How to Use and Abuse Stumbleupon for Maximum Traffic

November 8, 2007 by
Filed under: General 

One of the greatest ways for any webmaster to get new visitors for free is Stumbleupon. I have been using this Firefox addon for months now, and the simplicity and ability to send as much traffic as it does amazes me. For websites that you like, users of StumbleUpon “thumbs up” the site, and it sends tons of stumblers to that website who are interested in those topics. For webmasters, it is a common idea to “thumbs up” your own site for an instant burst in traffic, but other than that one time traffic flow, I have created a list of how to ab(use) Stumbleupon to get the maximum amount of traffic without spending a dollar!

Benefits of StumbleUpon:

  • You can select the exact niche that sends these visitors, so if your blog is about investing, you will get tons of people who enjoy “investing” sites, which turns into excellent clickthrough rates for your ads.
  • If you do go on the “paying” route, it is far cheaper than most advertising solutions. (I still recommend the free way, as it is dead simple).
  • It can help anyone who owns a website
  • It is completely free
  • You can learn the entire ups and downs in 15 minutes (by reading this post in its entirety)
  • Tons more, take a look for yourself

The guide to (ab)using Stumbleupon for all it’s worth:

  • 1. Sign up for Stumbleupon.
  • 2. Stumble at least 50 websites that you enjoy, but do not submit your own URL’s more than 5% of your total submissions.
  • 3. If you own a blog, make a post asking your readers to add you as a friend. With that being said, add me as a friend!.
  • 4. Look for people with a high amount of “mutual friends,” which means they reciprocated friends with people that added them as a friend. Add up to 150 of these people as your friends and wait a week or so until some of them add you back.
  • 5. Ask around in related webmaster forums, or any active forums that you are a member from (and you can also exchange stumbles with other users).
  • 6. Stumble others and they will stumble you back
  • 7. After you have accumulated a good number of friends, the sites you stumble now get an even larger burst of traffic to them.
  • 8. If you own a blog, exchange reviews of websites with other blogs, and then when their blog’s first post is about you, stumble their main page as well as the exact URL of the post. This will give them “2 stumbles” to their website, sending them a flood of visitors, but it will also help you in that those hundreds of visitors will be reading a review of your website.
  • 9. StumbleUpon will not let you stumble your own site with hundreds of pages, until you stumble 9 other pages. With the technique shown in #8, for every 9 stumbles you make on blogs about your own, you will be allowed to stumble another one of your own pages.
  • 10. Join stumble exchanges. Do a quick search for “stumbleupon exchanges” and you should be able to find some active communities that allow you to exchange stumbles with other stumblers. People will stumble your pages in return for you stumbling theres. Both of you result in tons of free visitors, so it is mutually beneficial.
  • 11. If you get a lot of stumbles in a small period of time, you get listed on the Stumble Buzz page, which will send you tons more free traffic. To raise your chances of getting on this page, only stumble your best websites or blog posts, so that with the thousands of visitors that Stumbleupon sends you, they have the highest chance of also giving you a thumbs up, sending thousands more and making your content go viral.
  • 12. Stumbling sites does not cost you anything, so I recommend stumbling every website that links to your website, because the better that those sites do, the better they help you. This will also make the owners of those sites like you more if you are sending them tons of traffic. Like I said earlier, mutually beneficial.
  • 13. If you own a blog or an interesting website, you can provide a stumble upon button on every post. Your readers generally shouldn’t mind, and it has the potential to send you lots more easy traffic. If your blog is big enough already, I don’t recommend this because I feel you should only stumble “your best content”. The call is yours to make though.
  • 14. Like I said with stumbling sites that link to yours, another really “evil” trick is to get around that “you can only stumble another page on your website if you stumble at least 9 external sites” problem is to stumble your Digg posts, your own Stumbleupon profile, your forum profiles, your Myspace/Facebook pages, forum posts about your site, etc etc. Not only does this get around the stumbling limit, but it will also send you some more visitors to your websites and build up your stumbleupon profile.

Now obviously, like everything there is a few downfalls:

  • 1. The traffic is inconsistent. You will get a burst of traffic one time, but then it idles down to very little, or if you write good content consistently, it will be a series of traffic spikes.
  • 2. The links from the stumble pages are nofollow, so it does not help your search engine optimization
  • 3. It takes up a pretty big portion on your browser

It is completely free, so stop worrying about the three downfalls and start using it to make some money!

Now add me as a friend and start using/abusing stumbleupon today!

Comments

47 Comments on How to Use and Abuse Stumbleupon for Maximum Traffic

  1. Rich on Thu, 8th Nov 2007 8:08 pm

    2. Ok..great post! Who wants to exchange stumbles..lmao

  2. Kris on Thu, 8th Nov 2007 9:20 pm

    3. Nice post. But isn’t this what all we DP members have been doing for quite a while? :) Jokes apart, I read somewhere that SU is targeting webmaster forums like DP and whoever does this “exchange” stuff will be banned from SU or something like that. Is it true?

  3. Team Fortress 2 hacks on Thu, 8th Nov 2007 10:08 pm

    4. Thanks for the tips, never knew that there were stumble exchange websites.

  4. Aleks on Fri, 9th Nov 2007 3:07 am

    5. Excellent article. Recently I started to use SU, and seem that traffic getting from there is amazing, but not constant. Now my SU profile is PR4 and with the number of friends increasing traffic will also increasing.

  5. admin on Fri, 9th Nov 2007 11:14 am

    6. I have heard no such thing. I know they are stopping people from stumbling the stumble exchange websites, but so far I have been using it for months without problem. As with any third party program, only time will tell.

  6. Jason on Fri, 9th Nov 2007 1:13 pm

    7. Great post!
    Thanks I am gonna try this out.

  7. nimrodjo on Tue, 13th Nov 2007 8:42 am

    8. Very useful article…I do stumble but I prefer Technorati…

  8. Sarbarth on Tue, 13th Nov 2007 10:33 am

    9. Really helpful and got lots on StumbleUpon. If you want you can add me as your friend in StumbleUpon. Here is mine, http://espresons.stumbleupon.com/

  9. Collin LaHay on Tue, 13th Nov 2007 1:17 pm

    10. @Sarbarth: Done, as well as stumbled your site.

  10. TheAnand on Thu, 15th Nov 2007 10:43 am

    11. Thats a lot of cool information to getting started with SU. Good article and good luck with the blog too. but you really did not share methods to abuse SU though :( lol

  11. soulbleed662 on Sun, 25th Nov 2007 2:46 am

    12. Sarbarth added as a friend

    anyone feel free to add me and ill add you back

    http://soulbleed662.stumbleupon.com/

  12. Michael Cruz on Sat, 1st Dec 2007 2:28 pm

    13. thanks for this article. I had self stumbled my humble blog with only the intention of trying to get reactions so I could improve my posts….little did I know that it would lead to what seems to be getting banned from stumble….Im anxious to try what was posted here. I can understand the fear of trying to use stumble as a way to get out spam,

  13. Ethan Christ on Tue, 4th Dec 2007 12:01 am

    14. Yes, StumbleUpon is a great thing. I wrote my own post about my success with StumbleUpon. The traffic spike has been going on for 8 days strong now!

  14. Alex Gogan on Sat, 8th Dec 2007 11:11 am

    15. Excellent post (will be digging and stumbling this in a moment right after I click “Post Comment” >:

  15. Collin LaHay on Sat, 8th Dec 2007 11:54 am

    16. @Alex: Thanks, any blogroll links are greatly appreciated. =)

  16. Haroon Dot In on Tue, 11th Dec 2007 3:08 am

    17. Its nice to see you also one of those who like DP’s forums.
    And this trick really works i have used it many times.

    Haroon

  17. Use Controversy to Increase Website Traffic on Wed, 26th Dec 2007 10:54 pm

    18. [...] to social networking sites (Stumbleupon, Mixx, [...]

  18. StumbleAds Case Study | Mixed Market Arts on Sat, 29th Dec 2007 6:31 am

    19. [...] of the free Stumbleupon toolbar. I have always received ample amounts of free traffic from the use and abuse Stumbleupon technique, but I have never tested the paid version until now. I decided to do a $60 test run to see what [...]

  19. Improve your Alexa rank with free these Alexa rank tips | Make Money Blogging on Thu, 24th Jan 2008 2:13 pm

    20. [...] Start a stumble exchange thread in the freebies thread. This will also help bring lots of traffic to your blog. If you want more tips to build traffic with this, read my post on How to Use and Abuse Stumbleupon [...]

  20. Leandro on Fri, 25th Jan 2008 5:57 am

    21. nice post. i

  21. Francois Harris on Wed, 30th Jan 2008 10:20 am

    22. Hey, nice post man, I wasn’t fully aware of the amount of friends needed to see a decent traffic spike. I have been linking to loads of sites by other bookmarking and social networking sites too. I have a nice list of my profile pages on my blog (http://blog.sa-nethost.com/my-.....-pages.htm). If you or anyone ‘friends’ me, I will gladly participate in a mutual ‘link love fest’!
    As I said, nice post….

  22. How to enslave StumbleUpon to do your bidding on Wed, 30th Jan 2008 10:28 am

    23. [...] a post I really liked, and apparently John did to as it was one of his recommended articles, about using StumbleUpon to bring in traffic to your site. While the traffic will likely come in spikes if you blog on a regular basis you can build up a [...]

  23. Living Off Dividends on Wed, 30th Jan 2008 2:46 pm

    24. great post.

    thanks for sharing this info

  24. Living Off Dividends on Wed, 30th Jan 2008 2:47 pm

    25. btw, I stumbled it!

  25. Austin on Thu, 31st Jan 2008 3:57 am

    26. Wow, great post! Thanks for the info.

  26. paulette on Thu, 31st Jan 2008 10:59 am

    27. Thanks for the info. I have learned something from you

  27. Manav on Fri, 1st Feb 2008 7:52 am

    28. Great post, very educating, liked it a lot.

  28. Keyword Removed on Tue, 12th Feb 2008 11:16 pm

    29. I would advice anybody who has a website to use stumbleup. The site has given me so much traffic at some point i wanted to unstumble an article someone had stumbled because the huge traffic i got from stumbleupon was eating up all my band width.
    I went from an average of 50 visits a day to 6000 visits thru stumbleupon. I didn

  29. Aris on Sat, 23rd Feb 2008 11:00 pm

    30. Just to let you know of a new SU exchange website, which is StumbleUdon.com (not a typo: UDON, not UPON)

    The exchanges are automatic :)

  30. Eugene walker on Tue, 11th Mar 2008 2:34 am

    31. Hi there

    Great article

    Feel free to add me as a friend and I will return the favour!

    http://planetofrock.stumbleupon.com/

  31. KG Lew on Sun, 13th Apr 2008 3:29 pm

    32. great post.. it is true that there are a lot of advantages to using stumbleupon! I like the fact that I can target my viewers with tags…

  32. max on Fri, 18th Apr 2008 6:53 pm

    33. StumbleUpon has sent some traffic my way, but I’m working on different formulas to write some truly viral posts. Hopefully I’ll hit the right chord and get a successful linkbait create.

  33. David from PPC on Tue, 10th Jun 2008 12:22 am

    34. Awesome post on how to game on of the major players. Thanks for the tips, am looking forward to more like this!

  34. Ibrahim Hussein on Thu, 19th Jun 2008 2:26 pm

    35. thats no possible anymore, DP new rules forbids you to do that …

    Any other good forums that allows you to do so ??

  35. TheAnand on Sat, 21st Jun 2008 6:58 pm

    36. I would like to introduce you to StumbleCult.com which is a advanced version of getting seed stumbles to your site.

    http://www.stumblecult.com is the url and now they have a promo of getting some 30 credits free.

  36. Julie on Sun, 22nd Jun 2008 4:53 am

    37. I will have a try. Thanks for this piece of advice

  37. Julie on Wed, 2nd Jul 2008 6:23 am

    38. It works!!!! I really appreciate your pointers

  38. Internet Age on Tue, 22nd Jul 2008 12:47 am

    39. StumbleUpon definitely drives traffic to one’s pages. Getting conversions out of the traffic is the challenge here. I can not dispute the efficacy of StumbleUpon as a traffic generating tool though.

  39. Jason X on Sun, 17th Aug 2008 9:01 pm

    40. Good tips about Stumbleupon.

  40. Examination on Wed, 12th Nov 2008 11:45 am

    41. Abuse stumbleupon? I just know that.

  41. AwakeBlogger on Sat, 15th Nov 2008 5:49 pm

    42. You wrote “9. StumbleUpon will not let you stumble your own site with hundreds of pages, until you stumble 9 other pages. With the technique shown in #8, for every 9 stumbles you make on blogs about your own, you will be allowed to stumble another one of your own pages.”

    Do you know this 9:1 ratio for sure? Where do you know this from?

    The problem I have is that all my recent submissions receive no traffic anymore. May this be the reason?

  42. Ari Lestariono on Fri, 28th Nov 2008 5:27 am

    43. Thank you so much for the tips.I think SU will likely can give you massive traffic, what about digg, can anyone share their success story and how to generate traffic from digg, i heard if you manage to digg more you will get digg effect that can bring you millions of traffic.Need your reply in this forum .Thanks in advance

  43. Erwin Tan on Thu, 4th Dec 2008 11:02 am

    44. Awesome post.. One of the best I’ve read about stumbleupon.

    Thanks!

  44. Ari Lestariono on Sun, 7th Dec 2008 9:11 am

    45. good post article

    http://arilestariono.stumbleupon.com/

    pls stumble guys, and i will return the favors ASAP!

    thx in advance

  45. iCoreVirtualSandboxing on Thu, 14th May 2009 6:40 am

    46. Great article!
    thanks!

  46. slym on Tue, 23rd Jun 2009 1:26 am

    47. This is really one of the finest and well written material on the topic and i am really impressed. I will experiment it on my site TechZee, hope i will be benefitted by the technique. You can see, I have already stumbled your page.

  47. slym on Tue, 23rd Jun 2009 1:28 am

    48. I really liked this article and stumbled it as well

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