First, if you haven’t heard of StumbleUpon, check it out right now at StumbleUpon.com.
In short, it’s a free service that lets web surfers rate websites with a thumbs up or thumbs down. It also allows you to “stumble” through their massive directory of websites that others have stumbled upon. All of this is done through the StumbleUpon toolbar. If you are the type of web surfer that remembers the good old days when surfing the web was a fun exploration of the unknown, cool, and weird–then this is the toolbar for you. It makes surfing fun again.
A rather nice side benefit from using the service that I’ve stumbled upon (har-har) comes from giving your own blog posts a “thumbs up” using the tool bar. This is basically along the same lines as submitting your posts to social bookmarking services. However, if you take a little time and carefully use appropriate tags and a good description when you are submitting your post (using the thumbs up button), I have found you will often received a large, but short-lived bump in traffic.
Depending on the time of day and the content of your post, I easily see a spike in traffic of about 100-200 unique visitors within an hours time. Now, for larger, higher traffic websites, this may seem like a drop in the bucket. But, for smaller, struggling blogs it’s a nice experience.
I mentioned writing a good description and tags for a reason. If you don’t, you may still get a bump in traffic, but the visitors may “hit and run” without browsing or commenting (or doing anything else you’d normally want them to do at your site). The better the tags/keywords, the more appropriately matched your visitors will be, and the more likely they will be to browse, comment, subscribe to your feed, etc.
So, give it a shot. Create an account with StumbleUpon and start stumbling. Stumble other sites as well as your own and you’ll develop a small following of other SU users that pay attention to your stumbled sites.
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