The Basics of StumbleUpon: What is it?
There’s a good chance you’ve heard of StumbleUpon. There’s been a lot written about it recently, but if you haven’t, then you need to know about this program. It has the potential to drive tens of thousands of targetted visitors directly to your website, and if you don’t want to take advantage of that, you’re missing out on a major potential traffic and link-building source.
The Basics of StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is the channel-surfing tool of the internet, with over 2 million users. It allows people to quickly and easily visit and “discover” new webpages that they otherwise never would have.
The process: You install a toolbar (see below), you signup, and then you hit stumble. Pick some interesting topics, ranging from photography, web development, humor, gardening, and hundreds of others, and Stumble will start giving you pages that other users have rated positively.
Over time, as you rate pages, Stumble will learn what you like and match you up with similar Stumblers, giving you pages that they’ve marked as “thumbs up”.
You’ll end up finding amusing, interesting sites that you otherwise would have never even thought of looking for.
How it Works
StumbleUpon gets to know what you like when you rate web pages, and matches you up with similar users. Additionally, when you add new sites that are quality, you start getting good “Karma” and future sites that you submit and your votes will have more weight.
Adding a site is easy - just give a page thumbs up that hasn’t been stumbled yet, and it’ll be added to the database, and you’ll get credit for it.
Then there’s the entire social network aspect. To be honest, this isn’t a thrilling aspect, but it could be interesting for some people, since it automatically matches you up with people with similar interests. If you invest more time, you can make “friends” with other users, and they’ll be more likely to see your pages.
How to make it benefit your site
Stumble your own pages. There’s nothing against the code of StumbleUpon that says that you can’t Stumble your own pages. However, you have to choose content that will attract Stumblers’ attention, and keep them on the site for longer than a few seconds.
The ease of stumbling also leads to one of the downsides of StumbleUpon - it makes it really easy to leave sites.
In the next article, learn how to capture a Stumbler’s attention and how to convert Stumblers into regular visitors. Read it tomorrow!
