StumbleUpon is an amazing phenomenon which has become a very important source of traffic for those website owners who understand what it is and how it works.



I personally know how big the impact can be because over the last few weeks we have befitted twice from StumbleUpon traffic surges:



This article will provide a quick guide to getting your site picked up by StumbleUpon, giving you the potential for attracting thousands of extra visitors.



StumbleUpon, which is often referred to as SU, is a service that allows users to surf the internet randomly to find great sites, videos and photos all with a common theme.



For example

, if I’m interested in model trains, I can use StumbleUpon to randomly show me lots of different sites related to model trains. What makes StumbleUpon special is that all the sites it displays have been chosen by its users, who can rate the sites as good or bad. This voting process means the quality of sites displayed continually improves.

The only way to really understand how it works is to sign up for a free account and start using it. It’s a great service which is fun to use.



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From a website owner’s point of view, if your pages get indexed by StumbleUpon and then get lots of “thumbs up” votes from SU users, you can suddenly find thousands of extra people visiting your site.



Simply because it can drive huge numbers of new visitors to your website.

Others will decide to link to your site from their own, giving you valuable inbound links.

Our success with SU, has meant that we have learned what types of content they like, and just as importantly, what they don’t like.



The first things to understand is how StumbleUpon works from a website owners point of view.



StumbleUpon users add a toolbar to their browser. This has a button that reads “Stumble” and two more buttons; one a thumbs up and the other a thumbs down.





Stumblers click the Stumble button, which takes them to a random page from the subject channel that they have chosen. When they arrive on the page they can give it a thumbs up or thumbs

down depending on whether they like it or not.



The more thumbs up a page gets the more frequently it is displayed to other Stumblers. If a page gets lots of thumbs down it is de-listed.



It follows that

as a website owner you have two objectives.



OBJECTIVE #2 – Encourage lots of Stumblers to give your page additional thumbs up so that it continues to get displayed to other Stumblers. This is what drives the traffic to your site





Creating

StumbleUpon Friendly Content



I studied a lot of pages on StumbleUpon and c

reated a list of common themes.



I then created some pages on the SubHub website which included all these elements. The result was one out of the three articles I created got picked up.

This single page drove thousands of extra visitors to our site.

It’s a wonderful feeling opening Google Analytics and seeing thousands of extra people have visited your site.Some of these people will love what you do and bookmark your site or sign-up to your newsletter.Be warned (but don’t be put off) most Stumblers spend less than 10 seconds on a site, but amongst these shooting stars there will be prospects who hang around… and return.– Get the first few thumbs up so your page gets indexed (why not suggest to friends who may be interested, that they visit your site/page and give it a thumbs up on their SU toolbar if they like it).