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How To Get Blog Traffic from StumbleUpon
With all the hype about social bookmarking these days, it’s near impossible to separate the myths from the facts.
Myth: Use social bookmarking, it’s sooo easy to get tons of traffic
Fact: It’s not easy but done the right way, you can get a lot of traffic
StumbleUpon is a great way to get huge amounts of traffic to your site, web 2.0 style - as long as it’s done right. Daniel Scocco from Daily Blog Tips got over 140,000 visits in 7 days to a single blog post titled Top 6 Bizarre Online Gaming Incidents
It’s not a fluke either, as Daniel consistently gets a few thousands SU visitors to a lot of his blog posts. If there’s anyone out there qualified to teach you how to get StumbleUpon traffic, Daniel’s the man.
Listen in to the podcast where I interview Daniel about his secret tactics on getting traffic from StumbleUpon. You can also download and read the PDF transcript, or read the shorter, condensed version below.
You will get the most out of this interview if you actually register for a StumbleUpon account first, install the toolbar, and then follow along as you read / listen in.
Lastly, practice makes perfect! Don’t forget to click on “Stumble It” at the bottom of this blog post and write a short review about this blog post or at least give it the “Thumbs-Up” in the toolbar, since you liked it that much 
Getting Blog Traffic from Stumble Upon - An Interview With Daniel Scocco
Q: Tell Us Something About Yourself
I graduated in 2005 in International Economics, and right after my graduation, I started working for a multinational company. That’s the year that I started blogging as a hobby. I kept working for another year and over that period of time, my blog started to grow. After a couple of months, I went to see the server logs and I had like hundreds of visitors and after 6 months, thousands of visitors.
At the end of 2006, I decided to quit my job – that was in Italy – and then I just returned to Brazil and started blogging full time. I started www.DailyBlogTips.com in November 2006, a little over a year now, and we currently have about 7,500 RSS subscribers.
Q: As a social bookmarking tool, how is Stumble Upon different, and how do we use it?
StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site. It’s a place where people go to exchange websites that they find interesting, write reviews about it and share it with other users. However, most social bookmarking sites eventually bring you to their site where you can save / share your bookmarks.
StumbleUpon, on the other hand, works with a toolbar that you need to install on your browser, for Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Once you start the toolbar, you can use it for several stuff. First of all, you can rate the websites that you visit by clicking “I like it!” or “I don’t like it.” So you can give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to the websites that you visit. That’s basically how the rating process takes place.
Now there’s another button called “Stumble”.
When you click on “Stumble!” you are going to see websites that other users with a similar profile to yours have rated as good. In other words, many other StumbleUpon users gave a “thumbs-up” to this site, so when you click “Stumble!” you’re shown the highest rated websites. What type of website / niche you’re shown depends on your user preferences, which you specify when you sign up buy you can also change it later.
Websites that get thumbs-down, then they won’t be shown to other users. You also have the option to use channels to stumble upon. So for example, if you select the web development channel, every time you click on “Stumble!,” you’re going to be presented with a website that was rated inside the web development category.
So you can pretty much filter down what kind of stuff you are looking for - that’s the advantage of StumbleUpon. You can get the best websites in a certain topic delivered to you just by clicking on “Stumble”..
The good thing about StumbleUpon is that the algorithm is really effective. I mean, if you just give a couple of stumbles and you see that the quality of the websites that you see will really be high.
Q: I’ve ben wanting to ask this question so badly: Can I stumble my own websites?
Yes, you can. Although, in most social bookmarking sites the community prefers that you don’t.
Even in Digg, if users see that you are just submitting your own stories over and over again, they’re just going to bury it; they’re just going to give you the thumbs-down because they don’t want people that are just promoting their own stuff.
In StumbleUpon specifically, if you stumble stories inside the same domain about 10 times or so, your thumbs-up will no longer count. It’s a good idea to stumble other different stuff; interesting stuff that you find across the web.
Q: How do I build a powerful StumbleUpon profile, to become a “power user” of some sort?
Firstly, if you just want to build a profile for your own benefits, I mean, just to generate traffic to your website, that won’t work because after a certain amount of time, you won’t be able stumble your own stories anymore.
You want to be part of the community, and as a result of that, then you might get traffic to your site as well because you’re going to have more friends – more people that know your work, that know your websites. So the first step is to add as many friends as possible.
When you add someone as a friend, automatically, you’re going to follow his “stumbles.” So whenever he discovers a page – whenever he submits a new page for StumbleUpon, it is very likely that the next time you click on “Stumble!” on your toolbar, you’re going to see that page.
Let’s say your new friend has 1,000 friends - it’s very likely that when he discovers a page on StumbleUpon, these 1,000 people are going to see that page too.
It’s a good idea to track down people that have similar interests, people that stumbled similar sites to yours, and add them as friends.
However, you can only have a maximum of 200 friend request. After that you can no longer request to be friends with anyone, but people can still follow your activity. They can still become your friends if they request it.
Usually, if a person is always submitting interesting and new things to StumbleUpon, people want to follow him and his activities, so they add him as a friend.
Another strategy, if you have a blog, is to display a link to your StumbleUpon profile and get people to add you as a friend. This may mean that you may have to create a blog post to explain what StumbleUpon is, to get them to sign up and add you.
You can also do the same in forum signatures and email signatures.
Q: I notice in the toolbar that you can also import email addresses from MSN, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL; and you can even import your Friends directly from your Facebook account to your StumbleUpon account. That’s how I first added new friends to StumbleUpon. Is this recommended?
Most of these social bookmarking sites and social networking sites, are interconnected somehow. So usually, you can import your friends from your profile, you can exchange profiles.
For example if you have a strong profile in Digg, on the “My Account” space you can also list your StumbleUpon profile there. So yeah, you can benefit if you already have a strong profile or if you are active within another social bookmarking site.
Q: Are there any other strategies you’d recommend?
Yes, you can be the first person to write a review or give a “thumbs up” to a site. Any website, before it gets introduced into the StumbleUpon system, it needs to be discovered. If you’re the first person to tumble a site, you’ll be asked to fill up a form and you’ll be given credit as the person who discovered it.
If you discover a very popular website, something that people will love afterwards, it’s very likely that a good percentage of this users who will click on the discussion button should see the reviews of this website and they will automatically see your profile because you discovered this page. Then they would add you to their friends list, and this build your profile even further.
Q: That sounds almost impossible. What is the percentage of sites out there have actually never been discovered by a StumbleUpon user?
Actually, a lot. You shouldn’t think just in terms of the home page of the website. For example in a popular website like TechCrunch there are hundreds on new pages produced every month. You can be the first to Stumble any of these.
Just keep track of some popular blogs and popular websites and whenever they publish new stuff, you go there and you submit right away. Most bloggers are very active browsing around and discovering new stuff, so this shouldn’t be too difficult.
Q: Tell me how you got 140,000 visitors in 7 days to a specific blog post at DailyBits.com, which means that you’re getting about 20,000 visitors per day just using StumbleUpon.
I’ve been using StumbleUpon for over a year already and I had some very successful stories as well, but none of them managed to attract such a huge traffic.I’ve got as much as 5,000 unique visitors; sometimes as much as 10,000 unique visitors.
Until the day that I published a story on DailyBits.com titled “Top 6 Bizarre Online Gaming Incidents“. I was expecting indeed that the story would be popular because it was some crazy stuff that most people had never seen or heard of before.
Then, I got a friend of mine (who had a 900-friends profile) to Stumble it just to get the ball rolling. The I contacted a couple of my friends over AIM, over MSN and GoogleTalk, and I asked them to rate this story and then give it a thumbs-up - and many of them did.
That was about it.
On the first day, I got some 25,000 unique visitors, and then the second day it was about 20,000, the third day about 15,000. StumbleUpon traffic usually behaves that way - peaks on the first day then slowly reduces.
Q: Where is this traffic coming from? Is it coming from the StumbleUpon site main page, featured page or from the toolbar “Stumbles” itself?
I believe that majority of the traffic is coming from the toolbar itself, because that’s how StumbleUpon users visit web pages. But then the story also got featured on the buzz page of StumbleUpon. If you go to buzz.stumbleupon.com you’ll see the hottest stories.
Even popular websites on StumbleUpon, usually they get 10, 15, 20 reviews at most, and this story in particular after 5 days, if I’m not wrong, it had already 90 reviews. So people are just going crazy by the stuff that was listed in the story. They were literally shocked about the events that I’ve mentioned.
So I think that’s one of the reasons why it got so popular. Because it covered a topic that people wanted to read about. It was funny, it was shocking. In fact, if I was to say, I think that there are some topics and subjects that will be better inside StumbleUpon.
For example, if stuff talk is on technology, web design, humor and entertainment, usually these stuffs really go popular within StumbleUpon.
Q: How good is the quality of traffic from StumbleUpon? A lot of bloggers complain about the low quality traffic from other sites like Digg - is StumbleUpon traffic any different?
That’s a good point. Well, first of all, the StumbleUpon traffic will never be as good as paid traffic or organic traffic. The users are very, very technology-savvy if you will. They know what AdSense unit is, they won’t click on it.
That being said, usually StumbleUpon traffic is much better than Digg.com traffic or Reddit traffic because, well, first of all, the users will stick around longer. I have been on Digg.com front page as well, and if you track the time spent from Digg users and StumbleUpon users, you’ll see that StumbleUpon users stick around much longer.
Usually Digg users go away after 30 seconds while in StumbleUpon users, they will stay over 1 minute.
Q: Did you manage to convert any of them to RSS subscribers?
I think it would be a good guess to say that some 200 - 250 new RSS subscribers were gained in that week from StumbleUpon. I know the conversion rates aren’t that great - 140K unique visitors and only 250 new subscribers. The point is, this as good as any traffic you can get from social media traffic.
Q: In terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), how did StumbleUpon traffic benefit you?
The story that we’re talking about, it got over 200 back links in the following week. So, yes, it’s a definitely a good tool to build links as well, which can help improve the SEO of any blog.
Other blogs eventually linking up to your post that is discovered from StumbleUpon.
Another peculiar yet very good quality of StumbleUpon traffic is that it’s cyclical. Okay, let me explain what I mean by this. If you hit the front page on Digg, okay, you’re going to receive a huge amount of traffic, but it will only last as long as you remain on the front page.
With StumbleUpon, on the other hand, even if you typically have your traffic peak on the first few days, it’s possible that after 1 month or even after 6 months, people may start stumbling the same story again, and you’re going to get a new cycle of traffic to your website.
Q: Ok, my last question. Some people reading this right now would think about mass-generating thousands of StumbleUpon accounts, and cross linking those accounts as a way to game the system. Or, they would think about outsourcing the whole thing to someone else. What is your advice?
Well, those things could possibly work.
If you go into online forums, you will see that there are people that actually selling stumbles and there’s also one website called StumbleUponExchange where you can basically exchange stumbles. You just stumble the websites of other members, and in return, they will stumble yours.
But I don’t think it’s a good long-term strategy because the algorithm can change overnight and usually these systems are smart enough to catch anyone trying to game the system.
I think the better long-term strategy would be to play along the rules, to be active within the community, to make friends, to tell your friends to join StumbleUpon, and to teach them how to use StumbleUpon.
Q: Thanks for sharing your strategies on using StumbleUpon to get web traffic, Daniel. I’m sure a lot of people would appreciate this.
It was a pleasure. Thank you, Gobala.
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Gobala Krisnan is a direct-response marketer turned blogger who makes over $10,000 a month from his blog empire. If you want to make money online from blogs, he is the only person who can reveal the secret of merging time-tested direct marketing strategies with web 2.0 traffic. Read more about him >>
Great interview there Scocco and Gobala
I am a daily reader of Daily blog tips, but didnt expect that it was getting that much traffic from Stumbleupon!!!
Good work and i love SU
Awesome!! 140,000 visitors in 7 days… only from StumbleUpon. I learnt this experience.
Very nice. I’ve recently been following your work, Gobala, and I’ve appreciated the “down to earth” simplicity that you bring to the web community. You’re easy to learn from.
In true fashion, you’ve brought to us a very nice interview from Mr. Scocco. Both of you lay it out in an easy to follow, non “elitist” format. Much appreciated.
Thanks.
Great interview. It’s true, SU is not only a great source of traffic, the community there also takes the time to read your post. A lot of them even browse your other articles.
You make it seem easy!
going to try it now…
thinks for a great story.
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Thanks for the interview. It was very helpful! Go StumbleUpon!
That was an excellent interview, I was wondering what was the best strategy for Stumble Upon, thanks.
140 000 visits in 7 days? That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing. Keep on posting.
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