Using Stumble Upon to Bring Traffic to Your Site

So you've built a nice site with good content. Now you've got to find a way to get people to your site. After all, this isn't like the movie Field of Dreams. If you build it....they won't necessarily come. You've got to help them find your site.

Fortunately it's not as difficult and costly as traditional advertising. You don't have to buy a 1/4 page ad in a news publication and you don't have to buy a 30 second spot on the TV network. You can do these things if you've got a large advertising budget. Of course if you've got that kind of money you could probably hire someone to teach you the things we'll share in this blog!

With the internet you have several ways to get traffic. We've already mentioned traditional forms of advertising. You also purchase advertising from Search Engine's such as Google's Adwords. With search engine advertising you pay for your ads when internet users click on your ads when they are shown during a Search Engine Search. Another way to get traffic is to share links with other sites, post on other website forums (including your links), or posting your content on news aggregator sites.

One of the best news aggregator sites is called StumbleUpon. This is an awesome site with millions of users. Stumble Upon works like this. Registered Users submit websites to Stumble Upon with URL of the site along with a brief description and a few tags (search keywords or categories) which these websites belong in. Members of Stumble Upon click on a button which brings up various websites in the category they have selected. If the user likes the site they give it a "thumbs up". If they don't like the site they give it a "thumbs down".

The beauty of Stumble Upon is that there are millions of users who browse this site regularly. In other words, if you're site is "posted" on Stumble Upon, you have access to this large base of consumers. If your site gets recommended by a Stumble Upon User it gets higher ranking by the StumbleUpon site. This means your site will be displayed more often when users search for sites relating to your tags.

This is one of the BEST ways to bring traffic to your site. Go to StumbleUpon, register, and start Stumbling sites of interest. If you add StumbleUpon to your web browser toolbar (The Toolbar on the top of your Internet browser) you can go to your site or blog and click on the "Thumbs Up" icon. If your site has not been submitted before you will be prompted to add the URL (web address) of your site and a title/description of the site you've 'Stumbled Upon'. Congratulations, you'll see traffic increase immediately if your site has an value. When you get a good feel for how the site works you can also find other sites which could be of benefit to your own website users. Stumble Upon is a great resource for finding sites of interest in categories you desire.

This is just one way of getting traffic. It works. On our site our traffic increased 30% in the first month we discovered StumbleUpon. We quickly realized the importance of using sites like StumbleUpon, MySpace, Facebook, etc. to reach an established audience with relative ease. The best part is....this is free!!!

It's quite gratifying to view your website statistics and see where visitors came to your site as a result of your efforts to reach out to these established networks. Why not use a free portal to "get the word out" on your site or blog? It's a win, win. They get good content and you get traffic.