Next Modo

Have you heard of Stumble Upon yet? Did you think it was a silly way to waste time?  If you did think again because Stumble Upon is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your Web pages.  SU exposes your pages to multiple visitors each day.  It’s the perfect social marketing tool.  If you have an idea that you think has value you can expose it to Stumblers that will comment on your page and give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down.  This rating system can be painful, but this helps you learn what users like and don’t like about your pages.  In fact you learn more about your visitors than you can from most analytic software features. 

I’ve personally used StumbleUpon.com to expose several of my sites to visitors.  Sometimes the pages are not as good as I first thought and the tribe speaks and votes those pages down.  Other times everyone loves what I have to contribute and they give my pages a thumbs up ranking, often sharing those pages with their friends via email and links.  If you have something of value it’s a truly viral marketing tool. 

Some want to use Stumble Upon to expose their pages to more visitors to increase their conversions and revenue.  Through testing I’ve found that the visitors are only “channel surfing” and not there to buy so the click-through rate (CTR) is very low.  Pages that usually get  5% CTR from searches might only get 1 or 2 percent from StumbleUpon.com.  Stumblers are there to have fun and see what sites are “out there.”

The real value of Stumble Upon for webmasters is the inbound link potential from those that like a Web site.  SU is also a prime tool to expose a site to new visitors.  I’m sure there are many happy Webmasters now that found their online fame through Stumble Upon.  If you aren’t using Stumble Upon to drive traffic to your site you are missing a huge opportunity. 
One other fun fact: eBay bought Stumble Upon a few months ago.  Watch for SU to adapt into a strong socially driven search engine, one that might even rival Google.