StumbleUpon is one of those places where bloggers go for promoting their stuff. There’s usually a mixed feeling about StumbleUpon. Some bloggers absolutely want it for traffic while some other absolutely don’t want it.
Mostly the latter is the case because StumbleUpon is known to create a lot of bounces on any blog. StumbleUpon is not a place where most people stop and look. It is a portal of highly busy people, or I might even call, impatient people; myself included.
With StumbleUpon, everyone is in a hurry with just a curious eye to see if something catches their attention; if nothing does, press, press and press the Stumble button, that’s it!
So what does it mean to your blog in terms of bounce rate?
Bounce rate is nothing but a measure of how many people just rush out of your site out of those who come in to visit your site. Let’s say someone searched for “bicycles” and your page came up on first page on Google for this search term.
So that person clicks through your link and lands in your blog, just to find out that your blog is about “chocolates” and it has nothing to do with “bicycles”. Not even a bicycle with a brand name “chocolate”.
So he/she just pushes the back button and exits your site. He did not visit any other page except the page where he landed.
This is just one example of a cause for visitor bouncing, there can be more, like poor design, too much clutter, improper or too confusing navigation, irrelevant content, boring content, copied content and whatever you can think of.
With Stumble Upon, its much more easier to do the bounce because the brain is just at the perfect stage. All we do is press the Stumble button once we’re in the job.
So if it takes less than 10 seconds for a visitor to get annoyed and push the back button in normal scenario, it will take less than 5 seconds to do the same while stumbling through your content via Stumbleupon.
So the chance that an average visitor will simply jump off is so high while they are finding your site through StumbleUpon.
Well, what you need to do in order to keep your StumbleUpon visitors is a story for another post. This post is apparently not about that. This is about how you can use StumbleUpon to its fullest so that you can suck every possible way of achieving blogging success through it.
Let me now dive in.
Traffic from Stumbleupon
Quite ironical to what I just said in the intro, StumbleUpon can be a great source of targeted traffic. Even though chances are the most people will bounce off (thus increasing your blog’s bounce rate), its your responsibility to make your blog’s content and design eye catching and unique in order to make those stumblers stick to it.
In order to do so you need to know what affects stumblers the most. In order to know that you need to use Stumbleupon yourself and see what makes you stick to a website and what makes you to press that Stumble button quite fast.
You know its all about grabbing the stumbler’s attention and prove useful to them in a matter of seconds. One common mistake (or misused potential, I would say) is to submit your blog’s homepage to StumbleUpon.
Your blog’s homepage is dynamic (unless you have a static page) and it updates with your current blog posts. So you don’t know if its a killer post or an announcement post that smiles at a stumbler at a given time.
In order to demonstrate that you are useful (in a highly relevant way to what the stumbler is looking at - say through his/her keyword interest) you need to submit a specific post or a useful page to Stumbleupon.
But make sure that you don’t submit and like only pages from your own domain. If you are liking and stumbling only your own stuff, people will most likely never find what you discover!
Find new blogs (and connections)
Well, I was recently telling you about the importance of Alexa links (not the Alexa rank) and 2 easy-peasy ways to increase yours. Stumbleupon comes to picture here.
If you remember my post about Alexa links (or if you haven’t read it, please go ahead and read it when you finish this post), the key thing is to find new blogs and comment on them.
The more blogs you comment on, the more backlinks from new domains you get (compared to commenting on the same blogs again and again).
Finding new blogs (relevant to your niche or any particular niche you are looking at) is very handy and easy with Stumbleupon. Just feed in your interests (keywords) and start stumbling.
Try it for yourself and see how many new potential blogs you can find to comment on.
The most important thing here is that, it is not just about commenting for backlinks. You get to know and connect with a lot of new bloggers (and their community). Hence it is a nice way of building up connections and hence readership.
Blog post ideas
Stumbleupon is undoubtedly a great place for generating blog post ideas. Instead of subscribing to a handful of blogs in your niche and reading them again and again, you can find new blogs and fresh information with Stumbleupon.
Although, I absolutely don’t complain about reading high quality blogs on which you are a regular reader/commenter, sometimes you need fresh thoughts and voice to kindle your brain for something new.
Stumbleupon is the right place for that since you never know what you will stumble upon. You may get some fantastic “Oh what?” kinda cool stuff there. You may find some interesting videos and podcasts which might give you some new sparks and so on.
Since there is variety over there, there is much potential.
Oh but Stumbleupon can be distracting…..
I know, I know. The internet is itself a distracting place. And while I started to use Stumbleupon, I got sidetracked a lot.
Sometimes you come across a cool video or a puzzle, you start watching the video or solving the puzzle and when one ends the other begins and this can go on and on.
You may also accidentally stumble upon some games or funny pieces which you can share with your followers and friends and then you might get stuck either on the place you found the funny piece or at the social media where you get so many interesting comments on that share.
Well, you need a bit of discipline and a sense of awareness to get the most out of Stumbleupon and this is totally possible. It is indeed a no-brainer.
I will come up with more tips on how to use Stumbleupon without getting distracted. Until then start stumbling, find new connections, find new blog post ideas and get loads of Stumbleupon traffic.
If you find this post useful don’t forget to share it so that others can make use of it too!
