I’ve been a professional blogger for five years now, and I just love doing it. I get to write about topics that interest me the most and share information and opinions on these subjects with millions of readers around the world. Over the years I have found many different ways of driving traffic to my blogs, but the one tactic that I know many other bloggers either only utilize a little or sometimes not at all is a little social media tool called StumbleUpon.
What’s a StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking tool that web surfers use to bookmark blogs, websites, and videos all across the Internet and then share them with their friends and people who are following them. It’s a fairly simple and effective way to share interesting web content with other people who you know.
Just being social
If you’re not too familiar with many of the social media tools all your friends are talking about, that’s OK because using StumbleUpon is one of the easier ways to begin using social media as a tool. The idea behind StumbleUpon is simple. After you sign up all you have to do is just hit that “stumble” button and you’re off to the races—so to speak.
You’ll be taken to different websites, blogs, and videos, and if you stumble upon something that you find interesting then all you have to do is give it a “thumbs up” with the appropriate icon. You can also either give the page a thumbs down or just hit that stumble button again and you’re whisked away to another page.
The stumble strategy
So now that you’ve gotten a little social, it’s time to begin that all-important strategy to get traffic to your blog. When you stumble a page and find a page that interests you, you can write a short review about what you like about the page and recommend it. Contact the page’s owner or someone who “liked” the same page.
Start a conversation. This is the way to begin to “seed” your quality content virally through StumbleUpon’s vast network of over 15 million users. When people discover your contentby other people giving it a thumbs up, those are automatic pages views, and you may not be aware of this but, Google will take note if you have several web pages or blog posts getting several thousand hits a day.
Ask your network connections and friends to stumble
There’s nothing wrong with asking people in your network to help you out and stumble a few pages to get more of those page views that are important for getting your site more traffic. And don’t forget to enlist the help of friends and even family members to help get your pages noticed if they have StumbleUpon accounts.
Beyond the traffic
If you are a new blogger and you want to sell products or services through your blog, then you have to understand that traffic translates into monetized eyeballs. In other words, if your site has informative and interesting content, people will come back for more, and over time you have a great opportunity to earn a residual income from your blog. This is another benefit that is directly affected by some of the traffic that comes from StumbleUpon.
So take the plunge and start stumbling and before you know it you’ll see huge increases in the amounts of traffic that comes to your site, just for being a little social.
Lew N. is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch.
