Out of all the social media sites on the web today, Stumble Upon is one of the best when it comes to generating traffic for your website or blog.  This is because the users of the site are looking for interesting content in specific niches and if you or someone else has recommended your site, it will already be on the website – and be ready to be seen by millions of users.  So how can you start getting traffic from Stumble Upon or increase the amount that you already receive?

Write Good Content

Stumble Upon users are after one thing – interesting content.  But with so many different types of content this could get confusing.  Below are the main types of content Stumble Upon’s users look for:

• Lists – Top 10 lists may seem a little boring or a little 1990s but they are hugely popular with the Stumble Upon community.
• Images – the photography community on the site is HUGE, so including amazing (or at least unique) photos on your site is a huge plus.
• Tutorials – how tos and step by step guides are also very popular on the site.
• Infographics – these aren’t easy to make but if you know how to do them, I can guarantee they will be a hit with the users of Stumble Upon.
• Videos – Like the images, the video community on Stumble Upon is huge.  If you run a video site or integrate videos into your posts – you are likely to build a quick following.

If a user likes what they see or read they will click the “like” button – yes, it’s a bit like Facebook.  Be warned though, if they don’t like it, they will click the “dislike” button.  Get too many of these and it’s bye-bye to your webpage’s visibility.

Sites that don’t do too well on Stumble Upon include product reviews (unless you are well known, no-one is going to be interested) and poorly written content – whilst these will both be accepted to the site, they are likely to be disliked so much that they will be non-existent soon enough.

Build Followers and Share Content

Like Twitter, you will see that Stumble Upon also allows people to “follow you”.  In a similar way to Twitter you can either follow people who “like” pages you are interested in or follow people from a business angle – the more you follow people, the more they will follow you back.  Once you build up a base of followers, you will be in a good position to directly share your website content.

The best thing to do if you are new to the website is create a great profile page.  Fill out your user info including your likes and dislikes, and write a short biography of yourself including a link to your website.  This will help people to find you better when they search for people with similar interests.

It is important however not to spam your followers.  Don’t “share” the same page from your website more than once unless you want them to get annoyed with you and do take the time to read through and “like” other people’s content too.

Paid Discovery

Stumble Upon also has an option that enables you to advertise.  This works in exactly the same way as the above sharing system but it ensures that a set number of people each day will see your webpage.  This is very cheap – especially when you compare it to other advertising methods – and can also help your content to go viral.  Your campaigns can be targeted to a set audience and to set subjects, enabling people in a set demographic with specific interests to see your site.  There are a number of people who have seen a huge increase in subscribers due to the paid discovery option on the site, and people who have recorded higher than average organic views after their advertising campaign ended.

Whether you go for the paid option, the organic or a mixture of the two, the site has so much potential.  Make sure to add a ‘stumble upon’ icon to all of your web pages to enable other Stumblers to add your content to the site too; and be mindful not to spam.  Stumble Upon really is a great way to increase the traffic to your blog and has led to the success of many blog and website owners since it was founded.