If you’re new to blogging, you’re probably interested in learning how to attract more readers to your site. Many articles have been written by other bloggers but the most effective suggestion I can make is to submit your site to StumbleUpon. I ran across StumbleUpon last year, before I even started blogging.
The concept is unique, fun, and effective, both for the reader as it is for the blogger. Sign up for free at their site and install their toolbar on your browser. Choose the topics you’re interested in, and when you press the Stumble button in your toolbar, you’re taken to random site in your topics list. If you like the site, you press the ‘thumbs up’ button on the toolbar; if you don’t, you press the ‘thumbs down’ button. You can also submit other quality sites that haven’t been stumbled yet where they enter circulation for other Stumblers to discover. It works like a user voted playlist.
It’s difficult to find unique and interesting websites among the millions on the net, but StumbleUpon makes quick work of finding the best. I’ve bookmarked hundreds of fantastic sites I never would have found using a search engine. Oddly enough, I’d never thought to submit my own site to StumbleUpon.
My First StumbleUpon Experience
Last week, a submitted a post to Reddit. The results were decent - I got 95 hits in half an hour. I went out and came home and check my traffic a few hours later. Here’s what it looked like:
I received over 1000 hits in a few hours after a Reddit reader submitted my post to StumbleUpon. In the last few days, I’ve been receiving around 500-700 daily from other StumbleUpon submissions. Not bad, considering my blog is only a few months old and until now has only been receiving 30-50 hits each day! Not only was the traffic spike high in quantity, the quality was better too - the number of visitors returning to my blog since that day has increased over 1000%.
Topical news sites like Digg and Reddit are fine if you make the front page, but if you’re interested in increasing your online visibility with consistent daily returns, use StumbleUpon.