StumbleUpon

Transcript of Lid’s report from Tech Talk Episode 11/2008  

I’ve been having a chat with a few people recently about StumbleUpon, and most people seem to think that it’s a bookmarking site.  While it can be used to store and tag your favorite sites and pages – much like the original bookmarking site del.icio.us – it can be so much more than just being a place to dump all the junk from your favorite’s folder.

StumbleUpon is a social network; a website that gives its users a new way to experience the Web; one that is largely based on a recommendation system.

I’m sure you’ve seen the ’stumble’ button at the bottom of blog posts, usually alongside the Digg and Reddit buttons.

When you ‘Stumble’ a post, you are adding it to the StumbleUpon database.  By giving it a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’, you are telling the StumbleUpon community what you really think about that post or website.

When you thumb something up it is automatically added to your StumbleUpon list of ‘liked’ pages and this is why a lot of people use it a bookmarking tool.

But, adding content is only one way to use StumbleUpon; the other is to receive content.

Instead of searching for specific topics using search engines, Stumble Upon users tag the subjects they are interested in and then surf that topic ‘channel’ of the web.

Stumbleupon makes it easy by providing a browser plugin for both Internet Explorer and Firefox that, randomly takes you, with a click of the Stumble button, to sites that fall under your selected tags.

So, why should you give StumbleUpon a go?

Because StumbleUpon is known for its ability to send massive amounts of traffic, from all over the world, to websites; it is an incredibly powerful tool if you are trying to establish a following for your blog, website, brand or product.

Once your content is in there, other stumblers will – well – stumble across it, and it if is good enough, useful enough, they’ll thumb it up and link to it. It’s a gentle traffic pusher, consistent and continuous, sending hundreds or thousands of visitors a day.  And continuous is important, because while hitting front page of Digg can send you tens if not hundreds of thousands of visitors over a few days, and cause your server to crash under the load, it is a short lived spike that does not continue to send you traffic.

How many visitors can I get from Stumble Upon?

I’ve been stumbling for nearly a year, but originally I used it as a bookmarking site, without knowing about its other cool features.  More recently though, I’ve begun adding friends, stumbling other peoples sites, and other people have stumbled my posts.  In the last month, two posts on blogwell were stumbled, and they now bring in between 100 – 6000 unique visitors daily – over the past 30 days, blogwell has had 97,000 visitors from StumbleUpon alone.

So if you’re interested in getting to know StumbleUpon, visit the site, join and download the toolbar, which is available for both IE and Firefox, install it and start setting up your StumbleUpon homepage.

Before you add your site, go to the reviews page to see whether it’s already been listed – you never know, someone may have stumbled some of your stuff.  If not, start by going to your sites homepage and clicking the blue ‘thumbs up’ symbol that has ‘I like it!’ next to it – it’ll turn green, to show that you have now stumbled.

This should open up a panel that allows you to write a short description about your site and tag it with specific keywords – and this is part of the trick – make sure that you tag each page well so that StumbleUpon sends other stumblers that have similar tags to visit you.

While it is not considered good practice to stumble your own material, if you’ve created a great post that just begs to be promoted, ask a friend to submit it for you, or if you’ve been thumbing up other people’s content and contributing to the StumbleUpon community for a while, it’s okay to stumble your own post on occasion.

If you truly want to benefit from StumbleUpon, take Muhammad’s advice from a few weeks ago.  Get to know the community, check out and join the groups that most interest you, tag your favorite subjects, and make sure you click the thumbs up button in your toolbar every time you come across an amazing site, it only takes a few seconds.

If you want a more in depth guide to StumbleUpon, check out: A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon on Dosh Dosh

If you enjoyed hearing about StumbleUpon, or have any other social media questions, please e-mail lid at techtalkradio dot com dot au – and I’ll do my best to hunt down the answer