Archive for December, 2010

We’ve been stumbled. Ahhhhhhh, love it.

StumbleUpon is by far one of the absolute best traffic sources for any blog or website with the exception of search engine traffic from Google.

But first, let me tell you WHAT StumbleUpon IS then we can get into the WHY it is so fabulous.

StumbleUpon is all about social bookmarking (yes, just like Digg or del.icio.us). But the cool factor has to do with the slick toolbar that installs directly into your browser. What that means is that a stumbler (a StumbleUpon user) can mark any web site they happen to be browsing they can then give the site a “thumbs up” meaning “Like It” or a “thumbs down” meaning, um, yeah….the not so good “Don’t Like It.”

Here’s the formula. The more thumbs up your page gets, the more it’s served up to other stumblers on StumbleUpon which (obviously) leads to an increasing number of people who see your site – that’s a good thing! The alternative is that if a page gets too many thumbs down they are dropped out of StumbleUpon.

Now, here’s why StumbleUpon is so very fabulous. SumbleUpon has a unique algorithm that is different from Digg or del.icio.us. First of all you don’t have to land on the front page of StumbleUpon to get traffic. Popular pages and even not so popular pages are served up to new users everyday. So, a page that gets stumbled say two months ago will continue to send a steady stream of traffic because it’s still being seen by users.

I can testify that it works. This blog and the bestecostuff.com/blog (our lovely side gig) have both been stumbled and the traffic just keeps coming. As I said before…ahhhhh, love it!

Now, let’s make something clear. This traffic is link building traffic. Do not try to sell to stumblers (or any other social media users for that matter). It’s really bad form. Your information is getting stumbled because it is interesting, amusing and fabulously well-written. Stumblers aren’t looking for stuff to buy. They are looking for good information.

Now, those are the basics of StumbleUpon. There’s more, of course, there always is! Next time we’ll list out the must-have secret formula to StumbleUpon success – just kidding, I love throw in all those descriptive words. But we will list out some rules and a few hot tips to get you stumbling in the right direction.

Ahhhhhh…..we love being green and this site is near and dear to our hearts. This is a great example of excellent design with ecommerce (online shopping) functionality. Right out of the gate, this site ranked nicely - nice and high is how we like 'em. We used a combination of search engine marketing and built the site with our target audience and marketing goals in mind.