A few days ago I was sent the following article and asked to review the statements for validity and write another article about using StumbleUpon to direct traffic to business websites for the purpose of increasing sales and profits. As I was unfamiliar with the StumbleUpon form of Social networking, I signed up and spent some time browsing thru several pages and connecting sites. My review of the article and the use of StumbleUpon follow.

“StumbleUpon is a source of great traffic which lasts quite long. Previously, I have written a blog post about how StumbleUpon can bring good traffic. But what can you do to bring even more traffic from it?

Of course, quality content is still the biggest factor for more traffic, but what can you do to increase it even further. The key to bringing even more traffic lies in “friends and fans”.

According to the help page of StumbleUpon, about friends:

Adding a friend is essentially subscribing to their content. You will stumble upon pages they have rated, filtered according to the shared [topics] displayed on that person’s profile.

So, when you add somebody as a friend, he or she is effectively subscribing to your stumbled content automatically.

Similarly for fans:
Fans are people who have clicked “add as friend” on your profile. This means they will now stumble upon your favourite sites which are of interest to both of you.

So, the key to bringing viral traffic is to get more and more friends and fans. When you stumble a page, your friends and fans will be subscribed to it automatically. So when they click the “Stumble” button, your site will be shown to them. This can bring viral and you get more traffic. So try to get more and more friends and fans in your niche and then submit your pages to StumbleUpon.”

My Honest Review: While Stumble Upon is great for sharing web content that’s been filtered and brought to your favourites page by the Stumble programming, it is against the TOS rules to private message another stumbler and ask then to review your personal sites.

The only way to get traffic to your site is if it is “stumbled upon” and brought into the Stumble matrix, and then marked as a favorite site by several people. You can, however, recommend you favourite site on you blog page, but that does not get it listed unless someone visits you blog page, goes to the site, and gives it the thumbs up. But you’d need several people to “thumbs up” your site before it comes “hot’” listed.

Quote from the SU ‘about’ page: “StumbleUpon presents only web sites which have been suggested by other like-minded Stumblers. Each time the ‘Stumble’ button is clicked, the user is presented with a high quality web site based on the collective opinions of other like-minded web surfers.”

So unless you have a newsworthy site, or a video that gets virally stumbled and flagged, there is very little chance of your personal web sites ending up on Stumble upon hot list. While there are Billions of website available world wide, SU only has 500 topics to brows from and as only 4.6 Million members. If you’re looking to research your favorite niche, you probably won’t find it here – unless it’s on wacky videos.

StumbleUpon is not a search engine and when you click on the “Stumble” button, “you will only see pages which friends and like-minded Stumblers have recommended”.

So how do you “recommend’” a site? By downloading the StumbleUpon browser bar onto you Internet browser, which by the way, made my computer run really slow! (Ugh!) Then you go visit your favorite sites as you normally brows, and when you arrive at a site you wish to recommend, you give it the “thumbs up” and the site then appears on your favorites page. You can only hope that others will visit your blog page, become your fans, and “thumbs-up” your site as well.

It’s all rather complicated if you ask me – and I think there are much better sites to use to drive traffic to you web page. But just the same, now that I’ve figured out how it works (I had to read thru ALL the about and help files to get it working), I’m going to “Stumble” all my blogs and web sites to see what happens. Maybe drive some traffic to my Squidoo lens and Hub pages blogs, both of which I found easier to use.

I’ll let you know in a later article how it’s going.

Wish my Luck and Happy Web Surfing.


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