DISQUS

Crystal · 2 years ago

Hi, I'm Crystal and I'm a StumbleUpon addict - thanks a lot, David. One more thing I need to keep me chained to my computer;)

Dave B · 2 years ago

Thanks for the great article. I looked into the whole stumble thing but never actually tried using it. A follow up posting on using Digg and we're all set!

Vijay · 2 years ago

Hi David,
great tips. As I was also wondering how people manage to get traffic using stumbleupon.
Now I will actively participate in stumbling in the network!
Thanks.

Daniel Richard · 2 years ago

Wow I didn't know that Stumbleupon is such a great tool! I did install the plug-in for Firefox, but don't really know how to use it.
Thanks for providing the tips!

Russell Rockefeller · 2 years ago

The Stumbleupon user interface could definitely use some work. Mostly their problems are because that lack of intuition on the website back end. It would be nice if their stumble toolbar remembered the categories I usually submit to rather than having to scroll through a long list of topics. Additionally, by limiting users to submit to specific categorical topics rather than directly by tagging it kind of kills the motivation. Their search feature only brings back a few results and it would be nice if they had a Digg type method for displaying articles. I get that the idea is to stumble but what if I want to display all recent articles about a certain topic? No luck.

gerardmcgarry · 2 years ago

Loved your post David, but a small correction - the buzz.stumbleupon.com site actually applies nofollow to all of the links, so there's little chance of any link juice from those pages. Besides, the links are only there short term, so any effect would be negligible.

On the plus side, I've got on Stumble Buzz before, and it definitely generates a great spike in traffic. For a while, anyway.

David · 2 years ago

Gerard, you know, I didn't even notice the nofollows on those links. That would alleviate any search engine benefit from showing up there. So, I guess getting onto the buzz page is kind of like the Digg homepage now.

gerardmcgarry · 2 years ago

I think with most of these things, you have to be ready to capitalise on the short-term gain from the traffic you receive from StumbleUpon. Personally, I think encouraging RSS subscribers is the best bet, as they'll hopefully result in long-term visitors. Obviously any backlinks gained from other bloggers don't hurt either...

Pavel Bastov · 2 years ago

I have always been wondering how to promote a site with StumbleUpon and this article comes in very handy. Thanks for it.

Kathleen · 2 years ago

Great article! Thanks! That's how SU works.

Matt Keegan · 2 years ago

StumbleUpon is awesome! I typically get more than half of my daily traffic from SU, sometimes a lot more. Some of my visitors stop long enough to leave a comment on my blog, read an article, or contact me for more information.

Because SU is so valuable, I purposely stumble as many pages as possible for each of my mutual friends. Together, I am sure we do a great job of helping each other out.

Stephen Hopson · 2 years ago

David:

I found your site through a google search using "how tomake use of stumbleupon." YOur article was interesting but it still left me perplexed as to how I suddenly got a huge spike in traffic from SU yesterday. According to Google Analytics, the day before I had a measly 40 visitors and then suddenly yesterday it shot up to 216, mostly from SU. I am trying in vain to figure out how exactly that happened.

Of course, I'm not complaining-I'm actually THRILLED. But, but, but, SU does not really give very helpful hints on how to find out more about SU traffic or where they came from. And believe it or not, I'm still trying to figure this thing out. SU's user interface is not 200 percent easy to figure out. There are a lot of missing gaps like helping SU users learn more about SU traffic, what made traffic spike and how to make it happen more often.

Can you lead me in the right direction on how to figure all this out? Thanks!

AdamJ · 2 years ago

I get also so much Traffic from Stumbleupon, its just great. I learned some new stuff trough your tips and just wanted to thank you for this great article.

Jay N · 1 year ago

David:

I found your article from a google search that I did on this issue today.
Kind of interesting as I pretty much figured out this process on my own (with some work). Just to verify, I did the search and found you here.
Although I have not actually "Stumbled" my own site just yet, I will do so and if I have anywhere near the results mentioned here, I will report my results.
It's nice to know that I must be on the right track if so many others have had such results!

Jay

Delores Chappel · 1 year ago

I just signed up with SU and installed the button on my website. I clicked on it to see if it worked and tried to write a review and I got an error message: The page you are submitting is not accessible (http error 404). I don't know if my button code is wrong or if we can no longer submit our own sites.

Delores Chappel · 1 year ago

I just had to comment back on the above post. I had the code wrong. The directions for the code are confusing! When I finally got it right - I see that someone already discovered me back in Sept. of 2004!

Mable · 1 year ago

Great Article!! Thanks for sharing :)

Brandon · 1 year ago

Good research. I got stumbled one time. It was an article on Warren Buffet that I did, and I guess, it caught like hot fire.

The traffic was basically meaningless though. Upwards of 5K a day at the highest hits. But they really did not click on Google ads or buy any of the CPAs I had running. Makes you wonder sometimes if the surge of traffic is worth the bandwidth.

Jeremy Day · 1 year ago

Hi David,

This is a great site. I found you from Problogger. I am checking out a lot of your articles. As a fairly active user of SU I found this interesting. I think its spot on except for one thing....

You didn't really say anything about subscribing to favorites. This is one of the most important parts of the SU experience. When I go to my home page I see the stuff of people I have subscribed to that they have fav'd in the past couple of hours. I surf those sites and I rarely use the Stumble button.

The more active users all use subscribe to favorites a lot. This can't be underestimated. They are the ones you want finding your site because its more viral. They are the ones that get it voted high enough to gain traction and for SU to start loading that article in the random Stumble mix.

Food for thought...

Cheers,
Jeremy

Rob H · 1 year ago

Thanks for the advice, Dave. I set mine up over the weekend. If I read correctly, you stumble all of your new posts or just your home page?
Rob

David · 1 year ago

Rob: I would stumble the post itself, not your homepage.

Travelcn · 11 months ago

I have tried quite hard on stumble upon but not sure about the results, my blog stats shows quite low number of referrals from SU, but the page I have submitted on SU actually viewed several times more than the number of referral, not sure why it is like that.

Chris · 11 months ago

Interesting stuff - many thanks for posting. I have to say that I had much more luck finding out what Stumbleupon was actually supposed to be for from here than I did from their own homepage.

Dean · 11 months ago

Great article. I've been getting about 3,000 monthly referrals from SU without doing a thing to promote my site through SU. With the techniques you mention I can see that SU can be a real gold mine.

Nico · 11 months ago

It's exciting to see thousands of visitors come to your website from stumbleupon, but I have never seen many ad clicks or signups from these visitors. Your best bet to make a return on SU visitors is probably with CPM ads.

Donace | The Nexus · 9 months ago

In regards to social media converting to rss subscribers, I have found that niche SM sites convert much better then the bigger names.

Yes they bring traffic; you may get 4-5 comments and 3-4 clicks on adds and 3-4 subscribers per 1000 via SU. Though the question is it really worth it?

binyamin butler · 6 months ago

Just a few lines to let you know that after scrutinizing your site; I was pleased with the selflessness of your contributions; esp. your advice on promoting through Stumble upon. The address of my proposed website is: (sonoftherighthand.netfirms.com) which I will be going public with in the near future; being as I believe that the content of my site is one of a kind; even though there seemingly are an overkill of religious practitioners on the web, and in every other place except Hell where they belong. Oh, concerning your views on O'Obama; I will prophetically tell you this: Watch him and the deft moves that he shall be making very closely; for he is a man of destiny such as the world will only see one of his kind.

MartinT · 5 months ago

Interesting post on StumbleUpon. I realize it is a couple of years old now so was just wondering whether your opinion of it is still the same today? Do you still make use of it? Is it another area of the Web2.0 scene that is being overly abused and spammed?

PeterM · 5 months ago

I've been using StumbleUpon for some time, but some of the info in your article was completely new to me. I'll try the tips and see how much it improves my traffic. Thanks for the post.

InvisibleParis · 4 months ago

One thing that isn't mentioned here and is driving me wild is how to find one of your referenced pages on the StumbleUpon website. I've been getting a steady stream of traffic for one of my articles, and I'd like to see if it has been commented upon on the SU website, but I can't find it at all! Any ideas about how you go about doing this?

Richard Arghiris · 3 months ago

Thanks for this article. I discovered stumbleupon tonight and I'm finding it quite addictive. I'm hoping it will be a more useful promotional tool than twitter, which I think functions poorly and is, quite frankly, oversaturated with rubbish.

Just to say your article was very concise and useful, but there was a minor typo I couldn't help noticing; wholly crap, batman = completely crap, batman. 'Holy crap' is actually what you're after. Sorry, I hate to be pedantic, but I thought this was a bit of an unfortunate one :)

Jens P. Berget · 2 months ago

I've been using Stumble Upon for a while, but I'm not active, and I have't been trying hard to promote my blogs or my posts. That's really because I can't seem to figure out how.

I don't have a lot of "friends" on SU, and I usually stumble my own posts first, and that's probably the problem.

Do you ask people to stumble your posts first, or do you always stumble your own posts?

- jens -

trapsolutions · 2 months ago

Awesome info, I have been usung Stumbleupon for a couple of years and had been wondering on how to use it to my advantage

Marya Miller · 3 weeks ago

David, I would have to say, after your wildly successful article "Why Nobody Cares About Your Blog", you don't even need to use Stumbleupon!

Thrilled to have discovered your site.