Getting StumbleUpon Traffic

Recently Blogsters Guild asked me the question...

remember a while back when I first discovered Stumbleupon. Sushi was all over it. So needless to say I've been a fan ever since. When and how did you start getting gargantuan amounts of hits with Stumble? We peasants could use some pointers.

While I am not an expert on the subject, I have been using StumbleUpon to market myself for over a year and half, having made my fair share of mistakes and have had a few strong successes. Most recently I received over 76,000 hits on one post over the course of a week, including over 21,000 unique visitors in one day.
 
My list of tips and tricks can be broken down into 3 broad categories

• Become an active member of the SU community,
• Write content that's going to get Stumbled and
• Submitting your content.

 
Become An Active Member of the SU Community
What Is StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click "Stumble", they deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 4,493,158 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating the sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.
 
 
Stumbling a Reputation
The biggest mistake bloggers make when signing up with SU is using it to Stumble each and every one of their own posts and nothing else.
 
The community is protective of it's own collective reputation and is therefore wary of spam, advertising and shady marketing. Having a favorites list of nothing but your own posts will mark you as uninterested in the community and repeatedly Stumbling pages from the same domain will lower the weight of all of your Stumbles.
 
Here's a few simple ways to increase your standing (moving up towards being a Top Stumbler)...

• Stumble often, even daily
• Whenever appropriate, add a review in addition to a "thumbs up"
• Discover new, quality sites - this is easy to do if you read a lot of blogs on a daily basis
• StumbleUpon Photo Blog It to increase the visual impact of your favorites list
• Stumble quality content - being the first to find a popular page or even "thumbs upping" a popular page can add to your reputation

Stumble Friends
As with any social site, making friends through SU can help you increase your standing within the community.

• If you're a blogger, you probably already know a few people using the service - add them as friends!
• Reciprocate when people add you as a friend
• Check the pages that your friends have Stumbled and try to give some of them a positive review also - this gives them more clout so when they Stumble one of your posts it will have a bigger impact.
• When adding new friends try to check out their homepage and Stumble a specific post that you enjoyed - it often comes back around
• Join communities

Overall becoming a user with some clout will take some time. You'll know that you're succeeding when people start contacting you to thank you for the Stumble and the massive ammount of traffic you sent their way.
 
 
Write Content That's Going To Get Stumbled
There's no sense in devoting every word that you write to the cause of Stumble fame but keeping SU's potential in mind when composing a post can increase the likelyhood of getting multiple Stumbles.
 
Here's a few types of posts that don't tend to do well on SU (which isn't to say that you shouldn't write them, they just won't fare well on SU)

• Link posts or link-dumps - they're redundant to the system
• Personal posts - tend to require an interest in you and your activities that a random Stumbler won't have
• Part 3 of 6 posts - if it's not self contained, it's not going to be worth a Stumble
• News - or anything time sensitive. If it's not going to be relevant or interesting in a month from now...

Here's a few types of posts that do tend to do very well with SU users...

• How-to guides and instructional posts
• Anything that looks like it's taken a long time to put together - posts with details, lists, links, pictures, etc.
• Poignant posts that make a powerful point in a short amount of time
• Visually interesting posts - sites like My Interesting Files are perfect in this way

 
Style It
Making your posts visually interesting beyond the words themselves can grab a reader, keep them interested and increase the chance that they'll think it's worth recommending. Scribbles and Words has an excellent brief explanation of a few basic design pitfalls.
 
Tease It
When people Stumble your post, they can add tags or a review but they typically won't change the title. Give your posts titles that entice the reader and invite them to find out more.
 
Sell It
Your first paragraph is your most important. Put forth some quality content and suggest what's coming later in the post. If your first paragraph falters, SU users will never make it beyond.
 
Prep Your Pictures
No picture on your blog should be over 715 pixels wide in the SU universe - that's the cap size for SU Photo blogging. Anything larger can be represented by a smaller image that links to the full size version. I can't stress this one enough. There have been many times where I've gone to add a picture, wasn't able to, looked for smaller pictures, found none and just gave up on giving a Stumble. Because so many SU users Photo-blogging, using interesting and relevant pictures in your posts will nearly double your chances of getting Stumbles.
 
Keep Advertising to a Minimum
Again, SU users are always watching out for spam so if your post's page looks like is an AdSense demo page, it'll get passed over. Similarly, don't expect to get Stumbles for paid-posts or blogs that are littered with Amazon links.
 
 
Submitting Your Content
The Discovery
Like I said, submitting your own content looks tacky and will turn away many users. A well written post will inevitably get Stumbled but here's a few things you can do to push the process along.

• Use some sort of "Stumble this" button on every post
• Use a SU logo somewhere in your sidebar to show your support of the community
• Link to your SU profile - in your "about" page is usually a good spot (here's my profile page!)
• Write a post about SU - if you've got readers who would be interested, chances are they would love to Stumble some of your pages
• If you use FeedBurner, use the Stumble It! FeedFlare

What and When
Another big mistake is the expectation that everything you write should get Stumbled.

• If your pushing for Stumbles, make sure that it's some of the best content you've ever written (see what does well above)
  
• Go back into your archives and find the great content that nobody read
• Once you've gotten a post Stumbled, give it at least a week to run it's course before you try to push another post - over-saturation shows and degrades the value of all of your content

Asking for a Discovery
If none of the above seems to work, you can always ask a friend to discover a post for you.

• Switch up who you ask so as not to get annoying or force them to Stumble pages from the same domain continuously (see Reputation above)
• Use the "Send To" button in the toolbar and don't forget to include a brief message asking nicely for them to take a look
• Understand if someone isn't interested in Stumbling your post about how cute your cat is
• Establish which friends have a very reciprocal type of relationship and which are more concerned with the integrity of the community
  

Your Vote
Once someone else has reviewed your post, you can go in at any time, vote for yourself and change the tags associated with it. Using relevant, broad tags will garner a lot more traffic than highly specific tags.
 
The Bandwagon
Once your post has been discovered, it will now be easier for others to simply thumbs up your blog without having to mess with a review. Now you need to increase the number of SU users rating your post.

• Use the "Send To" button in the toolbar to contact a few more friends and don't forget to include a brief message asking nicely for them to take a look
• Use other services like MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog to send out community messages - it won't hurt to add "please Stumble it if you enjoyed it" or something similar.
• The bandwagon phase does not have to involve a huge amount of work on your part - every time someone new reviews the post, all of their friends will see it. It will spread naturally over the next few days.

 
The Dark Side
I've dabbled. Has it paid off? No. Trading or paying for Stumbles is against the TOS and it also has little effect.

• Those who participate in large Stumble schemes lower their own sway within the system
• Paid Stumblers and those who participate in exchanges get their Stumbles discounted by the algorithm, because their voting interests are unlike anyone elses, and often stumbled positively really bad content
• This includes forums like those on Entrecard and BlogCatalog that exist to exchange Stumbles

Conclusion
Trying to game the system has little long term effect.  Explore the possibilities of SU as a discovery tool and use it to promote the quality content that you come across. When it comes to your own posts, content is king. Write something worth while and it will get Stumbled. Let the traffic come to you in a natural way otherwise your efforts will look spammy and garner you a negative reputation.
 
Oh, and if you found this guide to be useful...please consider giving it a Stumble!