Having noticed StumbleUpon come up regularly in my referrer stats I decided to try and increase the amount of StumbleUpon traffic for this blog. A traffic stats graph from SEOmoz shows StumbleUpon’s fantastic ability to drive traffic, the amount of referrals I have been receiving recently are around 50-100 visits a day which I hope will continue to improve.

What is StumbleUpon?
Social bookmarking websites such as Digg and Del.ico.us are an excellent method of gaining large quantities of traffic in a short space of time but the concept of StumbleUpon is slightly different. StumbleUpon has over a million users and generally refers a lower (but still significant) amount of traffic at a more consistent rate, whereas sites like Digg can send thousands of hits in the space of a few days for promoted stories which have made the frontpage.

How does StumbleUpon work?
Here is the definition of how StumbleUpon works but basically instead of listing popular stories on the homepage StumbleUpon works by downloading a toolbar which allows you to rate a website as thumbs up or down and view relevant websites (by clicking Stumble!) based on your own preferences.

StumbleUpon Toolbar

To begin receiving traffic from StumbleUpon you must have at least one of your webpages submitted. You can add this yourself by downloading the toolbar and browsing to your website, selecting the thumbs up ‘I like it!’ button will add this page to StumbleUpon.

How to increase StumbleUpon traffic?
The main methods I have found to improve StumbleUpon traffic have been:

• Rating websites
  By getting involved in the community and rating some of the websites I visit helps my website appear for StumbleUpon users who have similar interests to my own, therefore they will be more likely to rate my site with a thumbs up! StumbleUpon is time-based, although not to the same extent as Digg, which means the more votes you can get in a short period of time the more traffic you will receive.
• Adding friends
  By adding friends you will increase the amount of users who will see your newly added webpages, making them more likely to give your site the thumbs up.
• Submit new webpages
  Once I have created a new blog post for example I will submit the URL to StumbleUpon using the toolbar, it is perfectly fine to promote your own website providing you don’t overdo it. This will help to increase the amount of my webpages I have present in the StumbleUpon database and improve the likelihood of my site being ‘stumbled upon’.
• Carefully selecting topic titles
  It is important to categorise webpages carefully to ensure that it will be displayed to relevant users.
• Adding multiple tags
  By using multiple tags you can help to attract a wide range of users and by keeping these as relevant to the content as possible will help to keep the traffic targeted.