You can still use StumbleUpon to massively increase your blog traffic.
What a shock!
Talk about bad timing!
Within days of my guest author‘s April 21 guest post on how to use StumbleUpon to increase blog traffic, WordPress discontinued its StumbleUpon social sharing button.
No one saw that one coming. Thinking there was a technical problem, I Googled the situation.
A hue and a cry had gone out. Bring back our StumbleUpon sharing button, WordPress users cried.
Outrage is no longer necessary. This post will explain how to not only add your posts to StumbleUpon, but how to get boatloads of referral traffic from it.
The Value of StumbleUpon
The first purpose involves you as the reader.
StumbleUpon is a content curation site. You may have heard that fancy term before. A curator collects items.
Content curation sites like StumbleUpon are bookmarking sites. It is a place for you to collect articles you want to read later. You can curate videos there too.
The next use is for you as the writer. You want the 25 million users looking for content to find and read your posts.
I maintain that you will have an easier time getting referral traffic from StumbleUpon than search engines.
Your article’s graphic shows up at StumbleUpon, but it doesn’t on Google or other search engines. Readers are attracted to the pictures.
How to Use StumbleUpon
Step 1: Go to StumbleUpon.com and make an account.
Step 2: You will find yourself in settings.
Make sure you answer all the questions. Do not skip any of them. The more information you enter, the easier it will be for people to find your blog posts.
Step 3: Click “picture” and upload your avatar. StumbleUpon is about community. People want to feel they are building connections with real people.
This is StumbleUpon’s home screen.
When you made your account, you told StumbleUpon your interests, so it knows what they are. As soon as you get to the home screen, the folks at StumbleUpon have already recommended pages for you to read.
Step 4: It’s like you are at a great big linky party. Click on an article that interests you.
Since my interest is blogging, I clicked on this article about the dullest blog in the world. I don’t want to have the dullest blog in the world, so I want to find out how to avoid that fate.
Will I be wasting my time with all this browsing? The people at StumbleUpon have told me the article’s popularity. Look at the red arrow. Over 9,200 people liked this article, so I don’t feel I’d be wasting my time by reading it.
Step 5: You have three options. You can dislike the article by clicking the thumbs down, you can like the article by clicking the thumbs up, or you can neither dislike nor like the article. If you want to see more selections, click “Stumble.” Stumble is synonymous with search.
Step 6: The plus sign at the bottom allows you to add the article to a list. I add everything to lists. It keeps me organized. When I go to find the article later, I will know the topic. In my mind, these lists are equivalent to my Pinterest boards.
Step 7: The dialogue bubble at the bottom allows you make comments on the article. You certainly want to do that especially if it’s your own post, you want to explain the value of the article to others who might want to read it.
Step 8: The arrow allows you to share the article, but I have not found evidence that sharing an article leads to increased blog traffic for the writer.
There are other ways to search at StumbleUpon.
Step 9: When you are done searching for articles, search for people who are called Stumblers.
Search for StumbleUpon’s users by clicking “Stumblers.”
I found an article that sounded intriguing, so I clicked on the author.
The screenshot shows he is active on StumbleUpon. He has many followers and follows many others.
I want to show the people at StumbleUpon that I am a good community member, so I will follow who he follows and who follows him. His description says his niche is blogging, so I will find like-minded bloggers this way.
There is another way I know he is active–his “DNA” is green, which is a good color in terms of activity.
The “DNA” colors show the types of articles he writes.
How will this searching bring traffic to your site?
You are hoping that the people you follow will follow you back. If they do, they might “like” your article which will increase your visibility.
This article is explaining proven methods. How do I know? I tested these methods and proved them myself!
A blogger who knew I was interested in gaining more referral traffic from StumbleUpon liked my posts. Within the day, I saw a jump in my StumbleUpon referral traffic on my stats page!
StumbleUpon Strategy
1. Do NOT put all your posts on StumbleUpon. Your goal is to build a community of followers who will like and share your work with others. This will increase your posts’ visibility, and you will get more referral traffic.
If you put all your pages there, you will look like a spammer, a self-promoter, and not a community member.
My post Blog Growth Hack: A Cheat Sheet for Getting Followers advised you to have a “blogging buddy,” so you could reblog each other’s posts and get new eyes, each other’s audiences, on your blog.
Do not, under threat of penalty, follow that advice on StumbleUpon!
What is the penalty? You won’t get traffic from the site.
2. You should follow the 10:1 ratio. If you want to look like a member of the StumbleUpon community and not like someone out to promote their blog, you need to add ten other pages to StumbleUpon for each one of your own posts.
3. Where should you find the ten? Ask ten of your best blogging buddies to conspire with you?
Again, I say no. The folks over at StumbleUpon are just too smart for that. They will see through you and invoke their dreaded penalty–no traffic.
4. I know where you can find ten different bloggers to promote each time you go into StumbleUpon to add one of your own posts. You see, I know their hangout.
Are you ready? It’s Pinterest.
Pinterest is also a content curation site, a bookmarking site.
Go to Pinterest. Click the graphic of the article you want to stumble, and it will take you to the blog. Copy the URL, go to StumbleUpon, and “Add page”.
Add other pages as well as your own to StumbleUpon.
This is also the way you will add your own blog posts. I actually prefer this method to clicking the WordPress share button.
Previously, I just clicked the StumbleUpon button. Now, I am able to tag and categorize my post and make comments to increase its chances of visibility.
This is also the way you will add your own posts, your best posts, but only one for every ten others that you put on the site.
In conclusion, my guest author Jordan Dumer received 40,000 page views referred from StumbleUpon. You can too, if you follow the tips in this post. So, what are you waiting for? Go stumble!
If you feel others could benefit from using StumbleUpon as either a bookmarking site or a way to send massive traffic to their blogs, please share.
Readers, do you self-host? If yes, have you been consistently stumbling your posts? Others posts? Has it resulted in more traffic for your blog? I look forward to your views.
Related Posts:
4 Simple Ways to Start Blogging Creatively
How to Quintuple Your Page Views Using Pinterest
4 Practical Reasons Pinterest Will Make You a Better Blogger
