How To Use StumbleUpon To Gain Traffic

I very well could have titled this post “How To Use StumbleUpon To Find Pictures Of Dogs In Sunglasses”. Don’t worry; I’ll teach you that, too. But I thought bloggers might gravitate towards this title more.

StumbleUpon is one of those “internet fads” like Facebook or Youtube that looks like it’s here to stay. In their own words, “StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites.” It’s free to join, easy to use, and—if you’re a blogger—can reveal your content to readers who might never have heard of you before.

How it works:

Like I said, it’s free to join and create an account. Once you sign up and pick a username, you can find and follow friends using your email address book, Facebook friend list, AIM account, or Twitter following list.

“Stumbling” takes you from one random internet page to another, often one suggested by other users and the people on your friends list. You can specify which categories you’d like to stumble by picking certain channels, like photography, food/cooking, and television.

How to spread your content:

If you have content on the internet you want to share, StumbleUpon can be a great tool to getting it out there. The trick though is that it needs to be submitted to be stumbled by others. By creating your own account, you can submit your content and get it on StumbleUpon for your friends and others to see. Adding a plugin(I suggest Share & Follow) makes this quick and easy and inserts icons in posts for you or anyone else to click and submit the content.

Connecting with StumbleUpon:

You don’t need to have any connections on StumbleUpon, but if you know a lot of people with similar interests it can be a great way to explore the things they love that you might never have heard about. It’s easy to follow anyone; just go to their public profile and click “follow”, whom you can find using online address books like I said. If you have a website, you can install plugins and widgets to advertise your account(again, I suggest Share & Follow).

All about stumbling

When you go into StumbleUpon and start stumbling, you’ll notice a toolbar at the top of the page. To recommend this to friends, click on the “I Like It” button. You can also share it on the web by clicking on any of the social tool icons. To move on, simply click the “Stumble” button which takes you to another random page.

This way you can access the best the web has to offer, like so:

Any other questions? Feel free to friend me on StumbleUpon and I’ll friend back!