Since late 2010, StumbleUpon has been one of the top sources of social media traffic in the US, even surpassing Faceboook as a referrer.
In fact, using StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your site can produce some amazing results. According to Shell Harris, StumbleUpon basically built her website TopTenz. Here are some of her stumble numbers that she shared:
That’s huge traffic that can create some pretty lucrative income stream. The only problem is that traffic isn’t very targeted and your conversion may suck.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a modest stream of traffic but high conversion rates rather than high traffic stream and low conversion rates.
Let’s look at how you can get a high-quality traffic stream from StumbleUpon.
Step #1: Become a stumbler
You won’t be able to use StumbleUpon correctly unless you become a stumbler. If this is new to you, to “stumble” simply means to discover web pages by clicking the Stumble button on your browser bar.
This is what it looks like on Chrome:
StumbleUpon will deliver articles, images, videos and much more based upon your profile and interests. You’ll then get to vote on whether you like those suggestions or not. The more you stumble, share and vote, the better the algo gets at predicting what you like.
Now, since you’ll be using StumbleUpon to promote your own blog and want targeted traffic, then you need to stumble and vote on pages that are similar to your content.
What this does is identify other stumblers who have similar ratings and usage patterns like you. This will get content you stumble, eventually including your own, in front of these users as they stumble. If one of these users sees your content and likes it, he submits it and hopefully that creates a chain reaction of stumbles to other high-quality stumblers.
Step #2: Follow like-minded stumblers.
StumbleUpon is unique in that users are clustered into very specific categories depending upon your stumbles, preferences and even connections.
For example, you may be an entrepreneur and not have that much in common with everyone who is in that category.
But after dozens of very specific stumbles and votes you’ll eventually be getting stumbles based on a very narrow brand of entrepreneurship that interests you.
In other words, you’ll start to get matched with highly targeted stumblers who think like you, and will probably even be interested in engaging with you and your content.
And if you and other users start to thumb up similar content, then StumbleUpon may eventually show your content to those users.
Step #3: Submit interesting web pages – and not just yours.
You can certainly promote your own content on StumbleUpon, but if that is all you do, then you will likely not create a strong following since, like all social platforms, StumbleUpon works when you are social…in other words, you contribute other people’s valuable content to the discussion.
Besides, StumbleUpon does monitor user activity and may prohibit activity if all you do is promote your own stuff.
The point of StumbleUpon is to build up content in their collection that adds value to the community. This will keep you in good standing with their Terms of Service and add credibility to your name in the community.
Keep in mind that you can view which of your discoveries have been viewed the most, which gives you an indication of what people like to see and what they don’t like to see.
This will be helpful when it comes time to sharing your own content…you want to be able to submit content that will resonate with the audience.
Step #4: Create web pages clear
When it comes to optimizing your site for the StumbleUpon community there is one really important rule you must remember: the content on your page must be crystal clear to anyone who sees your page.
Stumblers like to explore pages that are designed to make sense and appear to reward exploration. Give the Stumbler visuals and good writing, along with links to other content on your site to encourage deeper exploring.
TED is a good example of this.
When you land on a page it’s clear from the start what the user must do.
Then there are other options that the Stumbler can explore, like the bio or other videos to watch next.
This is why you never want to submit a home or about page. You want to submit something specific like The Real Secret to 1,000 Subscribers in 60 Days or Less and 6 Branding Approaches They Forgot to Teach You in Business School. Specific articles are more likely to be shared, discussed or saved by fellow stumblers.
Step #5: Try StumbleUpon Paid Discovery
Sometimes you may not get the traction you would like from your organic efforts on StumbleUpon. Or maybe you simply don’t have the time to wait for natural discovery.
You can speed up the process with Paid Discovery.
The nice thing about Paid Discovery is that it sends traffic directly to your site, whereas Facebook ads, for instance, you buy a small ad and hope people see it.
If your site doesn’t violate any of the content rules at StumbleUpon, then you have three plans to choose from.
The cost is based upon how much you want to spend per visitor.
A campaign is broken down into 6 steps:
- Enter the URL – This is going to be the page that you want stumblers to visit. To track this via Google Analytics, you can enter a utm_parameter by adding this to the end of the URL http://yoursite.com/yourpage.html?utm_source=stumbleupon&utm_medium=paidscovery&utm_campaign=social
- Choose topics – StumbleUpon gives you the option to choose up to 10 topics or let them guess based upon the content. You also have the option to split campaigns into topics if you want.
- Choose your audience – Set the demographics you want this content to get in front of based upon age, gender, location or device, or StumbleUpon can actually optimize this for you.
- Set your budget – A priority placement will bump you to the front of the que, or you can upgrade and set your highest daily spend, which will calculate how many visitors it will send to your site based upon your plan and budget. A budget of $30 a day will send 300 visitors a day.
- Schedule – Finally, if you set the campaign to start immediately once the ad is approved, then it will run until you run out of money. Or you can set campaign dates so that the submitted page shows up over a period of time.
- Add funds – From your dashboard, go to the Account area and add funds from your PayPal account or credit card.
Finally, here are some tips to help you optimize your Paid Discovery campaigns:
- Try your content in multiple categories to test what works best. StumbleUpon’s new metric score is a great way to see which categories drive the most stumbles.
- To find out which categories are the most popular, you can select “manual targeting” before you submit your content to Paid Discover.
Step #6: Use StumbleUpon Badges
Another way to get targeted traffic is to have your visitors submit your page, vote or share your content via the StumbleUpon badge.
Putting this badge on your site is easy as it is a matter of no coding…just simple cut and paste.
Of course for those who would prefer to customize it, you can use StumbleUpon’s badge API. You’ll get all the information you need to build a badge perfectly suited to your site.
This customization will also help you offer information on the badge like if that page has already been submitted, how many stumbles it’s gotten and the pages thumbnail and meta data on StumbleUpon.
Conclusion
While StumbleUpon is not often in the spotlight like other social platforms like Pinterest, Instagram or Tumblr, it’s still a great workhorse for delivering high-quality traffic…if you do it right.
And, if you spend a lot of time online like I do, stumbling stuff all day won’t take extra hours out of your day…it will become part of your routine.
What other ways are there to drive high-quality traffic with StumbleUpon?
This amazing course will teach you, step by step, how to double if not triple your traffic over the next 30 days.
Hi Neil,
I have seen some great results from stumbleupon but like you mentioned its not targeted so i have tended not to focus on this, having said that I still use it, low conversions but a conversion is a conversion and is better than none lol.
Thanks
Dave
David, I will say one thing, StumbleUpon paid discovery often has a pretty good stick rate if you’re in the right industry.
Stumblers aren’t too big of fans of marketing sites, same with Reddit and the like, but humor/taboo content is up their alley, along with informative content, especially “lifehacks” and psychology related stuff (or maybe that’s just from my experiments.
That’s a good tip, Gregory.
I’m not so sure how easy it would be to convert the traffic into genuine leads and sales. In the past, the typical bounce rate of SU has been high. But, maybe certain content can help Stumblers stick around?
Good post, Neil.
Thanks Melanie.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter Gregory. I appreciate your added input.
Yep, something is better than nothing!
Thanks for this Neil.
I have used SU before but never did took it seriously. If I did now I would definitely be striving for high numbers in my Stumbles. Once this is done, then I can concentrate on building a following only withing my industry such as IT or SEO, as you pointed Neil.
This traffic can be funnelled to a landing page. Oh a form woudl help.
What do you think Neil? Would this work?
Thanks
Shuaib
That should work.
Good food for thought here Neil. Stumbleupon does seem pretty attractive and like it would be a good way of creating high traffic. The problem, however, is that most stumblers are passive and are there to browse, not actually take action and go deep into anything…which makes it tough to get conversions.
I have no doubt that there are success stories though, and for the right site it could be a very valuable source of traffic.
I agree, there are people who don’t make the effort to take action. You just have to keep at it and make sure you are taking action. Eventually you will find others who do the same.
I have been using Paid Stumble for a while and notice great traffic but not great conversions. Analyzing the time-spent on-site and they pages Stumblers visited revealed a 2 very different types of Stumblers.
There were the Stumble-scan-Stumble people that spent smallest amount of time on-site, and then there were the Stumblers that explored the site (at least 3 pages), these were about 10% of the overall numbers of Stumbles and these are the people that I wanted to engage with.
The problem though was that I couldn’t discern how to get the ‘good’ stumblers. Reading through your post, I think I just figured it out. Using these tips AND the Paid Stumble I will get much better results.
Thanks.
Thanks for sharing your experience with StumbleUpon. I hope these tips will help. Let me know if you have any questions as you go.
I’ve been using Stumbleupon and it tops the referral traffic. I’m gonna try paid discovery. Nice writeup Neil. Did you notice the type “Stumber”?
And i did the typo on typo
Thanks, no I didn’t notice. Where did you see it?
I’ve tried the StumbleUpon strategy and it brought great traffic but no conversions as stated above. I think that using your techniques+paid discovery+ retargeter is a winning combo; however, you truly need to make yourself standout with good branding and even better content.
I agree, that sounds like a great combo. As well, content is always the most important thing, without it all efforts to increase traffic are futile.
Hi Neil,
Its weird that I was checking out Stumbleupon this morning and was wondering how to get the right kind of traffic. I was also wondering about using paid discovery and you have outline it.
This is really cool. Thanks
Awesome, glad you were able to find what you needed here.
Stumblers always stumble through our blogs, I guess. Stumblers like me always scan pages and stop by a beautiful pic never caring for the write-ups.
Perhaps they just scan through until they find the content they need or could use.
Hi Neil,
I have only used digg so far in 3 months …but hardly works to get some decent traffic/votes on digg….now after reading your post i will definitely try to see if Stumbleupon works for me….
Thanks for Sharing:)
Definitely give it a try and let me now how it works out for you. Most of the time you just have to give these sites time to see results.
Hi Neil,
You write ” To track this via Google Analytics…”, why if your KISSMetrics is GA’s competitor?
I understand that everybody uses GA, but why would you mention them and not your own product?
PS I’m new to your blog and I’m sincerely curious
I suggest Google Analytics because it is a free service, where mine is not. My readers tend to be beginners or still building. So I like to suggest tips or tools that are either free or at very little cost.
Thanks Neil
I am a beginner and have been focused on getting established on FB & TW. This post being your endorsement of SU means I will have to make my blog a part of that community.
The direction given by this post will be of help getting me noticed there soonest.
Thanks Neil
g-
That is great, I hope you find SU helpful.
Best of luck!
That’s a surprise that some people say forget about StumbleUpon, I agree with you that it could still be good. Nice explanation there as to why stumbling an inner content page instead of the home page could result in more people seeing and sharing it.
Not only this tip but all the tips for getting targeted traffic form the Stumble upon are good.
Thanks!
Glad you liked it. Thanks for reading Quick Sprout.
I have had a couple of posts go viral though stumble upon recently attracting upto 500 hits a day.
In my experience the key is to create interesting content for the broader audience in you niche as very specific posts tend to attract less attention. For eg my blog is about niche marketing but I wrote a post about 10 things that make online marketers less productive which went on a mini viral frenzy on stumble upon.
Thanks Neil.
Awesome, glad to hear it.
This article is the nutz…
Wicked stuff. It’s only recently I started to ‘appreciate’ Stumbleupon and how it’s such a good source of traffic if you got something interesting to share.
In fact it might not even be a bad question to ask before hitting the ‘submit’ button on your blog… is it Stumbleworthy?!
Thanks for the tutorial.
That is a great thought. It is smart to think before you post, is this something you would benefit/enjoy reading?
Yes the biggest problem with stumble upon is that the trafic is usually not targeted. Last week I got 7,000 views within first five hours of submitting a post about creative business card designs. But I got no real long term value from those visits as my bounce rate was over 80%.
Yep, that will happen.
Paid discovery worked really well for us. But here is a little secret. Add something to your site that encourages stumble visitors to thumb you up. You’ll get a bunch of extra traffic as you work your way higher into the rankings.
What strategy did you use to do this David?
Thanks for the tip David.
I stumble every day but im not getting decent traffic yet. i will try out these recommendation. thanks
Hopefully these tips will help improve your experience. Let me know how they work out for you.
Great points Neil. Mind if I please share some of my own from this post about Stumble Upon? http://www.commissionexplosion.com/blog/478/why-stumbleupon-paid-discovery-is-better/
Have you ever seen the case study that “ThatHigh.com” did on Reddit with paid discovery? It’s definitely useful on occasion.
I will have to check it out.
Thanks Nick,
Happy to have you share.
Hello Neil, link with anchor “use StumbleUpon’s badge API” isn’t working properly.
In any case, thanks for great piece of advice.
That is odd…
Great tips Neil, thanks! I use StumbleUpon and often I received good traffic, but unfortunately they spend only few seconds on the site. I think over 90% spend less than 5 seconds. I didn’t tried yet the paid advertising, but to be honest I’d be somewhat afraid from the some reason ( if visitors stay on site only few seconds?)
Does someone tried the paid advertising? Thanks!
You should give it a try and see how it works out for you.
When I sign up in Stumble, should I use my personal email or email @myblog.com? Should my username have any form of the name of my blog (for example, “MyBlog” or “MyBlog.com”) in it or should it be neutral?
It is up to you, you can use either.
Thanks for the informative post. I did try the stumbleupon paid discovery but to be honest it was not for me as I found that although I got a lot more visits the bouce rate was still high and time spent on the site was not great. I think it is just not targettted enough.
I do agree with also stumbling as when I started I just promoted my own sites it was not until I stumbled and liekd sites my self that I noticed a difference
It isn’t for everyone, but is always worth giving a try.
Yep, you have to participate in order to get others to come to you.
I never really understood the whole StumbleUpon craze. Sure you can get lots of one-time visitors, but they aren’t really the visitors you are after…unless you are just hoping for some ad clicks.
True, but with certain niches, the conversion rates are a bit higher (they still suck, but when you’re getting a ton of traffic, it’s still a worthwhile amount).
Generally although, I agree, SU can be a waste of time for many topics.
Yep, thanks for your response Gregory.
It is certainly not for everyone, but can be very useful to the few sites that know how to use it and can benefit from it.
Great post Neil.
I agree. StumbleUpon is a great way to provide high traffic to a website is done correctly as you stepped through, and again isn’t quite a great conversion medium.
We actually get quite a bit of referrals from SU, but never a conversion. Just onlookers learning about SEO
Thanks Ryan,
Glad you agree and are able get get some use out of SU.
Nice writeup Neil.. Thanks for sharing these tips for gaining the traffic. Iam using Stumbleupon since from 3-4 years and it brought me lesser traffic as compare to facebook and twitter. I will definitly use the paid one …
Thanks Ashok,
Facebook and Twitter will typically always bring more traffic.
I’ve been slowly ramping my online efforts back up over the last few weeks after taking some time off. One thing I’ve wondered was how to best use StumbleUpon because I always saw it as something that was a bit “untargeted”. Thanks for showing me how to better target Stumbles to my content!
Great, glad to hear it!
Best of luck.
Hi Neil,
I have tried Stumble upon earlier and felt it as little confusing and difficult.
Your post was really an eye opener for me about capabilities of this site in improving traffic.
Thanks!
Happy to hear this post has helped clear it up for you. If you have any questions feel free to ask.
Thanks for the direction, I’m new to StumbleUpon so the content should be helpful in my endeavors.
Thanks!
I hope so, let me know if these tips help!
Quite nice. I have not personally tried to use much of SU but I think it sounds good to give it a try. I am sure, it will help. Thanks.
You should try it out and see if it works for you.
I’d recommend buying a few ads to see if the SU audience it primed for your content, the rates are very affordable.
Yep, I agree.
I always wanted to ask a question: how do people use SU to getting traffic for their site? Someone said it was a great traffic source for them, however, it’s not working for me, thanks for the post, I know where I went wrong.
Awesome, glad this post has helped to answer you question.
Hi Neil,
This article was amazing. I’ve never used SU before and I tried it and now I was getting more traffic from SU than from searches.
However, could you explain why the traffic dies down after a few days? For example, I submit a new page and I’ll get about 200 stumbles for about 2 days. Then, after that, nobody is stumbling onto my site all of a sudden. I can’t get around to why this happens. I wish the traffic was more consistent or long term.
Thank you a bunch.
Thank you Paul,
I don’t know why that is happening, sorry I can’t help explain.
I seem to get a lot of traffic from stumbleupon. Some days its as high as 600 visits. Its driving me nuts because the bouce rate is so high as the visitors are not targeted
Yep, that is how it typically works.
Hey Neil
I love this post, It jst gave me deeper insights on how to use stumbleupon
Thanks and Im grateful
Thanks Derek, glad you enjoyed it.
Hi,
do you think that the traffic we are getting from stumbleupon is relevant??
Not always but usually yes, I think any traffic is relevant.
Yes, Neil, I do agree that any traffic is relevant and essential. Stumble Upon gives good traffic to website. Thanks for the valuable advice.
Yep, glad you agree.
i just wanna thank you a lot, ive been using stumbleUpon and i really was trying to figure it out how does it work, now i have a more clear idea of the system of how my submitted post are gonna work,,
No problem, happy this post has helped make things clear for you.
Hi Neil,
Wonderful post. I have a question: I run a blog/podcast where I compose and play a new piece of pianomusic everyday and I have been trying all sorts of ways to get more trafficamong which SU. It has been growing but because my main focus lies on the music instead of words I find it difficult to get targeted traffic. Not only that, but most of the traffic I get listens through iTunes and never even gets to see the actual website. Do you have any tips on how to find more traffic and how to monetize a free three minute podcast without having to place ads in the podcast itself?
Thanks!
Regards,
Hilmar
hey Neil,
before this post I have no idea about stumbleupon, after reading i have created profle integrated stumbleupon on my website and there is great improve in the traffic of the website.
Your post are really helpful for building traffic and thank you for that.
Neil.
Would like to know is there any limit of how many stumblers you can do on a daily basis.
So far I have been struggling to drive traffic to my blog from StumbleUpon. But after reading this tutorial, I have some action points that I can implement right away and let see how they goes.
Stumbleupon really works well. I witnessed immediate traffic boost after stumbling few pages of my websites.
BTW where is the Stumble option on your blog ?
this is certainly an easy one for me, I’ve been using stumbleupon for years
I recently got a Stumble spike on one of Articles and was highly confused, but once I discovered what it was I was happy about it
From social bookmarking sites you can get links, nofollow of course, but lot of people do not count traffic they can get.
I am working on stumbl upon however not getting so much traffic. Can any one tell me the reason? I want more traffic from stumble upon.
stumble traffic never seems to convert
I never used Stumble Upon as a traffic resource, but your tutorial gives me enough idea to test it!
Nice post. I recently started using Stumbler and I noticed something interesting in my traffic stats. I noticed that whenever I stumble any of my article, within two minutes, I get 20-30 pageviews (as shown by my blog traffic stats). And then no traffic comes after even 5 minutes to whole week. Are these 20-30 pageviews from real visitors or some kind of bots? Can you please answer me?
I didn’t know this tool before. I will give it a try and see how much traffic extra i will get from it! thanks!
Thanks for the great article. I think that I can now get some great traffic from stumbleupon.com.
Paul
It’s definitely good for the ego, and you never know. Maybe you only get one person to re-tweet your content, but that one person could have a powerful following themselves which makes it all worth it.
Thanks for sharing. I am learning about how to get traffic from stumbleupon.
Hey,
Excellent post. SU is one of the best platform to get traffic. If you are using on the right way then you can get a lot of traffic from it.
Thank you
Has anyone see an on-site time of over 10 seconds from SU…I haven’t =/
Neil,
Not sure if you will be able to answer this question since it has been a while this article has been posted. We recently started using Stumble Upon paid version. The bounce rate is huge around 80%. Is it normal? Any thoughts on bringing it down?
Thanks in advance
Chris
nice post ! I use to get traffic from stumble but suddenly it stopped , now no traffic on my website , but other website that I submit do gets decent views . Is there any way to recover if my website is penalized there ?
Try emailing SU… It’s worked for me in the past…
Paul
hey neil,
awesome article. thank you for sharing this secret in this post. if one will use SU in the right way, he can get lots of traffic from it.
Thanks.
Matt
Previously I submitted several posts to SU but got only a little traffic. Now I am learning about how to get targeted traffic from stumbleupon. this post helped me a lot in that process.
Previously I submitted several posts tostumbleupon but got only a little traffic. Now I am learning about how to get targeted traffic from stumbleupon. this post helped me a lot in that process.
Wow! This is some incredible information. I share alot of these same strategies with my clients to help them achieve a page 1 rank as well. Thanks for the great content!
Hello!,,Thanks for the great article. I think that I can now get some great traffic from stumbleupon.com.Thanks for awesome information,
Hey Neil,
Would you also recommend paid discovery for smaller businesses and freelancers?
Thanks,
Paul
Neil,
Regarding selecting a Stumble Upon user name…
Do you recommend creating a random user name or using the “exact” domain name of your website?
Kevin
I have made a number of e-books, check them out! Thanks for the offer though
Awesome article, haven’t really tried SU to generate more traffic to my site, but I was wondering if you could possibly tell us a little more about the Paid Discovery.
Is this targeted towards a specific audience?
Clive, shoot me an email and we can discuss this in more specifics.
The article was informative. I didn’t know there was a paid stumble account.
Glad I could help
Truly instructive indeed! And I thought I could do without SU… I’m glad I took the time to read your article and changed my mind!!
Helen, glad I could help
I was confuse to use stumbleupon but your blogs so much helps to understand stumbleupon’s traffic
Glad I could clear up some of the problems.
me too I gained a lot of traffic with SU, when my one article made it on their suggested articles
Awesome!
Is there any daily limit to post our content?
I dont believe there is.
I read somewhere that you could get banned if you just submit your own content. Reddit does that if you over-promote your blog.
That is true, you never want to over promote content.
It works. Thanks a lot.
Glad it works
Something i found very interesting in this article and it’s very helpful to me. i will stump this article. thanks
Jaimin, thanks for reading. Glad I could help
To say frankly, After using stumbleupon for a few weeks, I came with empty hands. I think we must has a powerful strategy and consistency. Isn’t it my dear friends at quicksprout.
Tarun, you should keep at it. Its a process to get qualified traffic from there.