StumbleUpon offers a unique way of searching for online content. Users here don’t need to search for snippets of information by logging on to any search engine. Instead, they just mark their list of preferences (called tagging) that clearly lists topics/themes that interest them. Thereafter, StumbleUpon itself creates a stream of the websites and the latest online content (blogs) that is available with respect to these preferences. This stream of websites is available to the user in a channel surfing mode and he/she is at liberty to click on any one of them.

Adding Yourself In StumbleUpon - Getting Started

Just download the StumbleUpon toolbar from its website. Check if your website is already listed there. If it isn’t, start tagging your website, yourself and start giving it positive reviews by clicking the ‘Thumbs Up’ sign. You can repeat this exercise and ask a few of your friends and family members to do the same. This will help to get your website enlisted within the StumbleUpon database. Once your website is listed, the database will automatically include it in its streams for users who have marked preferences similar to your website’s theme/content. This essentially means that once your website is part of StumbleUpon, you are almost guaranteed a certain number of online visitors.

Increasing Traffic

Stumble Upon is very efficient at directing loads of traffic towards your website. If your website is stumbled even once (i.e. is streamed within StumbleUpon), you will regularly start getting new visitors, every day. The StumbleUpon community has members from all over the world. This gives your site/blog a global audience. However, this traffic may also consist of some casual browsers. The reason lies in the way StumbleUpon functions — the stream it creates sometimes includes just the closest matches to the list of choices ticked by a user. Nonetheless, addition of volume to your site’s traffic is assured. Web traffic, even if it doesn’t include serious browsers helps in the following ways:

• With repeated visits, your site’s credibility is boosted. Search engines like Google assign a PageRank based upon calculations that include the density of visitors to a site, irrespective of the type of visitors
• Every time a few users click on your site that is being streamed in StumbleUpon, its chances of getting streamed again multiply exponentially

Sustaining StumbleUpon Traffic

Users of StumbleUpon don’t have much time to judge your website and usually make decisions with just a glance at your website. Therefore, it makes sense to present your website in such a way that browsers do ‘stumble’ on it and don’t choose some other site. This is the only way of guaranteeing that you will continue to benefit from StumbleUpon. Following are some basic tips to help you make your website ideal for StumbleUpon’s streaming:

• Avoid Ads: Browsers will have a glimpse of your site and make an instant decision. This restricted time span shouldn’t be shared with too many advertisements on your webpages.
• Design-centric: Your site has to literally capture the browser’s attention. This is best done by using graphic modes of display such as images, photos and related web-based art forms. 
• Offer Subscriptions: Your website/blog should immediately prompt the visitors to sign-up for RSS Feeds, Newsletters or Free subscriptions.

Besides this, make sure that your site has a warm and friendly way of welcoming the visitors. Highlight any sort of freebies that you might be offering — this is an easy trick to make visitors click on your site, even if its content/theme isn’t an exact match.