StumbleUpon is invaluable when it comes to driving traffic to your website or other great content on the web. For this reason any business owner that is serious about driving traffic to their website must consider how to get the best from StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking and rating site where people can “stumble” their favorite web pages, write reviews and share their discoveries with their followers. Many people use StumbleUpon to:

• organize their favorites websites into a bookmark.
• drive traffic to a specific website or information on the internet
• share their favorite websites with their friends and colleagues.

After creating your StumbleUpon account and setting up a complete profile (this is very important), the next thing is to invite your friends to follow you. Using relevant tools in your StumbleUpon dashboard, you can then invite your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail to follow you. You can also follow a random selection of StumbleUpon users based on the topics you like in common. There are also groups that you can follow.

One of the easiest ways to use StumbleUpon is through the StumbleUpon toolbar which you can down as a browser add-on. StumbleUpon’s ‘Thumb’s Up’ button is similar to a Facebook Like. By clicking it, you are telling StumbleUpon that you give that post your vote. Whilst there’s nothing wrong in submitting your own content and giving it a ‘thumb’s up’ you most do so sparingly. So many users tend to follow the 10% rule i.e. for every 10 contents that you thumb up, only 1 must be your own content.

The best way to get others to share your content on StumbleUpon is to only stumble great content in the first place. When you stumble a content, you need to provide a detailed review for each content you stumble. The first review is critical for the traffic volume a page might get. The new discovery will only enter the StumbleUpon queue of pages shown to the StumbleUpon community if it has a review. Not reviewing your contents only condemns the page you discover to a slow death, especially if no other stumblers after you bother to write a review. Chances are, if you don’t write a review, no other stumbler will ever see that page.

Giving genuine and constructive reviews and comments for other people content is the best way to get any benefit from using this website. The more you interact with other users content, the greater the likelihood for your content to also be shared to.

If you don’t have many followers with whom you can share your content, you can opt for the paid advertising on StumbleUpon. Be warned though that advertising on StumbleUpon can be very expensive and often not as effective as advertising on other social media platforms. So your best bet is to rake up as many followers as possible by sharing great content with them that would attract others to follow you.

StumbleUpon is a very popular – and somewhat complex – social bookmarking site. So take the time to study all the features of the site before you start Stumbling. Also remember to only stumble great content. If you need to, then engage the services of an internet marketing consultant to help you get the best from StumbleUpon for your business.

Have more questions on how to get the best from StumbleUpon for your business? Then contact us and we’ll be glad help. Think this post will be useful to your friends? Please consider sharing it with them using the relevant buttons below.