on the site than someone coming through an organic means such as through a search engine or through the WordPress.com community. To lock in the attention of a Stumbler you must present something on the web page which will immediately attract their interest and entice them to continue reading and moving through your blog posts. If you do not do this in the right manner than you will find that the Stumblers will simply click on the Stumble button immediately and transfer away from your page and onto another website or blog. Through experiments with driving StumbleUpon traffic to the Study Matrix Art Blog, I am discovering a number of strategies that increase the attention span of Stumblers and entice them to click through to other pages. However, I will discuss this in further detail in a future post.

Stay tuned to the Study Matrix Art Blog as I will be presenting a StumbleUpon marketing SMX Spotlight Mind Map over the coming weeks. This will assist you in gaining a deeper insight, understanding and perspective on how the StumbleUpon community works and how to gain the most from utilizing it as a traffic generation tool.

 

Moving Beyond WordPress.com and onto WordPress.org

A couple of months after setting up miWisdom, I was feeling more and more comfortable about the possibility of setting up my own blog through an internet hosting provider. However, where would I begin? What host should I choose? Who could help set things up for me? Who would explain all the technical details of this process? These types of questions were bottling up in my mind. It was no doubt going to be a very big step for a Newbie like me to take. I was keeping my fingers crossed that it would all work out in the end.

In my next post I will discuss the process I took in setting up a WordPress.org blog on an international host server.

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