New Orleans Internet Marketing

http://www.stumbleupon.com

If anyone hasn’t tried StumbleUpon yet, I strongly suggest it, not only for bringing additional traffic to a site, but also because it’s really good entertainment and a great way to find the kind of stuff you’re into on the web.

SU is kind of a mixture between MySpace, Digg. and Del.icio.us. Sign up for a free account, download the toolbar (usually, I’m very against adding toolbars, but this one’s worth it), and choose your topics that interest you.

What SU is Good for from a User Perspective:
This is the fun part about StumbleUpon, after you fill out your profile and check off topics that interest you (so that SU knows something about you), when you click Stumble! on the toolbar – it takes you to a cool random website that you will probably like and / or find very useful. At first I was pretty amazed at how great it works. I now “Stumbleâ€? late at night when I’m bored and can’t sleep. I always wind up adding a new bookmark. Don’t be too selective with the interests you choose. Go to My Preferences > Stumbling > Update your topics, and dig through the multitude of topics checking of everything that interests you. That way you’ll get a wide variety of good stuff, and you’ll be more likely to find others with similar interests.

How SU Can Benefit Your Website:
Just like Digg, the SU community shapes what content gets seen on SU. SU can literally send thousands of unique visitors to a stumbled site at anytime. I’m pretty new to SU, and I’ve stumbled my blog a few times (which isn’t even ranking in the search engines yet, it’s so new), and had 2000 SU visitors come in one day. Also, all SU content is indexed by the SE’s. When I stumbled my blog, it went to #1 in their business section for a few days. A very good link.

Say you like a site, and you “Stumble� it (the best way is to click the “thumbs up� button, AND write a review and tags for the site), that counts as a vote for the site, and helps categorize it. When a site you stumble gets a vote, it increases the likelihood of others getting to see the site on SU.

Only thing is, all Stumblers aren’t created equal – some votes are more important than others. To improve your “importance� in SU, you want to have “friends� and / or people subscribed to your pages. Here’s some easy tips to improving your importance in SU:

1. Choose your topics liberally. Check off anything you’re interested in. If you have lots of interests, it will be easy to find similar stumblers.

2. “Stumble� sites you like. Just like you would use Digg or Delicious, but your “Stumbles� show up on your pages. People will be more likely to add you as a friend if they like your “stumbles.�

3. When you click on another SU member’s picture, their interests show up next to them, if you have a lot of matches, add them as a friend, there’s a good chance they will reciprocate.

4. There’s a lot of ways to find similar SU members, there’s a “Network� link at the top, and a “friends� link. Once you have “friends� it will even show you “friends of friends.� I’m sure you get the idea.

Here’s my pages – add me - http://chartwell.stumbleupon.com/

My experience with SU traffic so far, is that it is weird and unpredictable. SU now sends about 100 visitors per day to my blog, but every now and then I’ll get a wave of a few hundred or so. I have read of sites that get much more traffic than this from SU.

As with all good internet marketing, the quality of the content on your site is directly proportional to the visitor’s satisfaction, and satisfied SU visitors will send many more SU visitors. So don’t think you can spam StumbleUpon easily. You can “Stumble” whatever you want. When you “Stumble” a website or a page, all you really do is introduce it into the community. If it’s not very good, it will be ignored, just as many of my useless blog posts are - going by the SU waste side :)

The Downside to SU traffic:
SU’s not some magic bullet that will bring a ton of sales to your e-commerce site, even if Stumblers really do like it and bring in a ton of traffic. The visitors are much less likely to convert than direct SEM referrals. But it is a FREE, easy way to bring in extra traffic, and the search friendly links are good too. Did I mention it’s Free?

Have Fun Stumbling!
http://www.stumbleupon.com