Getting the most out of StumbleUpon

If you've been blogging for a little while, you may have experienced something like this:  You log into your blog on a normal day, expecting to see what you always see.  Instead, there's a huge spike in traffic, two or three times your normal pageviews level!  You click to find out more, and there it is — you've been Stumbled!

This happened to me a few times in the early days of my blog, bringing over 1,000 visitors on certain days, when I was used to averaging only a few hundred.  Shocked at the increase in pageviews, I did a little research to find out what StumbleUpon was all about, and here's what I found.

What's StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site, not unlike Digg.  Users rate and review webpages, share them with friends, and do whatever else it is that social bookmarkers do.  But what makes StumbleUpon different is the "Stumble" button, which users click to be magically whisked away to new webpages that StumbleUpon recommends based on the user's interests.  The more your blog post gets the thumbs-up from StumbleUpon users, the more likely it is that users who are "Stumbling" will be directed to your blog.

Example: Say you write a list post about the ten most unhealthy Thanksgiving dishes.  A reader submits it to StumbleUpon with a "thumbs-up" rating, so now your post is on StumbleUpon's radar.  They might send a little traffic your way, and if more users thumb you up, you get even more traffic.  In this way, StumbleUpon facilitates viral spreading of posts that deserve it!

How can you use StumbleUpon to get more traffic?

Though it's not known exactly what information StumbleUpon uses to determine how much traffic to send to different pages, there seems to be a concensus on some basic principles.

• StumbleUpon users are more likely to enjoy (and Stumble) bits of content that are unique and quickly digested. Lists, videos, recipes, how-to's.  Individual posts are far more likely to be Stumbled than your blog homepage.
• Don't spam! Submitting and thumbing-up your own posts to StumbleUpon, though ok in moderation, isn't something you should do very often, especially not in the beginning.  StumbleUpon does its best to penalize spammers, so submitting your own stuff could actually hurt you.
• Add StumbleUpon buttons to your blog makes it easy for readers to submit and thumb-up your posts.
• Participate in StumbleUpon. Create an account (it's free), tell them your interests, and start Stumbling, rating, and reviewing pages.  Note: you don't have to download the toolbar in order to use StumbleUpon; I didn't.
• Have a big StumbleUpon network!

It's this last point that I'm most excited about.  I've tried to find friends on StumbleUpon in the past, but unfortunately, there aren't nearly as many people on StumbleUpon as there are on, say, Twitter or Facebook.  But that's where Health Blog Helper comes in.

How Health Blog Helper can help

Thanks to our new blogroll, we have place where we can all share our StumbleUpon names and use it to "friend" (subscribe to) each other on StumbleUpon.  Once we're all on there, we can share posts that we think are Stumble-worthy, give each other some thumbs-ups, and increase traffic to all of our best stuff!

So here's what I'm hoping you'll do. Sign up for a free StumbleUpon account and add your StumbleUpon username to our blogroll. (Add your blog as well if you haven't done that yet!)  Then use the blogroll to find other healthy lifestyle bloggers on StumbleUpon and "subscribe" to them.  Soon enough, we'll have a healthy-blogger pack, lots of traffic to our blogs, and we'll all live happily ever after.

Need your first friends?  My StumbleUpon name is NoMeatAthlete.  Alison is MamasWeeds.