StumbleUpon – Are You Active On StumbleUpon?

Are you active on StumbleUpon? If your answer is no you could be missing out on a major source of referral traffic.

Which of the main Social Media platforms sends the most traffic to the rest of the internet? Have you assumed that it is Twitter or Facebook? Is it Linkedin? Youtube, surely? Maybe Google Plus, Tumblr, or Posterous? Well if you answered yes to any of them, you’d be wrong. In fact the answer is StumbleUpon. According to stats available from webtracking service Statscounter for the first half of August 2011, StumbleUpon accounted for over 50% of all referral traffic on the Web, comfortably beating Facebook, which accounts for almost 40% of referral traffic, into second place. The rest, including surprisingly Youtube and Twitter, come well behind with less than 4% each!

StumbleUpon often gets overlooked when it comes to deciding which Social Media platform or platforms to be active on and it is difficult to understand how just over 15 million users on StumbleUpon can drive more traffic than Facebook’s 750 million users. It also has it’s critics who state that most StumbleUpon users stay on the site for a minimal period of time. But there are also users who claim that they get all of their traffic from StumbleUpon and that it has been a great traffic generating tool.

Perhaps it’s supporters have achieved their success by understanding how StumbleUpon is structured. StumbleUpon’s own user guide stresses the importance of categorizing each site or link properly.

When you submit a site (which serves as a link on StumbleUpon to your page when listed) , one of the things you’re asked to specify is an interest. There are 4 main reasons why categorizing a site properly is very important:

1) Proper Distribution: The interest determines to whom we’re going to recommend a page. If you correctly categorized a recipe as “Food/Cooking” and StumbleUpon had 5 million users subscribed to this interest, there would be the potential to stumble it to all of them.

2) Keep Your Favorites Organized: If you like different genres of music or different sports and you submit a lot of interesting articles about them, categorizing them properly will help you find them easily in your own tag cloud. Make sure you keep those Bicycling, Tennis, Yoga and Running pages correctly categorized, instead of just submitting them to the more generic interest of Sports.

3) Get Thumbs Ups (And Not Thumb Downs!): By adding a page to the right category, the page gets the best potential ratings. Imagine if a page on cute animals is stumbled to someone who isn’t subscribed to Animals and is much more interested in tech and news articles. That page could easily be rated with a Thumbs Down, even though it may be a great stumble – just not the right one for that user.

4) Help Get Yourself Traffic To Your Site: If you own a site or a blog and submit articles from it to StumbleUpon, make sure they’re properly categorized! If it’s not in the right interest, people who stumble it may thumb it down just because it’s not what they were expecting to see. You want to avoid that as much as possible.

What cannot be denied is that StumbleUpon user numbers have been steadily growing – 500,000 new users signing up each month for most of this year. So why not put aside a few extra minutes to submit each new posting or site update for your business on StumbleUpon (it really is that straightforward to use), make sure you include a StumbleUpon button along with your Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus etc buttons and see for yourself if it really will generate you more traffic?

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