StumbleUpon Since you come to this page, I assume that you are one of us. Stumbler!. And I believe that you are curious about building traffic to your web site or blog. Recently, I have been getting huge traffic from stumbleUpOn. Thanks to all stumbleUpOn friends. With my additional efforts to increase my Alexa traffic ranking, I have been doing great on my personal blog.

You may have seen many blogs or web sites telling you how to build traffic to your sites or blog pages. Do you wonder why you still not getting the traffic you expect after following all those steps? I do! I get some huge traffic on some of the pages people stumbled, but not all my pages. Are those web sites or blogs telling you the truth?

The first question pop up in my mind is this. How do you attract people to read your blog? I bet that Your answer is pretty close to “Put up something interesting or controversial.” So people will read and see what is going on with it. However, does the viewer receive the information they really expect? How many duplicate information are out there on the Internet and how many are true? I start hating those blogs that put up some stuff just for attracting people to read and make profit from the advertisement. The viewer did not get what they are looking for.

So why are you reading this post? It’s because you are curious about how to build traffic to your web page with StumbleUpOn. I got you! Didn’t I? So you do expect to get something make sense to you, don’t you?

Back to the topic. I don’t like to talk nonsense, even I did sometimes. So what I am telling here is what I have done and what I have experimented for the past few weeks. I am NOT telling you some fancy steps and tricks that will give you 3500 unique user a day like some big “Make money on the Internet with ….” blogger claimed on their blog. They claims that you have to have 300+ thumbs up to be on the home page. That’s not true at all. See how many pages on the home page have less than 5 reviews and 100 thumbs up. You should pay more attention on who first stumble those page.

So am I telling the truth? Use your own judgement. At least, I am not make $$ on my blog.

So let’s begin. StumbleUpOn will not release their algorithm on how they drive the traffic. So no one really knows how that works except those developers. Do you think those big blogger knows? As a programmer, I will try to reverse engineering. Just pretend that I want to duplicate a brand new StumbleUpOn site with more features. Let’s call it “StepOn“. How is that? What will I do to calculate the weight of a page, so it will get more traffic? I asked myself.

So. What is StumbleUpOn’s goal? To build a great community and share what they like. Build-up traffic is just the facts not the purpose and causes. They say so to get your attention. Keep that in mind. So if you try to manipulate the traffic on StumbleUpOn, you will find yourself wasting time.

Once again. Do NOT quote anything I said here. It’s just based on my personal experience and the facts that I observed. We all know how StumbleUpOn toolbar work, so I don’t repeat that here.

What’s the facts of building traffic to your web site through StumbleUpOn?

  1. You need someone to stumble your page
  2. You need someone to thumb up your page
  3. You need someone to review you page
  4. You need someone to tag your page
  5. You need someone heavy(high score) to list you page in their profile

There are million web pages in StumbleUpOn’s database, how will it decide to show your page to the stumbler? To pick your page out of millions is based on the following facts.

  1. The category of your page. A page in the wrong category or less popular category will have less chance to be viewed. I can only tell you that my personal popular categories are photos, humor, blog, internet, technology. I have not test other categories, because my site won’t fit into those categories.
  2. The person who first stumble your page is NOT important. It can be anyone. In other words, you can stumble your own page. According the StumbleUpOn TOS, do NOT stumbleUpOn your own page, because it miss the whole point of the StumbleUpOn idea. However, it doesn’t say that you can not have two StumbleUpOn accounts. Got that? ;-)
  3. Number of reviews with thumb up is very important. You can review a page without thumb up and you can thumb up a page without a review. Either way will carry less weight. So you need to get someone to thumb up and review your page. BOTH!
  4. The tag used in the review. With more tags, your page will have higher chance to be listed.
  5. The stumbler who stumble you need to have higher score to carry more weight to the page. How does the score calculated? The stumbler have more than 1000 reviews and have more than 200 fans will be consider high score stumbler. According to StumbleUpOn, you can have up to 200-250 mutual friends. The rest will be your fans. The stumbler should also be a very active stumbler in the communities and forums. More active you are the higher score you will have.
  6. The page ranking of the stumbler profile page. Have you noticed that some of the stumbler profile page have Google page ranking 6+? Think about the side effect. What will you get, if your page is reviewed and listed on their profile page? Got that?
  7. Number of stumblers who thumb up your page is less important. I am not saying it’s not important, but I would rather have 3 thumbs up plus review and right tags than have 100 thumbs up with no review and tag.

As you can see that my profile doesn’t have any PR on it since I signed up on May 29, 2007. I am still young in the StumbleUpOn communities. I will post another entry on how I do to improve my StumbleUpOn score. Some of you are already with high score. I will very appreciate you, if you can add me as your friend. Here is my profile at http://terencechang.stumbleupon.com/.

Any comments and critics are welcome. I know the developers of StumbleUpOn were here reading my other post. You are welcome to correct me as well.

By the way, if you have not checked out my little bookmarklets to help you stumble, review a page without StumbleUpOn toolbar, you should check out the following two posts.

Stumble a page without StumbleUpOn Toolbar - One click to review a page

How do you know if a page is stumbled? - One click to check it

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