Image via Wikipedia Stumbleupon
The idea behind Stumbleupon is to have a collection of websites that have been voted for by surfers that can be visited according to set categories. Therefore I can select the category of business and marketing and stumble through (i.e. visit) a whole load of websites within those categories.
Stumbleupon is accessed via a toolbar
Firefox users: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/138
Internet Explorer users: http://www.stumbleupon.com/download.php
Once you have the toolbar installed you can stumble through random websites or vote positively or negatively for a website.
If a website hasn’t been voted on before, a new website box will appear asking a few questions about the site. Because a lot of stumblers can’t be bothered to fill in this box and will just not leave you a vote, I highly recommend that an existing fan of your website stumbles you first and fills in that box. After that, voting for a site is as simple as clicking the thumbs up on the tool bar.
Stumbleupon will bring a lot of visitors to your website. Now as these people are by definition surfing, it is not traffic that converts very well but as there are always exceptions to this it is definitely worth putting a little time and effort to make sure that your site is stumbled at least once.
Also, once you have the toolbar installed, it is very easy to spread love by voting for sites that you stumble that you like – a quick click is all it takes.
I was explaining Stumbleupon to my friend Carol Deckert and she wanted to also highlight Stumbleupon for her readers at her blog so I pass the baton on to her.
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9 responses so far ↓
1 AJ from trendy purses // Sep 16, 2008 at 9:54 am
How much traffic do you estimate you receive from stumble? Is there a way to differentiate this traffic from organic traffic using analytics?
2 Katherine Reschke // Sep 16, 2008 at 10:37 am
I use awstats which is included on cpanel and it tells me exactly where my traffic is coming from – my top 3 referrers so far this month are Google, Stumbleupon and Twitter.
3 Peter Answers // Sep 19, 2008 at 8:19 am
Interesting that you get traffic from Twitter – is that because you tweet your new posts?
4 Katherine Reschke // Sep 19, 2008 at 9:57 am
Peter,
I post the ones that I think will most interest my followers and that I think they would enjoy commenting on. I also get Twitter people visiting from the link in my profile.
5 Angie // Sep 20, 2008 at 2:02 pm
I think I finally get it LOL! I have had the StumbleUpon bar and really never understood it. I was able to stumble this post and had to write in the box you spoke of so hopefully I did OK.
What is the plug in called that you use to get the social bookmark box at the end of your posts. I would like to add that to my blog sometime.
Thank you!
Angies last blog post..Reward Yourself
6 Katherine Reschke // Sep 20, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Angie,
Thanks for visiting and commenting.
I use two plugins for social bookmarking – one can be found here http://www.milienzo.com/wordpress-plugins/i-love-social-bookmarking/ and the other one is http://www.socialmarker.com/
7 Jim from 110CC bike // Sep 22, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Personally, I have never had any success using Twitter. Maybe I am doing something wrong. Do you find that you get much response from it?
8 Tony from New Stylish Laptops // Oct 15, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Stumble Upon is an great way to get good exposure, from my experience Stumble Upon users are not as fickle as some social media sites. Stumble Upon users are way cooler!
Tonys last blog post..New Sansa slotMusic Player Announced
9 Coach Bags Fan // Nov 24, 2009 at 11:46 am
Ever since I’ve switched from IE to FireFox I’ve been using Stumbleupon it’s one of the add-ons I love the most~