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Thursday, January 23, 2014

How to Get FREE Stumbles from Stumbleupon and Increase Your Traffic


It's a well known fact that Stumbleupon isn't what it used to be.  Years ago, stumbling a page would almost guarantee hundreds of visitors to that page.  Nowadays it takes many stumbles to your page before it has any opportunity to bring any real traffic.  I should know, I've suffered with the best of them.  One of my oldest blogs which used to see about 5,000 visits per month from Stumbleupon alone now only gets a a couple hundred on a good month.

I've researched everything I can on ways to get Stumbleupon traffic to your website.  There just isn't much information out there, probably because there just isn't any real way to bring back the stumbler traffic like in the years past.  I've googled terms like "Free Stumbles", and "Stumble Swaps" only to find results to articles that date back to when Stumbleupon was in its prime. 

Since there's not much current information, I decided I would figure it all out for myself.   So here are the techniques I use for getting hundreds of stumblers to my blogs daily:
 
1.  First and foremost, you have to have interesting content.  Your website will never go viral if you don't have anything interesting on it.  I can teach you how to get alot of stumbles to your site, but it's up to the stumblers whether or not your page goes viral. 
 
2.  Your stumbleupon account must have strength.  You have to treat your account almost like you treat your website with Google PR.  The stronger your account is, the more weight your stumbles carry.  To do this, you need to follow a few rules:
 
  • Never "discover" your own page.  What I mean by this is never be the first person to discover or 'like' the page.  Let it happen naturally or ask someone to do it.  There are several Facebook groups and even a few G+ groups that have members willing to stumble pages for you.  There is even a much better option which I will discuss later in this article.

  • Keep your stumbles to your own site to a minimum.  Everyone will tell you not to like your own material, but it's ok to do sometimes.  So when stumbling my own material I make sure it's absolutely something I know other stumblers will also give thumbs-ups to.  If you stumble too many of your own articles, SU will catch on and remove the weight your stumbles carry to your own website.

  • Stumble alot of pages in your niche.  By alot, I mean hundreds or at least as many as possible.  The more stumbled pages on your account, the more weight your stumbles carry with Stumbleupon.

  • When other people stumble a page that you've already stumbled it adds more weight to your stumbles.  It basically tells Stumbleupon that other find the material you stumble interesting.

  • When you have SU followers, it adds a little more weight to your account as well.  So the more people who follow you on Stumbleupon, the better off you'll be.
3.  Your page needs to be stumbled in the correct category.  If your article is about SEO and it gets stumbled into the Automotive category, you'll only get stumblers who are interested in automotive and they surely won't give your article a thumbs-up.  I have no techniques for ensuring this.  It's more of a luck of the draw thing for the most part.  But making sure your article and website have a well defined niche will help.
 
And the best technique I've found for getting FREE stumbles from Stumbleupon...
 
4.  Creating a free account at ViralContentBuzz.com was the best way I've found to get Stumbled traffic.  VCB is a crowd-sourcing platform where you earn free stumbles to your pages by stumbling other pages.  When a user on Viral Content Buzz stumbles your site, it's not just a thumbs-up its an actual review which carries a little more power than a simple 'like'.  Whats even better is you can control what category it gets stumbled under which helps with #3 above.
 
Viral Content Buzz also offers sharing for Twitter, G+, and Facebook, but since there are so many ways to draw in traffic from those social platforms, I generally use it only for Stumbleupon traffic.  It only takes about 20 minutes of stumbling on VCB to get my own pages stumbled enough to make it go viral. 
 
Although I still don't see the 10,000+ monthly visitors from Stumbleupon like I used to, I do see several hundred stumblers a day on several of my blogs so it's definitely worth the extra effort.  I just wish they would bring the old SU back!

2 comments:

  1. Thanks a lot for taking the time to review VCB. We really appreciate that and we're happy to see that you are finding the platform so useful! :-)

    You're totally right about StumbleUpon. While it still is a good source of traffic as long as you have good/quality or useful content, it's not what it used to be. Still a worthy traffic source though.

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  2. You're more than welcome Gman. I wouldn't have mentioned VCB if I didn't believe in it. Thank you for a wonderful service.

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