Social Bookmarking: StumbleUpon

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This week we are exploring social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is a great way to keep track online of sites you like and a great way to drive traffic to your site. The first social bookmarking site we’ll look at is StumbleUpon. This site is fascinating and rather addicting.

Here’s how it works

You sign up for an account with StumbleUpon. You fill out your profile including keywords related to your interests. Now you have two options.

• Option 1: Let StumbleUpon show you different sites people have liked that are related to your keywords. Simply click Like It! if you want to see more posts along the same lines or Thumbs Down if it’s not for you. Then stumble onto the next website.
• Option 2: Go out to your favorite blogs and websites and add them to StumbleUpon. You can choose to add a review to the page when you stumble it.

Here’s how it affects traffic

Typically when a post or page on your site is stumbled, you’ll see a dramatic increase in traffic within minutes. It’s amazing how quickly the traffic pours in. It’s great to be stumbled! The down side is that this traffic often bounces. You get a lot of traffic, but they don’t tend to stick around. A few people will hang out and click around your site or follow a link in your post, but don’t expect many people to do this kind of browsing on your site. Most people who use StumbleUpon are in pure surfing mode and are poised to click the “Stumble” button, not the “post a comment” button.

Is it worth it?

Yes, it’s worth it! Even if only a handful of people browse your site and even fewer subscribe to your RSS feed, that’s still more than zero. Plus it keeps track of sites you find and like so you can refer back to them later when you want to link to them in a post.

Additional Features

You can add friends in StumbleUpon and then subscribe to their StumbleUpon RSS feed so you can see what sites they are interested in. You can advertise your site through StumbleUpon. Based on a pay-per-click model, you can drive traffic to your site by asking StumbleUpon to specifically send people to you. Once a few people have given you positive reviews, be sure to remove your site from the advertisement pool so that you don’t continue to pay for traffic that can now be generated from the previous positive reviews.
photo credit: topgold

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