When used properly, StumbleUpon is an excellent source for webmasters to gain substantial traffic in the span of minutes. Each month, StumbleUpon has the capacity to send hundreds of millions of hits to web sites within their database. Some web sites even credit StumbleUpon as the primary reason for their success, providing their first break in attracting a large audience.
Despite its significant potential, success on StumbleUpon isn’t as simple as submitting a link to your web site. Many webmasters make the mistake of doing too little on StumbleUpon, with the assumption that the traffic they’re receiving from StumbleUpon is quality, targeted traffic. However, it’s common for visitors to have high bounce rates simply because they were not targeted correctly.
When trying to master the potential of StumbleUpon, it is important to target the correct audience to ensure that new visitors to your site will stick around and return, as opposed to exiting and never coming back. Below are some common mistakes people make:
Not Interacting Within the Community
Submitting links on StumbleUpon – which you can do here – immediately places the submitted page within StumbleUpon’s database. That page can receive anywhere from zero to hundreds of thousands of views; the number is dependent on several factors.
One of these factors is community interaction. Your submitted link is likelier to reach more eyes if you follow StumbleUpon users in a similar niche. If they follow you back, it helps just as much, too. StumbleUpon is likely to show some of your content to them eventually, especially if it’s not getting any bites from other StumbleUpon surfers. Since your followers are within the same niche, it’s likely that they will be more interested in the content than the average StumbleUpon user.
Submitting a Text-Heavy Web Page
StumbleUpon users tend to be very capricious in their web surfing, since they are fully open to the idea of exploring various corners of the web. They are just as likely to give a page a chance as clicking out of it due to a poor layout or scatterbrain content. The most successful content on StumbleUpon is often an easy-to-read assortment of text and images. Too much text can be an immediate turn-off to readers, especially if – as is the case often – they are unfamiliar with the source.
Submitting a Home or ‘About’ Page
Opt to make the pages you are submitting as clear as possible, while also including links mid-content to other pages of your site to encourage deeper exploration. With that in mind, never submit a home page or “About” page to StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon users typically look for a page to ingest, not an entire web site. If the single page satisfies them, they are likely to explore the site further.
Using StumbleUpon Exclusively for Self-Promotion
StumbleUpon can typically recognize when a user is utilizing their site for self-promotion and nothing else. They can filter out your submitted pages as a punishment of sort. To prevent this, be active as a StumbleUpon user by actively stumbling and liking pages within a niche similar to your site. Not only will this increase the chances of your site’s submission being successful on StumbleUpon, but it can also provide inspiration for engaging content on your site. For example, if you submitted a site related to newspaper design, browse keywords such as news history or newspaper circular.
Submitting Only Your Site
Similarly in the theme of StumbleUpon frowning on exclusive self-promotion, it is prudent to submit content apart from your own web site. Submit a variety of content, from major sites like CNN to small-time blogs, to show StumbleUpon that you are genuinely interested in a niche, in addition to the various sources and fan blogs within it. Your submitted links will reap the benefits as a result.
Essentially, if one comes across as a community-driven StumbleUpon user that submits easy-to-digest content from a variety of sources, then their own submissions are likely to do well, too. By avoiding the common pitfalls above, your site can experience an extremely significant uptick in targeted traffic from StumbleUpon.
What’s your favorite way to use StumbleUpon? Tell us in the comments section below!
Great post Courtney. I stumble pages on here that will be useful to others in particular subjects and I stumble items that are in my interests.
Wow, this is helpful Courtney. I have been doing all of the wrong things on StumbleUpon with my own site. Thank you for the clarification.