How to maximise your StumbleUpon traffic
Muhammad Saleem at Copyblogger has an article explaining how to write for StumbleUpon.
The article focuses on the key aspects of getting striking images and remarkable content right at the top of your page. The key is to make your impact in the first couple of seconds so that users will give you the thumbs up and continue to read your article.
In my experience (gained from watching other people Stumble) the most important issue is actually much more fundamental. You need to make sure your page loads quickly.
A large number of pages on StumbleUpon fail to load within the critical 3 second time limit before most people click for the next site. Some try to load external banner adverts, blog widgets, Java applets or large Flash files which slow the page down considerably.
If you want to maximise your StumbleUpon traffic invest in quick hosting and take the basic steps required to make your page load quickly.
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Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 4 comments below, or add your own!
I think the best trick to get more stumble is to review other stumblers and their submitted pages. This way they are compelled to stumble your pages.
and if your website is too slow, get Patrick to give up the script he wrote that runs his site!!
The thing is, even if your blog loads very quickly, most stumblers either:
(a) rate a post/page, OR
(b) stumble the next post/page
and they do not normally take time to drop a comment or two. People would say that they use SU to “find great content”, but when they’ve found it, they just give it a “thumb’s up” and then proceed to stumble the next page.
Which brings us back to square one: Who will benefit from all these stumbling? Definitely not the bloggers because what good would it do to bloggers if visitors merely “pass by” their posts/pages without leaving a comment, or subscribing to the blog?
So to all stumblers, if you stumbled upon a post/page you like, why not leave the blogger a comment? I’m sure it would make everybody’s experience better
I did come upon this via Stumbleupon, and in this case it was the big “How to maximise your StumbleUpon traffic” that kept me from moving on. A lot of the time I do just move on, and I do admit I rarely leave comment. But even a few percent who do will make a difference.
Personally I halfway use Stumbleupon as my “bookmarks”, and I do often come back later.
It may also be worthwhile for the occasional added backlink (I recently put an RSS feed on my homepage at hokstad.com of my recent “thumbs up” stumbles, for example.
The first two paragraph of this article does hit the nail on the head, though: Far too few sites make their value proposition clear at the top of the page. That doesn’t matter much when dealing with your “normal” users that know what you’re about, but it matters for a new user that comes to your site without knowing what to expect. In the case of StumbleUpon that applies EVERY time, and so if it’s not blatantly obvious in a second or so I’ll move on.
But as the post says: Performance is also vital. I won’t wait long for a page to load. Again because I don’t know what value it’ll have, and most aren’t worth the wait, so I’d rather take my chances with the next page.
Think of writing for StumbleUpon and other “random” traffic sources as writing for a tabloid newspaper: You have a couple of seconds to get the attention of your public before you lose them. You need to both be able to deliver the page and show them why they should stay in that short amount of time.
The good side is that focusing your writing on that will be a benefit to you when dealing with “normal” readers too, who’ll otherwise just move on to the next item in their feed reader.
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December 10, 2009 at 6:21pm