StumbleUpon for your business

At first glance, StumbleUpon doesn’t seem like it’s much use for the average business owner. However, it can be insanely useful if you now how to leverage it and can drive a lot of traffic.  I personally get a lot of quality readers and I’ve heard many other friends who get most of their traffic from this site.  You will need to make sure that you aren’t just spamming, though, since StumbleUpon users are very aware of this and tend to give a thumbs down to anyone who has repeatedly submitted their own website or who stumbles content of obviously poor quality.

What else can you do to make sure that your business is getting noticed on StumbleUpon?

Set up a blog. This allows you to have fresh content on a continual basis for new stumbles. After all, each person can only give your webpage one thumbs up, but if you are constantly turning out great content, then you will be able to get the same people, fans, stumbling your content over and over.

Create quality content. Of course, if you have nothing of importance to blog about, no one will be giving you any thumbs up. That means your blog has to be full of interesting and useful information  . . . but truth be told, it should be that even if you aren’t looking for traffic from SU. Make sure that each post is crafted to give something to the reader, NOT just to get your keywords out there.  This is a very common mistake that people tend to make when starting a business blog. Rather than turn it into something useful, they try to make it search engine friendly and forget to write for human beings.

With StumbleUpon, what you write is very important since it makes all the difference as to whether people will like it or not. If they don’t, you won’t get any stumbles.

Finally, you need to network. Like other social media sites, StumbleUpon is designed for connecting with others. You should befriend people who are interested in specific niches that also interest you, as well as people who might be interested in your products.

Just having friends isn’t enough though. You’ll need to go stumble some of their pages, leave comments for them and make sure that you share websites of interest with them when you find something they might be interested in. This is the social part of the network. Without the connections, you can only bookmark your own stuff and no one else will care or give it a thumbs up. However, having friends means that your blog can easily be stumbled over and over, driving traffic and views up. It has to be worth seeing, though.

All of these pieces tie in together. You have to have friends, but you also need great content if you want those friends to stick around and stumble you. Without the blog it is much more difficult to build up the levels of traffic that you want for your business website. Once you have all the pieces of the puzzle, you will begin to see success.

What else works for you to bring good traffic and quality readers?