4 Tips to Increase Your StumbleUpon Traffic

Yesterday morning, I checked my post for the day and found that I was getting a lot of StumbleUpon traffic on that particular article (you can find it here). Now, just like any blog or website owner, I wanted to capitalize on this increased traffic for the day, so I needed more readers to Stumble the article and push it to higher levels of traffic. Social media traffic is 100% dependent on your readers and the new visitors due to the nature of the social media site. In this case, StumbleUpon was sending me the new, eager eyes, so how could I make sure that more readers hit the thumbs up button to keep the traffic flow going?

Tips to Increase Social Media Traffic

1. Write an engaging and useful blog article – This should go without saying but it has to be included. If you do not write an engaging, useful article on your blog, you are not going to get any social media traffic from sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and others. Your article needs to provide some worth to the reader. It can solve a problem, entertain or provide useful information such as news…but it can not just be another run of the mill how your day is going content.
2. Invite readers to submit your site to social media sites – At the bottom of every article, use a plug-in like Sociable to invite readers to submit your articles to social media sites. Sociable makes it incredibly easy to integrate this feature into your site and rss feed, but if you really want something unique that will have higher conversion rates, you should look into custom coding unique icons into your site. Custom coded icons will stand out to readers while integrating seamlessly with your blog design (if done right). If you are getting a lot of traffic, it is even a good idea to add a social media button from the site at the top of that article to make submission even easier.
3. Facebook and Twitter – Do you have hundreds of friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter? When you see that you are starting to gain traction on a social media site like StumbleUpon, invite your friends and followers to help you out by giving your article a thumbs up. Many of these readers will not respond to your call to action, but the few that do…will drastically help your chances of gaining more traffic that day. Now…do not use your friends and followers as a spamming technique in an attempt to get social media site traffic to your blog every day. I have only done this once in the past 30 days.
4. Message contacts on the social media site – StumbleUpon makes this process incredibly easy with their FireFox toolbar. You can message your contacts on StumbleUpon through the toolbar and the message will show up in their browser. I have Stumbled articles for friends in the past this way and it is a great outlet to give and take when it comes to spreading the social media love.

What you hope happens with Social Media traffic…

Social media site traffic is an interesting animal. I never write articles that are specifically targeted towards these sites as I am solely focused on articles that best fit the needs of my readers, but every now and then…it is great to get the bump. Your hope is that several of these Stumblers, Diggers or Propellers perform some call to action on your site after reading your engaging article. Either they subscribe to your newsletter, subscribe to your rss feed or bookmark your site for later visits. In reality, you are going to have extremely low conversions out of social media traffic and they are not great money makers. By converting a small percentage of these visitors, you are increasing your spread on the web and the more you capitalize on the small wins…the faster you will grow.