Long time readers of this blog know that I am a big fan of StumbleUpon (SU), both for the amount of traffic that it sends as well as the quality of traffic. Back in late June I decided that I wanted to drive more traffic to this site from social media sites, especially from SU. I picked SU over Digg because I wanted to drive consistent traffic to the site whereas Digg traffic seems to come in peaks and valleys.

Was I successful? Well in June I received 622 visitors from SU. So far this month I have received over 3,800 visits and the number of subscribers have more than since I began this campaign.

Before explaining how I did it, let’s take a step back and look at why you might want to pursue this kind of social marketing strategy. Well the first answer is obviously traffic. Anytime you can increase traffic by over 500% from a quality source without spending any additional money I think is a good thing. Plus SU traffic can be very high quality if you do a good job of identifying friends with similar interests as you. I have found that yhe SU traffic has consistently had the lowest bounce rate and highest pages viewed per visit of any traffic source that I have.

As you stumble and add friends within your niche, you get exposed to not only other people within your niche, but that they are reading and commenting on. Talk about a competitive advantage. Since I have started seriously stumbling, I am amazed and the number of great posts that I am being exposed to on a regular basis. It is one thing to read blogs from Glen Allsopp and Andy Beard, but having the ability to also see what other blogs they are reading really has been a thrill for me. Nobody can keep track of everything that is being written about a particular niche or market, but through SU you can easily expand how much information you are being exposed to. And since people like Glen and Andy are only stumbling the best articles that they find, it is if your SU friends are filtering out the noise for you, leaving you just with quality content.

So how did I do it? I spent a lot of time stumbling! Back in June my SU profile http://braveheartdesign.stumbleupon.com/ showed about 75 pages stumbled and a couple of friends. Today I am up to 765 stumbles and 98 friends. What I have learnt is that to build up a successful profile you need to stumble on a regular basis. In addition to stumbling and voting on a story (thumbs up), you need to leave a review. The review can be just 1-2 sentences, but the impact of a review plus a positive vote really carries a lot of weight.

When looking to add friends, look for people in your niche because ultimately you want to send qualified traffic to your site. Also when adding friends, instead of just adding them, SU lets you “Review the Blog” of the stumbler you are trying to befriend. A 1-2 sentence review will get you noticed by the stumbler and makes it more likely that they will befriend you back. The more friends you have and more pages you stumble, the more people see your stumbles. So take 20-30 minutes a day and Stumble, add some friends and watch the traffic to your site from SU steadily increase.

Just as there right ways to develop a SU profile, there are wrong ways also. The most common one I see is people who stumble only their own site or they stumble every page in their site. SU is not averse to people stumbling their content, they just want to be part of the community and stumble others sites other than your own.

The other two big mistakes and people who just vote thumbs up but who never leave a review, and also people who stumble hundreds of sites but don’t have any friends. Stumbling in a vacuum will not get you anywhere

Try SU for 60 days and see what kind of impact it has on your business.

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