How to Use StumbleUpon to Attract Website Visitors

While StumbleUpon is a very well known social bookmarking website, a great variety of people and businesses are utilising this valuable Internet marketing application to maximise their internet traffic.

StumbleUpon, owned and operated by eBay, is used both as a search engine and a social bookmarking site to rate websites, web pages, online video clips, audio files and images. Those who register with StumbleUpon (it’s free) can submit ratings for websites they visited.

Using StumbleUpon can easily help your website attract visitors. The more individuals who stumble upon your site and enjoy it, the higher your ranking climbs. A high ranking means even greater traffic to your site from StumbleUpon members and beyond. StumbleUpon can be even more valuable to your website if visitors leave a short review about your site along with their rating. There’s massive traffic potential involved with StumbleUpon, which presently has almost 8 million members, and it’s growing fast.

Website owners who use StumbleUpon have noticed an immediate increase in their website traffic. Those who track traffic diligently say StumbleUpon generates more clicks to their site than any other search engine. It can make a difference in their search engine ranking as well.

But the most important aspect for realizing success is having great content available on your website. It needs to be informational or educational, providing the reader with something of value. If you are selling products or services, include informational content on your website that speaks to a trend in the industry, a new finding, or current events that have a connection to your product or service. At the moment, StumbleUpon has more than 500 different topics. Use these categories to create content that meets the personal preferences and interests of StumbleUpon members.

To retain the new visitors that StumbleUpon brings to your website, add feeds, email subscriptions, contests, or special offers to your website to encourage StumbleUpon members to become long-time customers.

E-commerce websites can also benefit from StumbleUpon if it’s creatively designed or has an intriguing way of branding a product. The social aspect of StumbleUpon will enhance the exposure of your site. It’s viral marketing at its best.

StumbleUpon can also help your website gain more traffic through its buttons. You can add a button to your website and encourage your visitors to submit your content to StumbleUpon. It’s a free and easy way to spread the word about your site.

If you’re looking to enhance your website’s presence, it’s time to StumbleUpon a new marketing tool and give it a try for yourself.

Adam Toren, Co-Founder of Young Entrepreneur, specializes in developing the profitability of struggling businesses with a specialised and ‘bottom line’ approach. Adam, along with his brother, have created, purchased and sold a variety of companies over the years. At the moment, they own and manage a highly successful publishing company and several dedicated online enterprises.

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StumbleUpon Exposed - A simple and easy to read 20 page guide explaining the ins and outs of StumbleUpon.

Latest Features from Digg and StumbleUpon

Although news outlets continually bring reports about new features on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, there is actually a lot happening with social aggregation sites as well. To catch us up to speed, Brent Csutoras gave WebProNews a rundown of the latest news from both Digg and StumbleUpon.

First of all, Digg has a new trending feature that allows users to be more involved in the actual voting process. Since people are always complaining about the items that reach the front page, Digg is incorporating this new feature to give users more of an opportunity to vote on a particular item.

On Digg’s homepage, the feature will display an item that is close to being moved to the front page and give users 10 minutes to vote to move it or not. After the 10 minutes are up, the feature will show whether or not the item was moved.

StumbleUpon has also seen some drastic changes over the last several months. Earlier this year, the company broke away from eBay and is currently being run by its original founders. Since becoming independent again, StumbleUpon revamped its design, added more content to its homepage, and essentially, tried to become more like the other social sites.

Most recently, the site has made an attempt to focus on the social profile. Csutoras however, does not welcome this change. For him, StumbleUpon was different from the other social sites. He relied on StumbleUpon for finding really unbiased and good content from anyone. But now, the content is heavily dependent upon the social group that recommended it, much like Facebook and Twitter.

“It does put an extra click or two between you and content,” he said.

All these changes are currently in beta and Csutoras is quick to point out that StumbleUpon is very good about listening to user feedback.

What are your thoughts on the new features from Digg and StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon: New URL Shortener promises More Content Exposure

URL shorteners have grown increasingly valuable as a result of sites such as Twitter and Facebook becoming popular. They allow users to share long links across Twitter, Facebook, email, and other platforms. Up to this point, TinyURL and Bit.ly have been the most popular. However, StumbleUpon announced its own shortened url called Su.pr.

So what makes Su.pr different from the others? Su.pr is designed for publishers and allows them to broadcast their content across Facebook and Twitter (for now) as well as StumbleUpon. The free syndication tool also tells publishers the best time to post their content and lets them see real-time analytics on clicks, tweets, and traffic associated with posts.

Katie Sween, the Head of Marketing at StumbleUpon says the main reason Su.pr is different from the other url shorteners is because:

“…We [StumbleUpon] really are focused around helping the best content get more exposure… so the traffic element really is one of the biggest differentiators between us and some of the other shortened url services.”

Social media expert Brent Csutoras says the service really is super and claims it is, “…one of the most feature filled shorteners to date.”

StumbleUpon granted WebProNews 250 invite accounts to Su.pr. So, if you would like to try out the free service before it goes into public beta, you can enter: suprwebpro into the homepage of Su.pr. Try it out and let us know what you think.

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