StumbleUpon, Do’s and Dont’s for New Bloggers
October 9, 2008 
3 Comments
If your new blogger and you’ve discovered the power of stumble upon for generating new traffic then you’ll want to read this. There are limitations that you should be aware of, which can impact your traffic in a negative fashion and in rather short order.
Marketing a new blog is tough because there are so many to compete with and it is difficult to gain visibility. You can, of course, allow your site to grow organically by submitting to search engines and waiting for visitors or you can leverage the power of social web marketing.
StumbleUpon (SU) provides , in my experience, a tremendous amount of traffic almost instantly and you can go from 10-15 visits to 200+ with a single post. Now, its important to understand the nature of SU and that most of the visitors aren’t always qualified or interested. However, if you have some compelling content its safe to assume that a few might stay or even return to your site. So this is still valuable in my opinion but getting visitors just to increase stats wont do a lot for your blog.
What’s the problem
Well, hopefully you aren’t reading this because of the “blank page” that you see after submitting your own blog post. If you are then you have been slapped by SU and the yet undetermined throttle that they have in place. This will happen rather quickly if submit nothing but your own URLs or the same domain.
The Fix
The fix is simple, mix your shameless self promotion with other posts and sites at a ratio of 5 to 1 and don’t self stumble every single post. For every every self-post add five others and to be fair to the people reading your stumbled articles, make sure they are worth stumbling and not just a bunch of junk to meet a quota.
If you have been throttled in some fashion then you might need to make up ground and do nothing but stumble other articles. I don’t know the specifics about digging yourself out of this hole but consider it a good opportunity to research and use other social sites and tools.
Your thoughts?
If you have direct experience with this or a different approach to tackling this issue I would love to hear what you have to say..
Thanks for this – I am a REAL NEWBIE at blogging and especially SU. I have yet to figure out what the urls of the websites of my “friends” are or what I’m supposed to do to be a good “friend,” etc.!
Tabby,
Thanks for the comment! I am glad this information was helpful.
Yes, I found myself blocked and even when I behaved they wouldn’t unblock me. Then I found that they have a very limited set of blogs that they work with and a great deal of sites produce many more hits for me. Thanks for warning others.
Sheri