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154 Comments 
8 minutes
Many bloggers end up having a love-hate relationship with StumbleUpon. They love the amount of traffic that the service – which now boasts over 10 million members – can send, but they hate the conversion rate on that traffic. ViperChill received 12,040 visitors from StumbleUpon in May, yet their average time on site was just 26 seconds (overall site average is 2 minutes and 24 seconds) and they each viewed around 1.22 pages.
Simply put, compared to other traffic sources, StumbleUpon is terrible. However, because the service sends so much traffic, even leveraging just a small percentage can see a decent increase in your comment count and subscriber numbers. Today I’m going to give an in-depth guide to the service and then give my tactics for getting the most out of it.
StumbleUpon Basics
StumbleUpon is a system that allows you to find new and interesting websites based around your favourite subjects. The more you use the service, the more the system “learns” about your interests which in-turn provides you with more relevant, fascinating content.
This is very different to the usual method of finding news by going to your favourite blogs or entering a search query into a major search engine. Here you’ll find content from all over the web which you know other people have enjoyed, so it can lead to some great discoveries. With StumbleUpon, it’s all about the users and the content that the community enjoys.
How to Use the Service
Traditionally, StumbleUpon utilises a toolbar that you install in a browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. More recently however, they have came up with a toolbar that you don’t need to install, which shows at the top of the pages you are viewing.
I prefer using the toolbar option as you can customise it and it doesn’t take up any additional screen space. Here’s how it looks (note that my version has been tweaked based on my preferences):
The three main buttons that you should be aware of here are the ‘Stumble’ button and the up and down thumbs. The Stumble button will load a new page in your browser that is based around your interests. The thumbs up button signifies that you like the page and of course the down thumb signifies that you don’t like it.
There are two aspects of this thumbing up and down that affect the system. The first aspect is that StumbleUpon learns about what type of content you like and what you don’t, and then tries to show you more of what you do like when you click Stumble. The other use of the ‘thumbs up’ button is that StumbleUpon tend to show that page to more people if a lot of people are enjoying the content of that page.
With over 10 million active users on the site there is a lot of potential for certain content to get viewed thousands of times. In fact, I had a blog post I wrote for DumbLittleMan receive over 100,000 views from the service. Instead of trying to explain how the system works in just text, I’ve created this small graphic that should help to clear things up:
Becoming an Active User
If you’ve never used StumbleUpon before, let me warn you now that the service can become very addictive and a huge drain on your time. In fact, images that have said “Stop Using StumbleUpon” and shown up while browsing with the toolbar have become a thing of humour because people know how fun the service can be.
The following points are applicable whether you are just starting out in the service, whether you’ve used it and want to get more out of it or you’re an internet marketer looking for more website traffic. Either way, it’s good to take full advantage of all the features available and become a genuine, helpful user of the community.
Define Your Interests
When you sign-up to StumbleUpon you will be asked what topics you are interested in. Of course, it’s important that you select subjects which you are actually interested in so that you’re shown content that you care about you when using the toolbar. When I signed up I entered ‘web development’, ‘internet’ and ’self improvement’ as my favourite topics.
Although StumbleUpon will “learn” about your interests based on your usage of the service, it’s still good to pick topics that you’re highly interested in so you’re not just shown random content when you start using it.
Choose a Profile Picture
No matter what your reasons for using the service are, I believe everyone should at least take a minute to update their profile with a picture (also known as an avatar). Your profile picture will of course show on your profile, but it will also show on any pages where you have reviewed content and it may show on review pages which show users who ‘thumbed up’ content.
In other words, your avatar is going to be seen in a lot of places on the service so pick something memorable. Here are some examples of popular avatars in the social media space:
It is up to you whether you want to use an ‘avatar’ style picture like this or a picture of your face. Both are acceptable and about as popular as each other.
Fill Out Your Bio
Every user on StumbleUpon gets their own profile page which they can customise. Yours will be located at http://StumbleUpon.com/stumbler/username/ (of course, substituting username for whatever username you chose). Your description is there simply to tell the world a bit about yourself. I recommend that you fill this with relevant, honest information, so if people like your Stumbles then they can find out more about you.
Here is a slightly crazy but very honest bio from one of the top users of the site:
A nice touch in the description section is that you can add a link to other websites so other users may check out the links to see what you are about. I’ve made some great relationships through StumbleUpon and turned many of my ‘friends’ on the site into blog subscribers and Twitter followers.
Add People to Follow
I’ve already mentioned that when you sign-up to StumbleUpon you get to pick your favourite interests which StumbleUpon will use to show you relevant content anytime you click the Stumble button. The Stumble button is not the only way to find great content on the site though. You can also find it via your connections.
When you Stumble upon a page, you will be able to see the user who submitted it via the toolbar like so:
If you like what they are submitting you can both add them as a friend and subscribe to their submissions. This means that when you go to your home page on the site then you will see all the recent reviews by your friends. My own profile has 41 people subscribed to my updates.
Note: I have not used the service as a normal user (at least on the ViperChill account) for a long time, though I am going to get back into it. You don’t need to be an active user of the service in order to get a lot of traffic to your website.
Create Your Own Shortcuts
Once you start really getting into the site, you’ll notice that you want to speed up certain aspects of the features available. My current set-up (for the browser extension) is as follows:
- I let Stumbleupon prefetch the pages it is going to show me
- If I click ‘Thumbs Down’ then it automatically loads a new page
- CTRL + Left Arrow on my keyboard shows a new page (Stumble Button)
- CTRL + Up Arrow on my keyboard gives a page a thumbs up
- CTRL + Down Arrow on my keyboard gives the page a thumbs down
This means that I can browse around and find great new content without having to keep clicking on the toolbar with my mouse. You can change your shortcuts by going to Tools >> Toolbar Options >> Shortcuts. If you like the idea of auto loading a new page when you click the down or up thumb then you can change that in the configuration tab.
Getting Traffic from StumbleUpon
If you are not a webmaster and simply want to find awesome content, then the information above should be more than enough for you to get started. However, this is an internet marketing blog after-all, and StumbleUpon happens to be one of the easiest ways to get thousands of eyeballs on your content.
StumbleUpon is known to have the ability to send a flood of traffic to a page in the span of just a few hours. I remember the days when traffic from the service would only have a 30% bounce rate, and while it’s around 80% now, a percentage of visitors still leave comments and sign-up to your RSS feed which is what most people want them to do.
Though the 12,000 visitors ViperChill received from StumbleUpon last month is tiny compared to months where I’ve received over 100,000+ visitors from the service, I thought I would just show some proof of that traffic:
In the early days of StumbleUpon, being one of their “power users” helped you massively in getting traffic to a page. In fact, I could pretty much guarantee that any page I promoted would receive thousands of visitors. If you had a large network on the site you could also use their ‘Send to’ feature to share a page with all of your friends and get more traffic that way.
Nowadays, the power of your profile has very little (if anything at all) to do with getting traffic from the toolbar. It’s all about the content – which is great for you and me.
Write Creative Titles
Although your content should be good, it isn’t nearly as important as the headline it’s wrapped in. The title of your article or blog post is the first thing people see so if it doesn’t entice them to read on then they aren’t going to review or thumb-up your content which would send you more traffic.
The types of titles that work well on StumbleUpon include:
- List / Resource Posts
- Something that is humorous
- Something that is relevant and fills a need
- Something that is shocking and against the norm
A title like ‘Some snails in London get painted’ is nowhere near as interesting as ‘Graffiti Artist Uses Snails as His Canvas’ which was in fact an article which received thousands of views. Of course, don’t write a great title if you don’t have the relevant content to back it up. Just remember that the title is without a doubt the most important factor of whether people will read your content or not.
Want proof? Look at the top rated pages in any category and they will all have great titles. Or, test it out for yourself. Dragos is a great example of someone who knows exactly what the StumbleUpon audience wants — just check out the post titles in his sidebar.
Create Viral Images or Videos
Text isn’t the only type of content that works well on StumbleUpon. For a while in 2008 I ran a demotivational pictures blog and each day I would receive thousands of visitors from the toolbar. Don’t forget that most StumbleUpon users are just browsing around the web, looking for something interesting. Pictures and videos are great ways to catch their attention.
It’s important to note that while images or videos can be great at getting a surge in traffic from the site, it’s far less likely to convert in a way you want it to compared to text content. Unless of course, you’re trying to increase the view count of your videos.
Enter Relevant Submission Information
It’s important that you do not simply keep submitting your own content to the site as I’ve noticed a lot of people do as this is a fast-track way to get your account banned or have your site banned. Even a huge blog like ProBlogger was removed from the service and while the domain was allowed back into the system after a huge uproar, it does show that nobody is exempt from their heavy hand.
You can submit a new page to the system by simply clicking ‘I like it’ and if the page has not been discovered before, a pop-up box like this one below will appear:
If the title of the current article is catchy then leave it; otherwise you can tweak it to help the page get more views. For a description I sometimes just copy the introduction of the article, or you can write your own short review. It’s important that you pick an appropriate category for the submission. If you choose a sports category for a financial article, nobody who it is shown to is going to like it and it will quickly drop out of the queue.
Send the Page via a Re-Direct
I mentioned earlier that it is no longer effective to send a page to all of your friends and ask them for a Stumble. In the past this kind of activity would guarantee you thousands of visitors but now it is rarely the case. If you do want to share a StumbleUpon link with lots of people I’ve found it to be more effective to use a re-direct like this:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/click_redir.php?t=49e34c6117e3f&src=url&u=YOURURLGOESHERE
This reason this works is that StumbleUpon can tell whether you just landed on a page directly and clicked Stumble or they actually showed you the page via the toolbar (much more natural) and you voted for it that way. However if you go through the re-direct – or keep stumbling and land on a page and vote for it – it looks a lot more natural and like a genuine recommendation.
Clean Up Your Site
One thing many people forget about receiving traffic from any site is that by nature, you’re going to turn people away if your site is overloaded with ads, pop-ups, or anything else that deters from your main content. The design of ViperChill is very minimalist because I either want people to subscribe to the RSS feed here or view the content clearly. That’s it.
The attention span of StumbleUpon users is very short so if they can’t see your headline and your post straight away, there’s a very good chance they’re just going to move on to the next article. Getting StumbleUpon visitors to stick around on your site is hard enough so don’t make things harder for yourself with a cluttered website.
Look at What Is Hot
A good way to get traffic from any social media website is to look at what is hot and is working well in that specific community. It makes sense that if you find out what people on a certain website and send them more of it, they are going to stick around on your site as well.
A good way to check what is hot on StumbleUpon is to check the top rated pages for each category. As an example, ViperChill is in the Internet Marketing niche so I would look at the StumbleUpon “hot” page for internet marketing, which you can find here. I can see articles on this topic that have received thousands of visitors from the site which could possibly give me inspiration for future posts
When I was writing for PluginID, I actually had 3 of the most popular self improvement articles ever written on StumbleUpon, all receiving over 50,000 visitors from the service. The number one thing that worked for me was simply writing great articles with even better headlines.
The rest of the advice here may be secondary to that, but don’t overlook it.
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I used to love StumbleUpon. I say ‘used to’ because my site is now banned by StumbleUpon. Some idiot who was a ‘Stumble friend’ asked to work with me and I wasn’t interested so he told StumbleUpon I was scamming him. So they banned my site.
Crazy.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
As I mentioned in the post, ProBlogger was banned from StumbleUpon and then re-added, so you should definitely get in touch and explain the situation to them.
Yeah – I saw. I should have mentioned I’ve tried on 3 different occasions to get re-added and for my site, they are not budging. I also got a few friends to write in as well. Obviously not such an uproar as what ProBlogger must have created!
Andrew
Ah, that’s a shame. Sorry to hear about your troubles 🙁
I’ve tried sending SU messages several times. I’ve used that site for years but have never got a single reply from them. I’m starting to believe that no one actually works there. Or maybe I’m just not important enough for them to want to reply to me.
They were purchased by Ebay for $75m about a year ago but then the old owners bought the site back about 6 months ago, so they’ve probably gone through a number of changes in the user support area. Still, it’s sad to know they don’t get back to people anymore.
My StumbleUpon account was also suspended a few years ago because I was doing stumble exchanges 🙁 had it coming, I guess. My website was apparently not banned though, although I’ve never seen much traffic coming in from this source lately… whereas back in the day there was usually a couple thousands daily visitors coming in from Stumbleupon.
Hmm… maybe it’ll be worth trying to contact them and sort things out, based on what you wrote.
Awesome info……Thanks
Andrew, that sucks! I have a friend who that happened to, and like Glen mentioned about ProBlogger, he was able to be re-added. That’s really a shame though.
Thanks for this, Glen. I’ve always wanted a definitive article to using SU effectively.
You’re welcome Anne; I’m glad that you found it useful!
I’ve been using it for some time. However, it’s useful to read another person’s perspective on what makes the articles do well. I’ve submitted some of my own stuff, but I always counter balance this by submitting loads of other sites/articles/ interesting photos as well.I hope I don’t get banned too.
That’s a similar strategy to what I would previously do (submit other articles to counter-balance it) so you should be fine.
Hi Glen i think it is the ultimate guide on how to get stumble upon traffic.
Thanks for sharing this
🙂
Hey Glen,
Nice guide. Nice nice. I got a few stumbles, and my traffic was kissing the sky, just like me ego. But you are right – it’s not quality traffic. I searched around the website, and got the tool bar installed. It definitely gets addictive like heck, and that’s why I stopped. Writing killer ass headlines makes sense, the favorites on the site definitely have them. But I can’t find a reason why I should still work towards it, as it is really low quality for me. From the times I got stumbled, no one signed up, and maybe 2-3 left a comment. It’s always like that (well, the 4 times it happened). Why bother ?
How are you tracking sign-ups? I have pretty advanced tracking on RSS feeds and I can see the exact sources people come from before signing up to them. I always have referrers from StumbleUpon in there. Maybe you need to make your RSS more clear (like I mentioned on our coaching call) in the left sidebar.
Wow, what a great, insightful, detailed post on stumbleupon.
Though I have heard about StumbleUpon, I never really understood it.
I wanted to know that can we submit a squeeze page to StumbleUpon?
Thank you for providing such an important resource for getting traffic. These will be useful for any Internet Marketer.
Kindest,
Nabeel
Hey Nabeel,
It sounds like you’re the exact kind of person I wrote this guide for 🙂
You can submit a squeeze page to StumbleUpon, but don’t expect to get many (if any at all) signups. It’s really not the kind of content the users are looking for.
Oh Ok. Thanks a lot for replying back and answering my question. I appreciate it.
I don’t have any advanced tracking on my RSS feeds. I just check the period of the stumble, when the traffic goes ballistic, and check feedburner. The subscription rate is standard, even when I got lots of eyeballs. I actually put the RSS icon on the top of my left side bar, it’s the Japanese girl with a RSS icon now 😉 It does help, but not as much. My email list is growing way faster than my RSS list, but I wish it would grow as fast as well.
I have been curious about using Stumble upon for a long time, while my blog is in the beginning stages (I am still in the pillar content writing stages), I never had one clue on how to use it! It is great know that I don’t have to be active user to get traffic, because it I have a hard enough time getting away from a lot of other distractions on net.
This was a really great post I totally understand what I need to now!
Oh and did you tweak the design of the site a bit? it seems to be a bit different or may it just me ?
Hey Jason,
Really glad that you liked the post!
Yes, I tweaked the background image. I think it looks much better (especially on wider screens).
Also, the subscriber count now has 5 digits 😉
I even think I added one to that too, How could forget that! Great Job especially after the last post, it was brilliant!
Very good info Glen! I’ve found SU to be very hit and miss and when I tend to get traffic from it when I least expect it. Just a bit interesting that you don’t have a SU share button at the end of the post?!
Hi Jorgen,
Thanks! I used to have one but the number of times it was clicked was about once for every one thousand visitors. Maybe it was just my placement, but I don’t think it helps that much. Something to consider trying again in the future though 🙂
I didn’t know they were bought out and then bought back again. Perhaps I should try and get my site accepted again.
Andrew
Well, Andrew, too bad for StumbleUpon but I like your site and am going to be your newest subscriber yet!
As to ViperChill, thank you for a great guide on the service, with all its ups and downs (no pun), I think it’s wonderful to have so many ways to spread the word about our content.
Very timeley article. I have had a site up for a couple of years which is a blogger blog, and a purchased domain. It costs $10 per year to keep running. I have literally done NO work on this site besides the content and I pushed it out to my linkedin contacts back when I created it. Its a site on how to answer interview questions. It has like 14 Y! links lol. Literally no SEO work. I built it before I knew anything about SEO. The sites gets about 500 hits a month, mostly direct and from what seems to be email referrals.
I was browsing my analytics today and saw the site had 9000 visits this month. I was like wtf?
Seems that someone thumbs up it on Stumbleupon and its gone viral! 9000 visits in 3 days. Thats like the same as the last years worth of traffic lol. Think I might have to now spend some time on the site 😉
I already had a quick look and changed some of the adsense advertising as per your recommendation. Its a horribly designed site.
Goes to show you the power of stumbleupon tho!
Haha, that’s an awesome example Vinay!
Congrats 🙂
Also, what do you think about the “greetings” plugin for wordpress? You can set it just for stumbleupon. Dont know if it works. Also, what do you think about “lightbox” email captures for viral stumble pages? Think they are effective?
I’ve saw the greetings plugins but never tested them myself so not sure how well they work. I think anything that detracts from the content people are supposed to be reading / viewing though is never ideal.
I have been using SU for about 3 weeks now, great tool to find some more content for your blog and to write about but also great exposure for your own articles. Thanks to these tools a website can grow pretty fast these days. Great article, thanks!
You’re welcome Jan,
Thanks for stopping by!
Hey Glen,
Thanks for the great post. I have used SU before as a surfer but haven’t used it yet to leverage its traffic potential. I wouldn’t have expected to get banned by just submitting my own content, so thanks for the heads up. Semi-random question: What hosting service do you use for all of your wordpress sites/blogs? I have researched them in-depth but can’t figure out which is the best.
Cheers,
Alex
I use lots of hosts, including Hostgator and VPS.net. It really depends which sites I’m running.
Hey Glen,
Great post (as always). I’ve been doing a bit of research on SU lately because of its ability to drive massive amounts of traffic in a short period of time. However, I have a question for you: What do you think about initially paying for SU traffic (i.e. spending the .05 or whatever per view that SU offers through its advertising platform) to get more SU eyeballs onto your site? Is it possible this will cause more people to rate your site and get it moving organically once you stop paying for exposure?
It’d be great to get your thoughts on this.
Thanks,
Eric
Hi Eric,
I’ll actually have a post on this going live in a couple of weeks. In short: I found this to happen in the past, but in recent testing it did not send me one single organic visitor.
Yeah, StumbleUpon works great for me 🙂
Awesome 🙂
Glen, I’ve gotten some traffic from StumbleUpon, but I haven’t actively used it myself. I really appreciate this post, because I’m ready to add a new social media outlet to my marketing mix.
Hey John,
Glad that you like it. Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Glen, thanks for the SU primer. I recently made one, but found myself just getting lost or disinterested. Thanks for the refresh! -nd
Thanks Andrew, you’re welcome!
*by one I mean an account, lol. Dang Monday morning…
aha! I thought you meant making a guide 😉
Really Great StumbleUpon Guide!
I never knew this much about stumbleupon and now that my knowledge has increased, I will make good use of this information and use it to help my blog.
Thanks a lot for the inspiring post,
-Onibalusi
You’re welcome Oni,
Good to see you here!
Hi Glen, thanks for this in-depth article. I used to use StumbleUpon. I think my highest ever traffic spike was around 500 visitors per day. It’s not that much compared to you or other A-List bloggers out there, but it was big surprise for me. However, like you say, the conversation rate wasn’t that great and I also found the system to be time-consuming and distracting. For example, if I found a site I liked I would play around with it and maybe an hour would have passed by before I knew it. So I guess using StumbleUpon takes more discipline than I thought. I’m going to try using it right now. Thanks for the inspiring man. Happy first day of summer!
It’s Winter in South Africa right now so it’s freezing!
You’re totally right about the discipline side of things. Time just disappears. Thanks for the comment 🙂
Glen, thanks for the insightful post. I’d heard about how useful Stumble is and recently adding it to my list of ‘must use sites’. I’m pleased to read about your additional tip (warning) regarding over use of Stumble for your own blog; and there was me thinking Darren Rowse (Problogger) was impregnable; tough on Darren but a lesson learnt for all. Thanks again for sharing this.
Regards
Paul
I admit I like the large amount of traffic that StumbleUpon can bring, but I don’t like the wishy-washy nature of SU surfers, however. I hate logging into my stats and seeing my bounce rate higher, so therefore, I tend to stay away from trying to attract traffic via StumbleUpon.
Of course, I wouldn’t mind if other stumbled my posts and I DID get a lot of traffic, because I know many of them would “stick” by subscribing to my newsletter, but personally I’d rather put my traffic-generating effort in other sources.
Thanks for sharing this post with us 🙂
I haven’t found StumbleUpon’s traffic to be worth the trouble of submitting my posts to on more popular websites/blogs that I own. In fact, looking at the bounce rate from StumbleUpon traffic, I don’t even give it the time of day anymore. However, it’s good to see that you’re doing so well with it.
I just tried this service out for the first time. I loved the sites it showed me. The article I submitted got a few hits. But I quickly realized the bounce rate was higher than usual. Thanks for the heads up on not submitting my own stuff too much. The redirect tip l’ll experiment with. All the tips seem usefull so will be using this service more.
So, to clarify, the sharing function of StumbleUpon essentially follows the same rules you should adhere to on Twitter, i.e. don’t just broadcast your own stuff over and over again, but share a range of informative articles. You’re saying you can share your own blog articles, but don’t JUST share your own work-? Am I right?
I have to agree with you on the love/hate relationship with StumbleUpon.
An older blog I worked on with my friends had a few posts go crazy on StumbleUpon and sent a couple thousand each. The only problem was the bounce rate and lack of interest overall.
I wish I knew what I know now about keeping people around but it was still a really interesting experiment with traffic.
Making great titles really are key. Like the old cliche goes, create killer resources and people will go crazy. The funny thing is that it doesn’t need to be some 1000+ resources, it can be just 10 or 20 but it needs to be unique.
Great Article!
Again pretty powerful and full of actionable content. I like these post because they actually work when you put them into use. I feel like I am getting something tangible when I read these. Thanks Glen. Keep up the hard work.
Glen, you’re right StumbleUpon can deliver good volume though viewers slightly suffer from attention deficit. The other interesting way to use SU is the ad function which can be targeted by interests and at only 5-cents pay per view, which for some types of promotion is inexpensive.
Great overview, Glen. StumbleUpon has been one of the biggest traffic sources to my blog and my other websites for years now. And honestly, my experience is that any traffic is good traffic.
Would it be redundant of me to say that I thumbed up this article? 🙂
Excellent overview! Great to get a decent explanation of how it works while getting an introduction as a user too. Without that context and just being greedy for traffic will get people nowhere!
Stumbleupon has been very generous to me. A few of my articles got 10k, one got 50k and I amazingly managed to get all the way to 100k on my post about Irish English. I think being an active user myself means you intuitively know how the system works and write to people like yourself within it 😉 I always let someone else naturally “discover” my site before I would request more stumbles. If it doesn’t happen after a couple of days there’s no need to push it.
Having said that my 50k post went viral after *I* stumbled it a week after posting. Some requests on twitter worked magic. I used the su.pr URL shortener – would that be less effective than the redirection you gave?
Of course, most of the 200k+ visitors stumbleupon has sent me this year have been extremely fleeting, but a small percentage of a huge number has indeed given me long lasting commenters. RSS numbers don’t go up more than they usually would unfortunately, but I’m the same. I don’t tend to subscribe to RSS feeds I stumble – always preferring direct recommendations from people I trust on twitter etc.
Hopefully now that I am actually selling something and can earn from my traffic I will be able to keep up the flow! Although I imagine the results would be similar to my subscriber number experience. I just don’t see Stumbleupon users as quickly swiping out their credit cards 🙂
Great guide, Glen.
I had no idea that the pop up appears only if the URL hasn’t been stumbled before. I always wondered about the difference between the pop up and just clicking the button.
I received a massive traffic spike on an article and couldn’t figure out where it came from. I was mentioned on a site, but couldn’t believe that much traffic came from one site. I checked Google Analytics and found that the traffic came from Stumble. As you mentioned, it didn’t convert very well, but it was nice when it happened.
I learned a lot from the article, so thank you for writing it.
Karen
Glen,
Thanks for the article. You always have good content that can be put into action right away.
I used to be a big SU user but found it was, as you say, very addictive and I could easily waste a lot of time using it. I’ve started again, but am trying to use it in a more focused manner to find content I can actually use.
I did have a question, though. How do some sites put up special welcome pages for visitors from SU? I’m pretty sure I’ve come across sites like that.
Thanks
Glen, thanks for a great definitive guide to SU. Many of my consulting clients ask me things like, “how do I game SU with minimum effort?” and I always tell them the best way to get a benefit from any online platform is to become a genuine user and add value. That’s what the web is all about, right? It’s just the real world anyway. Now I can point them to your article.
Cheers.
John
Amazing! I just wonder how you manage to drive 12,040 visitors in one month by using StumbleUpon. Seems like it is really good in driving traffic. I seldom use it because i do not get any traffic from that. I will try it again! Thanks for the nice guide!
Hey Glen.
As I already tweeted, this is the best StumbeUpon tutorial ever and I mean it. I’ve read a lot of so called “Definitive Guide To Get The Most Of SU While Doing Nothing And Waiting For Your Bank Account To Get Fat” guides but as the joking title I gave to them implies, none was really a SU tutorial.
Thanks for the link and the mention of one of my articles, which, by the way , enjoys quite a bit of rejuvenation lately. I would like to add, just like the Irish Poliglot above, that I also use su.pr from the day they launched it and that helped me a little bit with the analytics part: I can see how many referrers from twitter, how many from SU, and what’s more important I can see the evolution of a post in the last 30 days.
That being said, I just want to share that I got 375k total visits from SU since I’m using su.pr, which is less than a year. Quite a number… Users from SU don’t convert into RSS readers because SU is not about commitment and retention. It’s a place where you can rate articles and then jump (or should I say “stumble”) to the next one, that’s how the service is built. So I don’t expect much of an RSS increase from SU. What I do expect though – and I do get it – it’s an increase in backlinks and Google awareness. I noticed that every time one of my articles gets viral on SU, the search engine traffic spikes too. Maybe a lot of people are using SU extension for Google, which allows them the see who rated that specific content on SU and how many stars that posts have on SU ( the stars feature has been disabled on SU site but it’s still active under the hood, Google extension still displays it).
As for the headlines, they didn’t matter as much as the content does. Each of the posts that went viral took me at least one week (some of them 2-3 weeks, the 100 topics lists) to write. So, just because you have a fancy headline, that doesn’t mean you’re going to get automatically viral. But if you do spent time and create unique, valuable content, they’re going to promote you.
Sometimes these articles generates months of steady, constant, big traffic from SU. I have articles written last year in august which are still getting constant traffic from SU.
Hey Glen,
Another awesome long-depth post.
I have to agree with you on the love/hate relationship with StumbleUpon.
I think getting traffic from stumbleupon is not hard, but increase bounce rate is hard. Currently stumbleupon is one of my top traffic source.
Thanks for sharing this great Post. Great work Glen.
PS. I’ve not copied any image from your site.
I simple search google or Flickr for my posts images. Thanks :).
Another fine post from the Glenster, thanks dude.
I used Stumbleupon to try and attarct visitors to a blog I owned about touchscreen phones last year. I did sometimes notice small trickles of traffic coming through so I don’t doubt it can be powerful if used correctly. I sold that blog but now own another blog based on concept phones so I might perhaps try and leverage the power of Stumbleupon again, using this guide.
I personally receive emails from the service alerting me to sites I might be interested in and I think that the kind of content I have on the concept phones site (pictures of cool, odd, weird, high tech mobile phones) would appeal to applicable Stumbleupon users. I will post my findings over at my blog.
Thanks again Glen.
Glen,
It is a great review of one of the social media site. Personally, I am not on any social media such as Stumble upon, twitter, digg, etc and so on, why? I have limited time to blog between my 2 kids, family, volunteer work and life, I do not want to add more time on internet as I have barely enough.
I guess I am last woman on the earth (who has a blog) and not be in social media. I know it can do wonder for site, but so far I am okay without it. Here is alternate view and my 2 cents. I applaud all of you who are on social media, as it can work for many.
Thanks for sharing this. SU can really help us add more exposure to our content. I have several articles from EZA stumbled there and it really helps to increase my article views.
Regards,
Gary
I’ve heard love and hate, from “Stumble Upon” users. I’ve used very limited lately, I’ll have to use it more just to see if the traffic generated is good enough.
Hi Glen, Great tactics and great timing. This morning when I checked my stats I had a spike that was 10x my usual amount of traffic. When I checked the source most of the traffic was from SU. Of course I was thrilled, but now I’m rather deflated since reading your reality check. I’ve never been a huge fan of SU because they recommend the weirdest things to me, and now I know why. I’ll look into this further based on your post here. Thanks!
glen
you have some very amazing people commenting here. i have just found you from somewhere else – referred to your site. just looked at the cloud – one tiny thing – slimmy has two m’s – must have missed it. i am looking forward to seeing how the program works for me – i am a newbie to putting my business on social media sites – had a fb page for myself for a little while but now have a business page, twitter and some of the other social media sites so i will be looking forward to seeing how things go especially for the blog – that is a big issue for me – getting the numbers to increase.
perhaps i am showing my age/lack of social media understanding/use but you have certainly done a lot. is pluggedin still operating?
robyn
PluginID is still around yeah. I don’t own it though.
Not sure what you mean about Slimmy?
Great post! I received mass traffic from SU but it’s been a while I haven’t any.
I’m always shocked at the posts that get StumbleUpon traffic on my site.. they’re usually obscure in-between posts, rather than the ones I spend time on.
StumbleUpon traffic is also not great for people looking to Monetize their site because the traffic quality is poor and the CTR ratio very low. Some traffic analytic sites like IZEARanks will not even count StumbleUpon traffic at all when tallying your daily and weekly visits. I used to get over a thousand visits per month from StumbleUpon two years ago for my primary blog and weaned myself off of StumbleUpon as such a high traffic source over the past year and a half.
I do however enjoy StumbleUpon and often will stumble and find some interesting articles, I think its faster and more random than having to go through Digg or other services to find articles. I try to stumble 5 articles for every 1 I would submit myself, though I don’t submit my own articles to stumbleupon very often. I find that my poetry blog gets more stumbleupon traffic than either of my other two blogs (stumbleupon users seem to like visual, entertainment, artistic type posts more than blogging related ones I find)
This post inspired me to join StumbleUpon and with a new blog, I thought it would be a great jump start. I’ve only been using SU for a week, and I try to be wary of “thumbing up” my own posts too much because it seems they’re touchy about that. I’ve used creative titles and all, but for some reason, I’m not seeing the surge in viewers that many of you are. Am I doing something wrong here? Thanks!
Hi, great article. I use SU all the time and also SU/ADS when appropriate.
Quick question:
How do you send traffic via redirects?
You have shown a redirect URL but did not tell how to get it.
Thanks
Sandro
Just edit the URL on the end and send it to your blogging friends / friends via email / IM / facebook. Just make sure it’s great content or you’ll be wasting your time.
Hi Glen, thanks for your prompt reply…
Yes I have understood that, thanks.
My question was a little more technical:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/click_redir.php?t=49e34c6117e3f&src=url&u=YOURURLGOESHERE
1) Where are these parameters coming from?
t=49e34c6117e3f&src
2) Where did you get this URL from?
I have tried to find it myself but I was unable to.
Thanks
S.
I believe it was in analytics referrers, but I can’t be certain.
Great article! I changed my stumble upon profile while reading your post. I’m definitely gonna use it differently now!
This is a basic yet good guide to Stumble Upon. I’m feeling to hooked to StumbleUpon now.
I’ve been using StumbleUpon for almost two years and must say that it’s definitely a great source of traffic. One of my articles did 40k in views from one submission but like you said; the traffic from them is low quality and are also a very specific crowd. If you submit an article or page and it doesn’t result in a burst of traffic then it could probably use some tweaking.
Curious as to what your thoughts are on forming a StumbleUpon group that helps put some wind under the sails of articles of other members of the group by doing objective peer reviews. Meaning you could get a thumbs up or down but at least you know it’s getting reviewed. Anyone interest, by all means contact me.
Great post. I learned a lot more than I previously did.
Thanks
if you want stumbleupon traffic to spend more time .. and perhaps even sign up to follow your blogs then it would be a good idea to find either original or little reported content. and this site doesn’t but don’t welcome me with a
“you’ve won!” wav file
I never thought that Stumbleupon can give massive traffic like you have show in this entry.
On top of that, 80% of my traffic is based on other social media sites such as Youtube, MySpace and Facebook.
Maybe I must try Stumbleupon to create another marketing funnel. Thank you. 😉
Thats a great guide to stumble upon. Su does bring in a lot of traffic but it really depends on your network. You also need to spend a lot of time on it stumbling. As you have mentioned, it is also important to submit other sites.
Hey, thanks for this guide. My blog is pretty new and I’m really trying to get it some more traffic. I bookmarked this post on my delicious account for future reference.
My blog is piss poor in traffic, doing just around 7-8 per day…and half of those are mine because of constantly checking if everything’s set up already lol
11. Fantastic day to you, I always study your weblog and i am certainly one of your fan. I love the way you talk to your reader as if they are your friend.
Stumbleupon doesn’t give you lots of traffic, and even if it does, it will only do sao for a couple of spikes, because of their indexing pattern…
Interesting. I’ve been trying to decide which social media networks to become more active on, and I like the whole concept of StumbleUpon. I used the site several years ago before, but it was quickly forgotten as I became busy with other obligations.
I’ll definitely check into it again.
Christina
Hey, i was just wondering which program you use to get your stats and graphs etc, i really want to find out what my bounce rate is. Thanks
StumbleUpon is really the best social network I know
A really useful and helpful post mate! You covered it totally well.
I was not getting enough juice from Stumble-upon, I’ill try your tips now.
Joined StumbleUpon today – thanks for the tips. Looking forward to the traffic!
Great article Glen.Didn’t really get the power of SU until I read this.Thanks a million.
Baz
Great and informative article on how to get traffic from StumbleUpon. Thanks for sharing !!!!
Hey Glen, Excellent article. You describe all things in graphical manner is outstanding. People much more like to see graphically presented blogs or articles instead real all things. Its really understandable.
you providing such a nice and perfect information about whole Stumble Upon like Write Creative Title, find Out people, Find out your Interest and many more.
I like to use StumbleUpon site. Its really excellent source for traffic generation. Its really a good social site. Thanks a lot for providing such a nice information.
very nice sharing keep it up dude 🙂
Thanks viperchill.. stumbleupon help me to increase my blog traffic. but, right about what you say, that is so low conversion 🙂
Food bloggers have discovered Stumble as if it’s the 2nd coming. I see the high bounce rates though and am not sure the lack of quality traffic is good for the long haul. Ad revenue vs bounce rate vs whatever else; it gets a bit all consuming sometimes!
Found this blog through Google. Interesting information on the StumbleUpon phenomena. I didn’t know you could get banned by submitting too many of your own pages. Do they ban you if you submit the same page over and over again or can you submit different pages from the same website with no penalty?
SU has been very hit or miss with me thus far. Some articles have upwards of 20k stumbles, some a few hundred and the rest have like one lonely stumble. Maybe one day I will crack the SU code.
I started my site in February of this year and started stumbling things in March. I ended up switching to Sexy Bookmarks in late May and in June I saw a massive increase in traffic from Stumbleupon. I’d have to say that 3/5 articles would receive anywhere from 500-5000 views. I pretty much figured if people are liking it I might as well keep submitting stuff. I submitted prob hundreds of articles in a 2 1/2 month span and got hundreds of thousands of views. Then suddenly about a week ago it just stopped dead. I haven’t been able to get any hits at all. I’m really not sure what the deal is.
Do they tell you if they ban your site?
Were you submitting them yourself?
Great post, thanks for the SU tips.
I must try this trick.
So, from what I see in your post and replies of other commenters – StumbleUpon used to be a great source of traffic in the past and is less so nowadays.
Well… I guess that’s the case with most networks.
Social platforms are quickly getting overused and abused by self-promoters.
So – maybe the best recipe is to use any social platform as a tool for creating community and connections. Traffic will come as a by-product of such approach.
Of course, easy to say, hard to do. Especially when bloggers are taught to use Twitter, Facebook, Google+, StubmeUpon, YouTube, Digg, Del.icio.us and so on and so on.
How can you be a genuine community member in all of these platforms?
I’ve been using Stumbleupon for a while now and not had much luck, hopefully after reading this blog post that’ll change… many thanks
Thanks a lot for the post this will surely help me get good traffic from stumble.
I actually ‘stumbled upon’ this old post because all of the traffic I get from StumbleUpon says it has average visit time of 0 seconds, according to Google Analytics. Thanks for the interesting read.
This is possibly THE definitive article on Stumble. I, too, try to advise people against Stumble exchanges/swaps, because it plain doesn’t work. You cannot just stumble stuff that is a) not worthy of Stumbling and b) outside your “niche.” It will not work in the long run, for either party. Stumble is not stupid when it comes to what they do. Your behavior has to be genuine and honest, or they’ll figure it out. Slow and steady wins the Stumble race. There are no shortcuts.
Great article.
I have heard a lot of mixed views regarding StumbleUpon.
Some people swear by it as a great way of bringing traffic to your site, others say the same thing as some of the comm enters above that their bounce rate shot up, and much of the traffic was pointless from a conversion point of view.
For me personally, I had set up an account a while back , only to find that my profile page(The main page where visitors will get to know you) was not showing my bio, or much of the other info I had added.
After contacting the admin on more than one occasion, they said everything was okay.
Yet, unlike every other Stumbler account I visited(Who’s pages were perfectly displayed) my page was close to non existent(Just a few words).
This became quite frustrating, as I kept getting the same response from the admin.
As much as I wished to get totally involved with StumbleUpon, I thought what was the use of me spending all that time stumbling other sites when I(And my site) are not even being included.
Eventually, I just gave up on them..
Amazing!!! u posted several years ago but still very relevant, thanks
Interesting and very informative post. I’m new to the concepts of search engine optimization but now I have become fan of viperchill. Great Job !
Thanks for this! I have a Sumble account I rarely use so I was looking for something to help me along. Glad I found your post. Thank you for the guide.
I had a some kind of a traffic growth spurt from SU but it died down. Any ideas why?
Great post- I have a stumbleupon account, but didn’t fully understand its functionality. Thanks for this article.
Good article, I used to get a alot of traffic from stumble but latley when I add an article I get no hits. I’m not sure if the site has been banned.
StumbleUpon is strange. I’ve had good success with some articles, and a standard 4 for many. I tend to reserve using it for my best stuff. The keyword tags seem to help sometimes, other times not. SU people have responded to humor articles fairly well. I have to remember to Stumble more than just my own stuff. I Stumbled a good blog from another site, and then one of mine a few hours later. I got some good traffic. But it tends to flare up and die down. 🙁
Nice post… StumbleUpon sends great amount of traffic. It helped me in a great way to get massive traffic to my site.
Recently I started getting some traffic on my blog from SU. Now I want to take my blog traffic stream which is coming from SU to new heights. Hope this guide will help me in that direction
Hi Friends,
i am one of the regular user of the stumble upon. i have a site.. last 3 months i got good traffic from stumble upon . but last week .i cannot get any traffic from stumble upon. how can i contract StumbleUpon member’s……how can i check my site is banned……can u help me ???
StumbleUpon can still be a source of massive traffic, it’s very viral, and nothing beats it. That is, when a post “hits.” Much of the time, though, it’s exactly two hits. Sigh. But some popular posts are STILL trickling in traffic. As a Stumbler, I try to make sure the content I recommend is up standards (there’s some amazing stuff on there).
I love SU too. I get tons of traffic but not in regular flow. So I am searching for tips and techniques on how to get regular traffic in SU. Sometimes I get 4k views sometime only 300 but not everyday.
Anyways, thanks for the share.
Edille
Great post! We recently started using Paid Discovery for our travel startup and have obviously seen a lot of traffic, but like you said, the bounce rate is fairly high with minimal time spent on the site. Just submitted our blog as well and hopefully that will get some retention going.
They also have our thumbnail/headline from our first ever release (which is terrible) and have taken over a week to change it after we requested it.
Hi Glen, thanks for sharing your knowledge on using Stumbleupon to generate website traffic. As i make this comment, Stumbleupon is the highest traffic generator to my blog. So i agree with you that stumbleupon is good for generating traffic to one’s blog. Keep up the good work.
Perhaps i’m a little late to the party. Did just want to inform you that this is a great post however and that I’ve started using StumbleUpon as an everyday marketing tool. My only fear is that i may get banned as previous users have mentioned. When i add my own content, i make sure to go and stumble about 20-30 other posts/pictures every single time. Do you know how StumbleUpon views this behavior? Will they say “This user stumbles 20-30x as much as he adds/contributes, he’s OK” or is it more like “This user has been adding content every single day, he’s banned!” Any help is appreciated! Thanks so much – Ryan
Hi, Glen. Thanks for sharing about stumbleupon. I think stumbleupon is a good alernative way to drive traffic to our site although some time the traffic is not targetted. I have ever heard that a wedding blogger got great result from social bookmarking site like like stumbleupon and digg. So, every internet marketer must try it.
Hi Glen,
I just read the 10k subscriber e-book. It’s definitely worth to try this traffic generation method to my blog.
Thank for great article.
I’m curious, is there a way to see which of my blog posts are being stumbled? I’ve recently seen an increase in traffic from SU, but I have no idea which blog posts are being stumbled. Sorry if this has been covered already, new here. 🙂
Hi Tiffany,
It’s pretty easy if you have some form of analytics software on your site…
I have google analytics, but all I can see is that the traffic is coming from SU. Is there a way to see specifically which posts are getting the traffic on GA?
Yes, click where it says “Secondary Dimension” just above your data table, and select the Landing Page metric. That should do the trick.
I’ve used StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery and it is very cool! Drives direct traffic to your site. Submitting from the same domain via a like to your SU account will get you banned.
Some excellent feedback here. I’m also new to SU and I am concerned as to how much to stumble my own blog content and how often to Stumble my Likes.
Certainly do not want to get banned, when just getting started!
From what I have gathered, it seems best to follow others first on SU, add a SU badge to your site and ever so often Stumble ones quality post?
Does this seem about right?
Thanks for the input.
In the middle of a battle with them NOW. They have restricted our account and refuse to delete it after NUMEROUS requests. Fortunately there are alot of other fish in the sea. It’s really a bad move on their part to PO bloggers.Bad press tends to spread.
I was not getting enough Traffic from SU It didn’t work for me 🙁
nice to way share this article. Never knew that this kind of way SU is usable. surely use for my new webstie
I hear people rave about Stumble Upon a lot of times but to be honest, i have used it and have not seen any great result that i should be happy about. I’m glad for people like you who use it and get great results for it. Maybe i am using it the wrong way. Will take a good look at this post and make some changes to see how it goes. At the moment, the stop social media i use and see reasonable traffic are facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and pinterest. There are other ones on the side but these are the top ones.
i am not getting that much traffic as desired. i have followed all steps. but not working for me in my point of view i think its the content from which i am not getting any traffic.
i have 1 Question can we buy stumble upon traffic ?
Really really useful for the beginners, but need to navigate and experience the site for the complete taste and ease to navigate.
Wonderful Trick for getting traffic from Stumble upon. this article helped me a lot.
Thanks for sharing.
hats off to you.. excelent post.. enjoyed reading it and followed to work on stumbleupon.. thnx
It really would be nice to see some updated versions of these advice articles.
Great great information, i am new to SU, but your article really helped me out. Keep up the good work. Happy holidays!!!
Great article, which I did actually Stumble Upon… I’m a new user and loving it at the moment, it does seem just a little addictive and easy to waste lots of time looking at random articles. This one, however, wasn’t time wasted. Will be checking out the rl.ty thing very soon – much appreciated for the heads up…
Hi I just came across this article. Very informative. I have been stumbling posts from others and also some of my own. I had no idea, stumbling your own content was bad. Can I remove posts somehow after I have added them? I would hate to be banned. Thanks.
Nice tip adding in the http://www.stumbleupon.com/click_redir.php?t=49e34c6117e3f&src=url&u=XXXXXX, I haven’t heard of doing that. I’ve never tried their paid ads, but haven’t heard great things, either. Do you have any recommendations on how to do these successfully? The traffic is cheap, but could be worthless if it doesn’t turn into any revenue. Thanks
What you wrote was actually very logical. However, consider this, suppose you
added a little information? I mean, I don’t wish to tell you how to run your blog, but what if you added a title
to possibly get people’s attention? I mean Getting Mass Traffic from
StumbleUpon: A Definitive Guide is a little plain. You should peek at Yahoo’s front page
and see how they create article titles to get viewers interested.
You might add a related video or a related pic or two to grab readers excited about everything’ve written.
Just my opinion, it might bring your website a little bit more
interesting.
Tanks you for this article, but when i submit my article on su it seems like nobody view them because it always at ‘0 view”. i think i must stumble many time before posting my article.
I recently noticed that my biggest traffic is coming from stumbleupon. Then, I stumbled upon your blog (this one here) that explained to me why it is so. Funny. Four years after you first wrote this article, it still works!
I have been a daily user of Stumble for a few months, and have posted daily.
I am completely baffled as to why all of my posts get ZERO views no matter what I have tried.
I do not believe for a second that it is a matter of title or content as my posts are as good as any out there. Something else is going here.
Stumble is just not showing my postings to anyone! Can anyone explain to me why that is?
Great article, thanks. However, I didn’t really understand what is wrong in primarily submitting your own content. This is what you’re doing when trying to promote your blog, isn’t it? Would be great if you can elaborate on this a bit more.
I love Stumbleupon and it does gives me a decent traffic. Also, its very addictive and filled with fun and information. Keep stumbling.
And I found this post from Stumbleupon. Cool, isn’t it?
Thanks Glen for SU ,
I did’t use StumbleUpon ever before but now I’m looking forward to use this one for my contents.