How to Use Stumble Upon

Today I wanted to teach you about my #1 source of traffic:

Stumble Upon.

Stumble Upon is a tool that can be used to drive your business through the roof, but it's extremely misunderstood. In fact, I'm guessing that at least half of you are thinking, "How can I use Stumble Upon to get more traffic!?" A month ago, I was in the same boat. But I've taken some time to learn about this social media tool that can completely turn around your page views.

To explain it, we're going to start from square one.

Stumble Upon has over 16 million subscribers that customize their account settings so they can find web pages that fit their particular interests. If you want to find pages with great photography, fashion, recipes, or crafts, you can do so by telling Stumble Upon that's what you want. So, how does Stumble Upon feed it's viewers with the content they want? By giving them YOUR posts!

To get your posts seen by potentially hundreds of thousands of people, it has to be "stumbled". Once it's stumbled, it enters the data base and gets sent out to those who would be interested in your content. People have the ability to like your page, and leave a review, which gives your page a higher ranking. So, the more people who like it, the more it will get sent out.

How do you stumble something?

If you look at the bottom of this post, you'll see a little orange box with the word share on it. When you roll your cursor over that, a lot of options pop up, one of them being Stumble Upon. Go ahead, click it, it'll take you to the screen that you'll need to learn about anyways! When you become a registered stumble upon user and you click that button, it gives you the option to like it. You can then write a review.

If you want the share tool at the bottom of your own posts, roll your cursor over the orange share button, and click on the little link on the bottom that says, "What's this?" This go through the steps on the "Add this" page that it brings up! Pretty easy!

You can also download the Stumble Upon toolbar which makes stumbling posts so much easier. Just type it in google, and it will take you to where you need to go for the download.

It's important for you to stumble other people's sites because it makes your ranking go up. It's also important for you to have Stumble Upon followers.

Those are the stumble upon "basics".

If it's new to you, don't be overwhelmed! I promise you'll get the hang of it. And just think, if we all stumbled each other's posts, our creative spaces would spread like wild fire!

So, a quick recap of what you need to do:

1. Make an account at Stumbleupon.com (come follow me on there under theshineproject!)

2. Create your own "Share this" button on you blog by clicking on my orange button, and then on the "what's this?" link at the end of my post

3. Download the Stumble Upon toolbar (SO quick and easy)

4. Start Stumbling

Leave questions, thoughts, and comments below, and I'll reply the best that I know how!