Posted by on June 10th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in Social Media, Social Network |
In an ever increasing competition for inbound links and web traffic, there are few link building tools out there that are as powerful and as helpful as StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking service that allows its users to discover, review, and give ratings to web pages, photos, and videos. It is one of the Internet’s most used social media networks today that doubles as a personalized recommendation engine. It has become a very effective tool to promote websites, since it helps in generating massive amounts of incoming traffic to a specific webpage or website. At the same time, it has provided its users a new way to experience the Internet with its channel surfing-like mechanism.
Stumbling Upon Innovation
StumbleUpon was created on November 2001 by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Eric Boyd, and Justin LaFrance. The group expanded when Silicon Valley investor Brad O’Neill helped them on moving to San Francisco, where the headquarters of StumbleUpon is currently located. Other investors subsequently brought in more funds for the program. These include Ram Shriram of Google, Mitch Kapor of Mozilla Foundation, Ron Conway, and First Round Capital.
Since then, StumbleUpon has delivered its potential to become of the most-used social bookmarking sites, catering its service to about 7 million users. In fact, it became very successful that a change of ownership transpired when the Internet giant eBay purchased StumbleUpon on May 2007 for $75,000,000. On April 2009, StumbleUpon was once again acquired by its original founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith and other investors to become an independent company. At that time, StumbleUpon has extended its reach to 10 million subscribers, generating up to 20 million personalized “stumbles” everyday.
How StumbleUpon Works
Like Digg and Delicious, StumbleUpon is one of the social bookmarking tools available in the web. However, StumbleUpon features more unique ways of viewing different web pages and generating traffic into these pages and websites. As mentioned above, it plays around the concept of channel surfing on the web, where a different web page is shown when users click the “Stumble” button on a toolbar that users have to install directly to their browsers. (The toolbar works on almost all kinds of browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.)
Hence, every click of the button allows you to “stumble upon” random pages all over the web. But StumbleUpon does not just flash any page randomly; it depends on what kind of interests a user (referred to as “Stumbler”) indicates in his/her profile. The chances that a certain web page is served up also depends on a Stumbler’s ratings of previous pages, ratings given by his/her friends, and the ratings and recommendations given by other Stumblers who share similar interests. The StumbleUpon toolbar shows you a “thumbs up” and a “thumbs down” button that you can use to rate Web pages.
The more “thumbs up” a specific webpage receives from StumbleUpon users, the more frequent the page would be shown up to people. And when a page gets a lot of “thumbs down”, the higher the chances that page won’t be seen again in StumbleUpon’s rotation.
In addition, this tool allows Stumblers to tag specific fields of personal or professional interest from a list of topics in the StumbleUpon website to filter out and serve up web pages that are related to their interests.
An Effective Solution for Your Web Traffic Needs
With so many webmasters wanting their sites or a specific page to have a greater flow of traffic, StumbleUpon is used as an effective social media marketing tool to:
StumbleUpon follows the premise that a content that is truly interesting and beneficial to online users will have more high-quality inbound links. The program also follows what search engines do in ranking websites. It is also an efficient link building strategy since you don’t have to trade links one-by-one to have a consistent stream of traffic, assuming that your articles or resources have high-quality content and are useful enough that it really deserves attention.
StumbleUpon can deliver a more consistent stream of traffic compared to other social bookmarking sites since it always serves high-ranked pages to new users everyday. You can take advantage of StumbleUpon’s link building prowess by knowing the right kind of content you should share to other users. Typically, Stumblers want to see useful and comprehensive articles based on their interests and not just some product advertisement. Selling something directly to users will get you nowhere. If you serve them with something valuable and interesting, expect a lot of “thumbs” up from them and more links to your site.
Creating the Right Content to Share in StumbleUpon
You can launch your content into a broader StumbleUpon audience and attract people to your website effectively if you know how to present the articles you will share appropriately. Comprehensive lists never fail to attract users, such as “10 Ways to Overcome a Breakup” or “8 Tips to Save up a Lot of Money for Retirement.” Aside from this, providing a catchy title or headline for your content is a surefire way to get you noticed, as they always read this first. Putting some high-quality pictures and videos to accompany your message or write-up will also attract people, especially if they serve the viewers’ interest, humor, and curiosity.
It’s always safe to check out what’s hot out there in other social media sites and blogs before creating and submitting content to StumbleUpon. Chances are, if a page or topic related to the fields of interest you are following on your StumbleUpon profile has high volume of viewers and good ratings from other sites like Digg, Delicious, Mixx and Reddit, it could be worth sharing to StumbleUpon as well. Just be sure to submit the content before anyone else does.
The Right Website to Promote
The page or website you are trying to promote and attract traffic into should contain a lot of content that users won’t finish viewing in a single visit to ensure repeated visits from StumbleUpon users. Longer and more in-depth articles and resources are more preferable than less-substantial ones. If content involves current events and latest trends, there should be consistent updates since current news would eventually die down and receive lower ratings and traffic in the long run. More importantly, the site should possess a visually appealing design and a memorable branding or URL to ensure higher ratings from visitors.
As mentioned earlier, it is not advisable to saturate a specific page or the entire website with many poor-blended advertisements using applications like Google AdSense.
Connecting to a Wider Audience
StumbleUpon gives users the opportunity to attract viewers and increase incoming links to their respective websites by disseminating content to other users who share the same interests. It also allows you to subscribe to other users’ favorites. Other users in return can subscribe to the pages that you have stumbled on and reviewed, therefore further increasing traffic into those pages and the probability of those StumbleUpon pages being kept in the site’s rotations.
It is important to maintain an active profile to build credibility and mutual subscriptions in StumbleUpon. People won’t just subscribe to you if your profile is empty of activities. Being active in StumbleUpon will ensure other users your reliability and more people will want to connect to you. In turn, this expands your network and connection with other users whom you share the same interests with whom you can serve your pages to. The more active your profile, the more people will subscribe to your pages.
Becoming Involved in StumbleUpon
To be involved in StumbleUpon means using it regularly and reviewing and/or rating sites consistently.
To do this, you can be involved as simple as thumbing up numerous sites a day. Better yet, you can go beyond this and write reviews for several web pages and tag them with relevant keywords. This is more applicable if you are submitting your own content; giving your article an initial review that shares what is good about the page will help your submission receive significant amounts of StumbleUpon traffic. Also, labeling your page with relevant keyword tags will help your page be stumbled upon by more users who are interested in that topic. Moreover, using popular keyword tags will send more traffic to your pages.
Increase Your Subscribers to Increase Traffic
The more subscribers you have, the more people you can send and recommend your pages to, and thus more traffic for your pages and website. If you have more mutual subscribers, there is better chance that the articles you share will be given a “thumbs up.”
It’s easy to add subscribers. You can connect with your friends who are already in StumbleUpon by importing your address book from your email or by looking at the profiles of the users who liked your page and subscribing them. You can also add users who share the same interests with you because they are more likely to add you as well. And you can also join groups related to your interests, since the people who belong to the group will be more likely to see the pages you have submitted and reviewed.
Once you have a considerable number of friends in your list, you can send your articles to them through the StumbleUpon toolbar to get more thumbs up that can lead to more traffic and higher StumbleUpon visibility.
Attract Traffic Effortlessly
Using StumbleUpon is not hard to use and does not require so much time to generate traffic. As long as you take note of the things mentioned here, it would actually take you less time to promote your page compared to other social media sites.
