Site Smart

First off I would like to thank John Chow for bringing Mixed Market Arts to my attention.

These days I am always on the look out for good, legit ways to bring in traffic and hopefully produce a little bit of passive income. I am not considering jumping into full-time blogging but have a little extra cash to pay for site expenses or even the occasional new gadget is always nice.

While browsing through Mix Market Arts I came across a post I really liked, and apparently John did to as it was one of his recommended articles, about using StumbleUpon to bring in traffic to your site. While the traffic will likely come in spikes if you blog on a regular basis you can build up a semi-consistant flow of traffic.

In his post Collin makes the following points to get you started on (ab)using StumbleUpon.

Benefits of StumbleUpon:

• You can select the exact niche that sends these visitors, so if your blog is about investing, you will get tons of people who enjoy “investing” sites, which turns into excellent clickthrough rates for your ads.
• If you do go on the “paying” route, it is far cheaper than most advertising solutions. (I still recommend the free way, as it is dead simple).
• It can help anyone who owns a website
• It is completely free
• You can learn the entire ups and downs in 15 minutes (by reading this post in its entirety)
• Tons more, take a look for yourself

Downfalls of StumbleUpon:

• 1. The traffic is inconsistent. You will get a burst of traffic one time, but then it idles down to very little, or if you write good content consistently, it will be a series of traffic spikes.
• 2. The links from the stumble pages are nofollow, so it does not help your search engine optimization
• 3. It takes up a pretty big portion on your browser

How to milk Stumbleupon for all it’s worth:

• 1. Sign up for Stumbleupon.
• 2. Register on forums.digitalpoint.com, and post a thread in the freebies section stating that you will stumble anyones website if they add you as a stumble friend. (http://*YOUR_USERNAME*.stumbleupon.com). For example, mine is raithe1337.stumbleupon.com. (Collin’s stumble url)
• 3. After you have accumulated a good number of friends, the sites you stumble now get an even larger burst of traffic to them. My stumble account has over 300 friends, but I started to notice my stumble visitors tripling when I reached 200 friends, so make that a monthly goal.
• 4. If you own a blog, exchange reviews of websites with other blogs, and then when their blog’s first post is about you, stumble their main page as well as the exact URL of the post. This will give them “2 stumbles” to their website, sending them a flood of visitors, but it will also help you in that those hundreds of visitors will be reading a review of your website.
• 5. StumbleUpon will not let you stumble your own site with hundreds of pages, until you stumble 9 other pages. With the technique shown in #4, for every 9 stumbles you make on blogs about your own, you will be allowed to stumble another one of your own pages.
• 6. Join stumble exchanges. You can make a thread on the digitalpoint freebies section, or join a stumble exchange website such as SUExchange.com, or StumbleXChange.com. People will stumble your pages in return for you stumbling theres. Both of you result in tons of free visitors, so it is mutually exclusive.
• 7. If you get a lot of stumbles in a small period of time, you get listed on the Stumble Buzz page, which will send you tons more free traffic. To raise your chances of getting on this page, only stumble your best websites or blog posts, so that with the thousands of visitors that Stumbleupon sends you, they have the highest chance of also giving you a thumbs up, sending thousands more and making your content go viral.
• 8. Stumbling sites does not cost you anything, so I recommend stumbling every website that links to your website, because the better that those sites do, the better they help you. This will also make the owners of those sites like you more if you are sending them tons of traffic. Like I said earlier, mutually exclusive.
• 9. If you own a blog or an interesting website, you can provide a stumble upon button on every post. Your readers generally shouldn’t mind, and it has the potential to send you lots more easy traffic. If your blog is big enough already, I don’t recommend this because I feel you should only stumble “your best content”. The call is yours to make though.
• 10. Like I said with stumbling sites that link to yours, another really “evil” trick is to get around that “you can only stumble another page on your website if you stumble at least 9 external sites” problem is to stumble your Digg posts, your own Stumbleupon profile, your forum profiles, your Myspace/Facebook pages, forum posts about your site, etc etc. Not only does this get around the stumbling limit, but it will also send you some more visitors.

Many thanks to Collin for a wonderful guide to using StumbleUpon