While new social media bookmarking sites like Pinterest are popular nowadays, StumbleUpon secretly moves up its sleeve.

1. Promoting Your Content on Stumble Upon
While new social media bookmarking sites like Pinterest are popular nowadays, StumbleUpon
secretly moves up its sleeve. If you’ve never used StumbleUpon, it behaves almost like a
Chatroulette for content.
Users can pick a topic (but don’t have to) and click “Stumble” to be served up an article or even
just a regular page on the web. StumbleUpon does not crawl sites — the only way a web page is
qualified to be “stumbled” is if a StumbleUpon user first submits it. That means you must be
actively involved to get your content into the game.
It drives nearly 50% of US social media traffic, according to data taken by StatCounter. The site
may have only 20 million users compared to Facebook’s 800 million, but the difference is that
StumbleUpon is a mecca for consuming content. It’s what users have in mind when they enter the
site. The internal data reported by StumbleUpon shows 1.2 billion total referrals every month and
an average of 300 “stumbles” each month per user.
So, how can you optimize your content to win in this crowd? Here are some tips that will get your
content exposure as well as quality time with an interested audience.
Install Badge on Your Site
The StumbleUpon badge looks just like the “Tweet” or “Pin it” button, and it enables your site to
get fed into the index. Sites see a 20-25% lift in traffic from StumbleUpon once they’ve added the
badge. As you can see, Mashable includes the StumbleUpon badge on every article.
Interact With the Community
The pages StumbleUpon serves to each user are selected based on both an interest graph and a
social graph. Add friends and “stumble” relevant and interesting sites.
StumbleUpon uses a thumbs-up, thumbs-down system to cater content to a user’s preferences,
but also measures what StumbleUpon friends he “trusts” based on which articles he like — so, that
will influence what a user sees. Having a legacy or reputation inside the StumbleUpon network
ensures that the content you inject into the ecosystem will be found.
Get on the Waitlist for Channels
Channels is a beta product from StumbleUpon to be released in a few months. It allows users to
follow or subscribe to content sites. The sooner your brand signs up, the sooner it can get started
building its distribution network on StumbleUpon. Microsoft, CNN and Wired are just a few brands
and sites already participating in Channels.
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2. Try Out Paid Discovery
AOL used paid discovery to grow new readership and increase time spend with its content.
With paid discovery, each URL is only served to people with interest in topics you choose, and
brands pay 10 cents per view (but the brand doesn’t pay if a user leaves in under 5 seconds).
StumbleUpon provides data, including sharing rates and time spent on a piece of content.
Premium paid discovery is also offered at 25 cents per visit — with this feature, the promoted URL
is pushed to the front of the line — so brands pay more, but they’re guaranteed to get lots of
views in a short time frame.
Digital Organics: Web Design Sunshine Coast - 1/102 Howard Street, Nambour, QLD 4560 T 617 5476 3800, SEO Sunshine Coast