Build it and they will come! Those “famous last words” aren’t exactly true in the digital age. Just because you have a website doesn’t mean users will visit it. And without visitors, you won’t generate leads, make sales or have stats on which to base your inbound marketing strategy. Somehow, you have to get traffic to your site and StumbleUpon is proving to be a good way to do so. 
What It Is
StumbleUpon is mainly what’s known as a social bookmarking site. It’s a platform on which users connect with each other as they do with other social networks, but it’s major purposes is the sharing of information between users.
You can set up a business profile and post links to items of interest to your customers, and those with StumbleUpon accounts can choose to follow your posts. You can even turn your blog content into a brand channel and build up your list of followers, helping to drive traffic to your site.
How it Works
StumbleUpon works by providing a location for user-posted content, which visitors access by clicking on the “Stumble” button to move between items. It allows users to upload and share new content as well as existing material they happen to “stumble upon” while browsing the site. It also enables them to vote for items they like (or dislike!) using a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” option.
When you Thumb Up a post for the first time you get a chance to review it too, and your commentary is shared with your followers as well as the originator of the post. This encourages the poster to follow you in return and to review posts of yours. The whole point is to develop a network of some of its 20 million users with whom you can share your content, in the hope they will share it further with their own networks.
Secrets to Success
As with other social media sites, getting set up to use StumbleUpon to boost traffic to your business website differs from simply creating a personal profile. And if you really want to make it work for you, you need to set up paid placements. Start by setting up an account, then connecting with and following users with interests that sync with your business activities. The secrets to success include:
- Voting with discretion. Don’t vote for your own posts, vote only for those posts you feel really are remarkable and don’t vote for everything. Be selective. Experts recommend being selective and only giving a Thumbs Up to one post per day.
- Focus on quality – both in your postings and your voting. This helps to maintain the profile of the platform as a medium where readers find information of value.
- Upload an eye-catching avatar. Use something that ties in with your brand or your product, or an attractive, personal headshot that draws users to you.
- Post content that contains punchy titles & blurbs and make sure the content is visible above the scroll, because you have a couple of seconds in which to capture your reader’s attention before they click the Stumble button and move on.
- Network with other users and create a following based on your material as well as following each other.
Opportunities Offered
Apart from giving you the chance to meet new people online, StumbleUpon gives you a range of opportunities:
- Access to a database of more than 20 million dedicated users, some of whom have been around since it’s inception back in 2001—long before Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
- Strong content exposure. Long after content has seen its heyday, sharing it on StumbleUpon will give it a new lease on life. The way users stumble around based on their areas of interest means it doesn’t matter how new or old the content is, it can still generate tons of traffic.
- Ability to customize and shorten your URL to make it easy to remember.
- Tracking the performance of the stumbles you submit. With more than one billion stumbles a month, it’s important to know how you rank in the scheme of things.
- Checking the number of click-throughs and retweets your submissions get.
- Viewing the source of traffic to the pages you share. This lets you know where your users are coming from and can help inform your marketing strategy.
All these add up to a great way to share your content, engage with other users and drive traffic to your blog and website. Conversions aren’t easy to make, so it’s not a lead-generation solution in its own right but more of a support system for raising brand awareness. And given that’s it’s free to use unless you take a paid placement, why on earth wouldn’t you give it a try?
*Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
